Europe's 'Right To Be Forgotten' Threatens Online Free Speech

An anonymous reader writes "Jeffrey Rosen, Legal Affairs Editor for The New Republic, explains why the E.U.'s proposed data protection regulation known as the right to be forgotten is actually 'the biggest threat to free speech on the Internet in the coming decade.' In the Stanford Law Review Online (there's a shorter version in TNR), he writes: 'The right to be forgotten could make Facebook and Google, for example, liable for up to two percent of their global income if they fail to remove photos that people post about themselves and later regret, even if the photos have been widely distributed already. Unless the right is defined more precisely when it is promulgated over the next year or so, it could precipitate a dramatic clash between European and American conceptions of the proper balance between privacy and free speech, leading to a far less open Internet.' According to Rosen, the 'right' goes farther than previously thought, treating 'takedown requests for truthful information posted by others identically to takedown requests for photos I've posted myself that have then been copied by others: both are included in the definition of personal data as "any information relating" to me, regardless of its source.' Examples of previous attempts this might bolster include 'efforts by two Germans convicted of murdering a famous actor to remove their criminal history from the actor's Wikipedia page' and an 'Argentine pop star [who] had posed for racy pictures when she was young, but recently sued Google and Yahoo to take them down.'"

Comments

Link to racy pictures of Argentine pop star please

[Phlow]

Bueller?

Uh huh.

[owenferguson]

Wish I could forget about Natalie Portman, petrified, and covered in hot grits...

Re:Uh huh.

[snowgirl]

Wish I could forget about Natalie Portman, petrified, and covered in hot grits...

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...

Re:Uh huh.

[owenferguson]

In soviet south Korea, old people help robots make petrified grit Beowulf clusters of YOU!

Re:Uh huh.

[sconeu]

using email

Re:Uh huh.

[owenferguson]

Just because it's done using email, that doesn't mean it should be patent-able...

Re:Uh huh.

[sidthegeek]

No, using frikkin lazer beams, you insensitive clod!

Re:Uh huh.

[Anonymous Coward]

>Wish I could forget about Natalie Portman, petrified, and covered in hot grits...

sauce?

will post tits on 4chan...

Re:Uh huh.

[Anonymous Coward]

...and naked. Don't forget naked ;P

Re:Uh huh.

[tehcyder]

Wish I could forget about Natalie Portman, petrified, and covered in hot grits...

Why would you want to?

Re:Uh huh.

[russellh]

Wish I could forget about Natalie Portman, petrified, and covered in hot grits...

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...

so, ahgh... can it run doom? I am posting this under extreme duress

Simple: compromise

[rtfa-troll]

Sometimes the right to life threatens the right to free speech (when people want to shout "fire") sometimes the right to free speech threatens the right to free movement (when people set up web sites to track others and become stalkers). What we do is compromise and weigh up one right with another. It's not so complex. Hell it's even built into the European court systems already.

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

The First Amendment holding in Schenck was later overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which limited the scope of banned speech to that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot). The test in Brandenburg is the current High Court jurisprudence on the ability of government to proscribe speech after that fact. Despite Schenck being limited, the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" has since come to be known as synonymous with an action that the speaker believes goes beyond the rights guaranteed by free speech, reckless or malicious speech, or an action whose outcomes are blatantly obvious.

You can shout fire in a crowded theater in the US anymore. (That is not to say that you're not going to be liable for any damages caused by it, after all, you can also drive a car, but it won't excuse you from any damages caused by your doing so.)

Re:Simple: compromise

[cheekyjohnson]

but it won't excuse you from any damages caused by your doing so

Or, more specifically, it won't excuse the people who actually stampeded over other people trying to 'save' themselves.

Re:Simple: compromise

[rtb61]

The question is what right do you have to reclaim your personal information from the web.

For example there is one group of people who the rest of use want to know about before we interact with them, psychopaths. Once the pattern of behaviour has been established crimes against people, do they have the right to be able to publicly hide or do we have the right to protect ourselves from them, which we can only do if we have foreknowledge of who they 'really' are.

The flip side is of course do people have the right to prevent corporations from gaining sufficient information to be able to manipulate the decisions and choices, not just adults but also children. Corporations have publicly demonstrated a complete lack of qualms when it comes to psychologically manipulating children regardless of the psychological harm it causes as long as there is a profit it (sick corporations employ even sicker doctorates in psychology to more effective achieve this, doctors paid to cause harm upon a mass scale).

The difference here seems to be what information individuals can save and share, what governments can retain and distribute in the public good and what corporations can use to data mine in order to manipulate and control. More than just the data, what is done with the data is far more important.

So Google and Facebook retain a lot of data, often on behalf of individuals and not directly, what should they be allowed to do with it and what audits should they be subject to, in order to limit abuse of that information. What information should people be able to remove and or correct and what process needs to be established to facilitate this, whilst not allowing people who cause harm to others to 'hide' their behaviour so they move from locale to locale to continue their abuses.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Anonymous Coward]

If there was ever an example of 'positive any more'* being misplaced, it would be here, due to the use of the "can" modifier.

You can shout fire in a crowded theater in the US anymore.

I assumed you made a typing error and meant to write "can't", which completely changes the meaning of your post.

Please, no more positive any more, any more!

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_anymore

Re:Simple: compromise

[postbigbang]

I think you get the point: this is about an open, more exploitable Internet, rather than a more private Internet where organizations like Google and Facebook can't make oodles of capital gain based on yours, mine, and our private information and memories. The Internet never forgets, and hence portends to make us all look like fools, eventually.

Re:Simple: compromise

[russotto]

Once you compromise on fundamentals, you're compromised. As the "shouting fire" case you allude to demonstrated; it upheld the conviction of a person whose offense was distributing pamphlets alleging that the US military draft was a violation of the 13th amendment (forbidding slavery and involuntary servitude).

So no, compromise is not always the answer. Compromise brought us from free movement to metal detectors to the TSA virtual strip search. Compromise brought us from free assembly to "free speech zones". Compromise brought us from "you have the right to remain silent" to "turn over that password". Compromise has gotten an undeserved good reputation.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Darinbob]

This is one good reason to just not put up information to these sites. If you're drunk do not turn on the computer. It's really going to hit the fan when all these naive "what's privacy?" kids get old enough to get a job or run for political office. If anything this law should be called the "I was stupid and regret it now" law.

Do people have a right to control info about themselves? I don't think so. Sure it'd be nice if all companies voluntarily would remove naked pictures of you that you regret, but to enshrine this service into law is a very bad precedent. What if you want the phone company to erase all records of bills you've ever paid? Or your bad credit history could be expunged just by calling up the mortgage company? Can you have your awful picture removed permanently from the yearbook?

The guideline that has been around since before language was invented is "if you do something stupid then you live with the consequences".

Re:Simple: compromise

[bky1701]

I am pretty much tired of hearing about shouting fire, and how that is a legitimate reason to support censorship. There are two major issues with this. First, yelling fire causes a rather urgent problem. If there really is a fire, there is no proper time to go and question the matter. This does not apply to slander and libel. Slander and libel laws are violations of free speech. Please do not use the analogy to support those (many, many people have... and been wrong).

Second problem: why is it never the fault of the people trampling others, or the organizers who set the situation up to be dangerous to begin with? Of course, it would be quite annoying if people constantly were yelling fire... yet, false fire alarms are actually pretty common. False security lock downs, too. Essentially, at what point is it the fault of the people listening to the guy yelling fire and trampling someone? I'd say, from the moment it happens. Consider if there actually was a fire - how does the situation change? Where does the fault go for someone being trampled if it was really a fire and it happened? If it can't rest with the person raising the alarm, where is it? Was it there all along?

Your idiotic rhetoric about some speech not being protected is why, lo and behold, less and less speech is being protected, despite nearly every developed country recognizing free speech as a human right. I think you can take your "fire in a theater" excuse and shove it you know where.

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

Sorry that you speak a different dialect.

Re:Simple: compromise

[rtb61]

I am a bit older and I got to avoid my not really friends from being able to exploit embarrassing moments. In that regard "I do not have the right" to argue that a younger generation should lose their chance to allow poor choices to disappear over time. For a younger generation that choice remains theirs to collective decide.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Nursie]

You can shout fire in a crowded theater in the US anymore.

WTF does that even mean?

Seriously. I have no clue whether it's supposed to mean you actually can shout fire (in which case why is the 'anymore' there, it's out of place without a negative), or you can't (but it says 'can' and the following sentence implies that yes, you actually can).

I know we British are bad for the double-negative, but dropping them entirely is ludicrous. Did this start with the famous American mistake - "I could care less"?

I know, I know, that's enough of a figure of speech that we can guess at its meaning, but dropping the 't negative completely doesn't have the same get out clause. I genuinely cannot understand you.

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

As the person above you was capable of understanding, and even linked to, it's a positive anymore.

The sentence is a positive one, and NOT a negative sentence. You can yell "fire" in a crowded theater in the United States. Or did you just not even read the quoted text that I had copied from Wikipedia? The "anymore" means "since the ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio".

And if you're going to start shitting on the double negative, then you need to check your credentials at the door, because any number of languages require negation for every word that can negate. (French's simplest negation even requires a double negative.)

Re:Simple: compromise

[Nursie]

positive anymore

Well, consider me educated, though it still reads like a grammatical nonsense.

Are you actually defending the use of double negatives in English as well? That they are valid in one language does not make them correct in another.

I guess that, despite the internet, American and British English will continue to drift apart. It's not just a case of validity being based on making oneself understood, either, as I now have real trouble.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a nice ideal when you live in a world where fundamentals never conflict, but that ideal world is not the one we live in. Fundamentals conflict frequently; compromise is not only "always the answer," it is in fact "the only answer."

Re:Simple: compromise

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither of these two problems are actually problems with the "fire in a crowded theatre" example. You might want to read the Wikipedia article "Shouting fire in a crowded theatre" to understand why.

Re:Simple: compromise

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

The yelling "fire" in a theatre scenario is an example of speech having negative physical consequences, contrary to those who claim that free speech is harmless. Actually, free speech is definitely not harmless, and that is one of the reasons we enshrine it so. It is a powerful weapon against corruption and conspiracy. It damages corrupt governments and other organisations. It is precisely because it is so powerful that we find it necessary in our society. But I digress. Let's get back to your issues.

First, yelling fire causes a rather urgent problem. If there really is a fire, there is no proper time to go and question the matter. This does not apply to slander and libel. Slander and libel laws are violations of free speech. Please do not use the analogy to support those (many, many people have... and been wrong).

I agree that this analogy alone cannot justify slander/libel. The situations are functionally quite different. Like I said, the fire scenario is more supposed to be an example of negative consequences from speech, not to justify specific censorship laws. At most, it should be used to open the table up to discussion about censorship laws in general, now that it has been established that there can be significant trade-offs to having absolutely free speech. To justify slander/libel, another argument, specific to these laws, is needed. Specifically, does spreading lies about a person deliberately harm that person, and does the harm from this outweigh any chilling effects that this law would cause? I think the answer to the first question is an easy "yes", but the second question is a lot harder to answer.

Second problem: why is it never the fault of the people trampling others, or the organizers who set the situation up to be dangerous to begin with? Of course, it would be quite annoying if people constantly were yelling fire... yet, false fire alarms are actually pretty common. False security lock downs, too. Essentially, at what point is it the fault of the people listening to the guy yelling fire and trampling someone? I'd say, from the moment it happens. Consider if there actually was a fire - how does the situation change? Where does the fault go for someone being trampled if it was really a fire and it happened? If it can't rest with the person raising the alarm, where is it? Was it there all along?

Fault often cannot be ascribed to a specific party. Sometimes the independent actions of several people are all causally relevant to some kind of detrimental event occurring. Sometimes there is no fault at all. As such, it's not really valid reasoning to deduce fault by eliminating various parties.

In the case of people being trampled without a fire, I would blame (in no specific order) the person who called fire, the people who trampled the victim (or who otherwise behaved in a reckless manner), the theatre for not having sufficient fire exits (if that's an issue), and the victim if there was any stupid behaviour that caused him specifically to be trampled. With a fire, I would also blame the fire (and whoever caused it), and blame the guy who called "fire" significantly less. The person who calls fire simply unleashes the inherent danger of the situation, but this does not make him blameless. His choices and corresponding actions caused the situation to be such that someone dies. Without that action, that person would have lived.

Perhaps we need a better example. Let's say I ring a very large hospital, and claim that there are several high-powered explosives hidden about the building, and that I'm going to detonate them in exactly 30 minutes. There are no explosives, but they don't know this. They proceed to evacuate the building, costing them many, many thousands of dollars, and possibly causing some of their sicker patients to deteriorate (maybe if they're in quarantine, or something like that). Where does the fault lie? It's not going to be the hospital staff for believing me. They must tak

Re:Simple: compromise

[EdIII]

The whole thing does not make sense to me and makes me think either the article is bullshit, the law is being misquoted, or both.

When I hear "the right to be forgotten" I am thinking that means you can request that a website remove all information regarding your account. That seems perfectly reasonable to me. As a developer I know that every single piece of content a user uploads into my system can be tagged with an owner. When that owner requests complete "deletion" (not just hiding it) then I can just search for everything with that tag and remove it. It's actually very simple to do if you think about it from the beginning. Having developer large scale databases and back end systems this type of design is not new or ground breaking.

Needing a law to force corporations to actually remove all the data you ever provided them does not surprise me.

I don't think it should be somebody's right to demand removal of content that has nothing to do with their account specifically. If they want it removed without actual ownership, then I say let them go through the courts on each and every website and prove copyright.

If that is really what the "right to be forgotten" law is all about, then I am in complete agreement that a compromise is required because otherwise the author of the article is right. It leads the EU down a road they really don't want to go.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Nursie]

It's really going to hit the fan when all these naive "what's privacy?" kids get old enough to get a job or run for political office.

Maybe at that point we can start to drop this ludicrous "OMG he got drunk once!" puritanism. It's repellant.

I know, unlikely.

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

Well, consider me educated, though it still reads like a grammatical nonsense.

In American English, we would say "like grammatical nonsense". Nonsense being considered something like water... uncountable. I'm curious, would you say "much nonsense", or "many nonsenses"?

Are you actually defending the use of double negatives in English as well? That they are valid in one language does not make them correct in another.

English already uses negative concordance, we just don't see our concordances as negative. It is ungrammatical to say "I have any books." Yet the negative of "I have books" is "I don't have any books." Clearly, the "any" there is simply to coordinate with the negative of the sentence, much like you expected "anymore" to concord with a negative sentence.

So, the only reason we don't consider English to use double negatives is only because the negative concordances that we have invented to avoid double negatives out of some fallacious argument about "logic".

I am well aware that many registers of English, particularly the formal registers of all native English groups consider the double negative to be poor form. That does not however make the forms ungrammatical.

Re:Simple: compromise

[williamhb]

I am pretty much tired of hearing about shouting fire, and how that is a legitimate reason to support censorship. There are two major issues with this. First, yelling fire causes a rather urgent problem. If there really is a fire, there is no proper time to go and question the matter. This does not apply to slander and libel.

So the night before the election, some disgruntled staffers (hypothetically) invent allegations of one of the presidential candidates declaring that now he's got the election pretty much in the bag he'll just spend the four years writing his memoirs and lining up a lucrative corporate gig afterwards, and allegations of him doing unmentionable things with prostitutes during the campaign. They fake up enough witnesses, documents, and photos that they convince Fox News, CNN, CBS, and the others that it's real and the story is broadcast right before the election and only uncovered as a fake after the polls have closed. Are you sure there's no "urgent problem"? No case that the faked allegations should be a teensy bit illegal? Are you sure the hypothetical conspiring disgruntled staffers should be protected by free speech laws and unprosecutable for their actions?

Re:Simple: compromise

[Nursie]

In American English, we would say "like grammatical nonsense". Nonsense being considered something like water... uncountable. I'm curious, would you say "much nonsense", or "many nonsenses"?

I'd say a lot of nonsense. Nonsenses is not a word I'm familiar with. I used "a nonsense" for emphasis; I'm sure it's relatively uncommon in the US. The "like grammatical nonsense" form would be more usual in the UK and Australia as well, though both are used. Are you unfamiliar with the phrasing "X makes a nonsense of Y" ?

English already uses negative concordance, we just don't see our concordances as negative. It is ungrammatical to say "I have any books." Yet the negative of "I have books" is "I don't have any books." Clearly, the "any" there is simply to coordinate with the negative of the sentence, much like you expected "anymore" to concord with a negative sentence.

Certainly, but negative concordance like that is not the double negative to which I was referring. You may well consider these concordances similar to the French "Je n'ai pas". I was referring to the informal double negatives used colloquially by my countrymen - "I ain't never see one o' them before..." which strictly means the opposite of that which the speaker intends.

However, even that conveys meaning. The "positive anymore" is jarring to read and genuinely confused me, especially in light on the increasing incidence of the dropped negative. The usual exemplar of this is the aforementioned "could care less", but it seems to be spreading.

The usual argument I hear in defense of strange constructs like that is that the meaning is still clear. Here it was not.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Anonymous Coward]

"s the "shouting fire" case you allude to demonstrated; it upheld the conviction of a person whose offense was distributing pamphlets alleging that the US military draft was a violation of the 13th amendment (forbidding slavery and involuntary servitude)."

That sounds more like argument against common law (the law based on precedents). The 'shouting fire not allowed' is perfectly ok, stretching that precedent to 'draft pamphlets not allowed' is wrong.

Re:Simple: compromise

[kyrio]

There aren't many people who speak your dialect of "mentally challenged."

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

Are you unfamiliar with the phrasing "X makes a nonsense of Y" ?

I think we would say, "X makes nonsense of Y".

... which strictly means the opposite of that which the speaker intends.

Again, as I already explained, this is a fallacious argument. Double negatives, and indeed in some languages negative concordance requires all words that can negate to be negative. This does not change the meaning from the original single negative.While you could consider "Je n'ai pas" to be a concordance in the positive, the sentence "On ne voit jamais aucune perfection." clearly uses negative concordance in the negative.

The whole notion that "two negatives make a positive" is logical fallacy.

The usual exemplar of this is the aforementioned "could care less", but it seems to be spreading.

This is not a case of what you seem to be inventing as "dropped negative". This is a case of SARCASTIC TONE.

The usual argument I hear in defense of strange constructs like that is that the meaning is still clear. Here it was not.

I'm sorry that we speak a different dialect. The meaning was clear enough to me, despite sounding odd.

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

There aren't many people who speak your dialect of "mentally challenged."

Funny that the Oxford English Dictionary would seem to affirm the use of a positive anymore, but then obviously, you're the authority here, and since your dialect and register says it is wrong, that must mean it is wrong for all dialects and registers.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Nursie]

Again, as I already explained, this is a fallacious argument.

Then you may take it that I disagree.

The whole notion that "two negatives make a positive" is logical fallacy.

Then to you the phrases "I have never understood" and "I have never misunderstood" have the same meaning? Interesting.

This is not a case of what you seem to be inventing as "dropped negative". This is a case of SARCASTIC TONE.

No, it's really not. If that's the way you use it then good for you, you understand what you're saying. I do not believe that the general use of this phrase in American English is sarcastic. Its use has spread from that one expression to many general dropping of "'t" in various places, and mixing up of "can" and "can't".

I'm sorry that we speak a different dialect. The meaning was clear enough to me, despite sounding odd.

Then as I said before, your dialect and mine are clearly moving apart in terms of mutual intelligibility.

Re:Simple: compromise

[kyrio]

Correct, I'm glad you agree.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Nursie]

Let's try that again without the HTML cockup.

Again, as I already explained, this is a fallacious argument.

Then you may take it that I disagree with the argument as you have so nicely explained it.

The whole notion that "two negatives make a positive" is logical fallacy.

Then to you the phrases "I have never understood" and "I have never misunderstood" have the same meaning? Interesting.

This is not a case of what you seem to be inventing as "dropped negative". This is a case of SARCASTIC TONE.

No, it's really not. If that's the way you use it then good for you, you understand what you're saying. I do not believe that the general use of this phrase in American English is sarcastic. Furthermore its use has spread from that one expression to many general dropping of the negative in various places. If you want to accuse me of inventing this phenomenon that's up to you, my data is purely anecdotal - my reading of the internet over many years.

I'm sorry that we speak a different dialect. The meaning was clear enough to me, despite sounding odd.

Then as I said before, your dialect and mine are clearly moving apart in terms of mutual intelligibility.

Re:Simple: compromise

[dunkelfalke]

Except that the right for privacy is also fundamental.

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

Then you may take it that I disagree with the argument as you have so nicely explained it.

You can't disagree with my argument, as it is the consensus of the linguistic community. It's like saying that Newtonian physics is correct, and Relativistic physics is wrong. We have documented evidence that states quite clearly who is right and who is wrong. Hint: YOUR SIDE IS WRONG.

Then to you the phrases "I have never understood" and "I have never misunderstood" have the same meaning? Interesting.

This is not a case of negative concordance. "I have a book" and "I don't have no books," however is a case of negative concordance, and has identical meaning to "I don't have any books." It's all in the register/dialect's choice of how a negative concordance is met.

The same arbitrary choice dynamics shows up with the argument that "to be" should always have nominative arguments on both sides, "It is I" instead of "It is me". Except that French requires the oblique case "C'est moi", and Polish requires the instrumental case. "by mdrym" not "*by mdry". The logical argument "'to be' is an equal sign, so both sides must agree in case" is born out of grammarians from the 18th century competing for the most number of rules for speakers to follow.

Guess what? Science and study has advanced a long ways since then... and the overwhelming evidence from other languages states that much of the "logic" employed by these grammarians was faulty, and fallacious.

No, it's really not. If that's the way you use it then good for you, you understand what you're saying. I do not believe that the general use of this phrase in American English is sarcastic.

And this comes from all your experience as a linguist and deep study of American English? Let me tell you something, as a person who actually speaks American English... THE SENTENCE IS SARCASTIC.

See, there's this whole field of linguistics beyond phonology and morphology, semantics and syntax. It's called "pragmatics". And it deals with things that are simply understood by speakers, without them being said.

And they claim that the British are so much more keenly aware of sarcasm than Americans...

Then as I said before, your dialect and mine are clearly moving apart in terms of mutual intelligibility.

And as I stated before, "I'm sorry we speak a different dialect."

However, despite us speaking different dialects, double negation through negation concordance is scientifically known to not cancel itself out.

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

Correct, I'm glad you agree.

-1 for your trolling here... you've made it far too obvious.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Luckyo]

Your argument is similar to arguing that you can murder someone by shooting them repeatedly in the chest and face in the middle of the busy city centre.

Sure, you can. But it's illegal. So is shouting "fire" in the theatre. By this measure, you can not "delete" someone's posts who wants to "be forgotten".

You'll just be liable for damages. Just like with the fire shouting.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Luckyo]

So we have a case of a right for privacy, vs right for free speech.

Both are fundamental. Both are in direct conflict with each other in this particular case. One will have to give. That's the brutal reality under the pretty "save the free speech" demagogy.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Nursie]

You can't disagree with my argument, as it is the consensus of the linguistic community. It's like saying that Newtonian physics is correct, and Relativistic physics is wrong. We have documented evidence that states quite clearly who is right and who is wrong. Hint: YOUR SIDE IS WRONG.

Of course I can disagree with it, unless you're contending that there is an absolute right and wrong in language? Something deeply unfashionable in linguistics these days I believe.

It looks like you and I see language in vastly different ways, which makes sense as I'm used to evaluating statements in computer language and thinking in line with strict grammars in which tokens have meaning. Perhaps we differ there.

This is not a case of negative concordance.

No, it's a case of a double negative meaning a positive, something you said was a fallacy.

And they claim that the British are so much more keenly aware of sarcasm than Americans...

Yes, and I'm keenly aware that the construct is used without a hint of sarcasm.

It has come to mean its opposite and is used unsarcastically.

However, despite us speaking different dialects, double negation through negation concordance is scientifically known to not cancel itself out.

It doesn't cancel out the intent of the speaker, if that is the speakers intent, certainly. As you say, pragmatics, which brings us back to the my original comment, your use of positive "anymore" is not pragmatic and I'm clearly not the only one thrown by it.

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

Of course I can disagree with it, unless you're contending that there is an absolute right and wrong in language? Something deeply unfashionable in linguistics these days I believe.

There are rights and wrongs in language. For instance, we know for sure that "language is a Markov chain" is wrong. The same that we know that caloric theory is wrong.

Your argument that double negatives must make a positive statement is fallacious, because language does not work that way.

It looks like you and I see language in vastly different ways, which makes sense as I'm used to evaluating statements in computer language and thinking in line with strict grammars in which tokens have meaning. Perhaps we differ there.

I'm equally accustomed to computer languages as well. But I understand that natural language is not definable by the same grammar definitions used by computer languages.

Regardless of whatever model one designs to explain the world, if the actual evidence from the real world conflicts with that model, then the model is wrong.

Your model is CLEARLY wrong.

No, it's a case of a double negative meaning a positive, something you said was a fallacy.

I said that the argument that double negatives always mean a positive is a fallacious argument. Go read about the "fallacy fallacy". My statement does not mean that the conclusion is false, or that no evidence can ever be brought that the conclusion is true. Rather, it means solely that the logical argument cannot be trusted to be true.

Take for example an argument: "all animals are mammals." This is clearly a fallacious argument, because there are clearly animals that are not mammals (reptiles and avians as simple token counter-examples). Yet, pointing out "but raccoon are animals, and they're mammals!" will not suddenly make the argument valid.

Your argument is that all double negatives are positives. I provide a counter-example from numerous languages that demonstrate that double negatives in a negative concordance can be equivalent to a simple negative. I have supplied the necessary counter example to your argument. Provide all the supporting arguments that you wish, your argument must apply to all double negatives, and it doesn't.

Yes, and I'm keenly aware that the construct is used without a hint of sarcasm.

Then you need your brain checked, because it's clearly sarcastic.

It doesn't cancel out the intent of the speaker, if that is the speakers intent, certainly.

Intent, schmintent. Double negatives through negative concordance are proper grammatical forms in many languages, which provide all the counter examples you need to invalidate the argument that a double negative is always a positive.

As you say, pragmatics, which brings us back to the my original comment, your use of positive "anymore" is not pragmatic and I'm clearly not the only one thrown by it.

You're fucking throwing around words that you don't even understand anymore. I understand that the positive anymore is a highly unusual grammatical form, and I understand that it's an odd construction. But you're not getting any traction by telling me that simply by including the "anymore" that it created a negative sentence, or that double negatives always mean a positive.

You can't argue against 21st century linguistics with 18th century grammarian bullshit. It's like trying to tell a chemist that they're wrong, because they disagree with your alchemy.

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

Your argument is similar to arguing that you can murder someone by shooting them repeatedly in the chest and face in the middle of the busy city centre.

No, it's not.

Sure, you can. But it's illegal. So is shouting "fire" in the theatre.

In the United States, no, shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is NOT illegal, or criminal. So, let me rephrase, "In the United States, one may shout 'fire' in a crowded theater."

You'll just be liable for damages. Just like with the fire shouting.

You can always be held liable for damages that you cause. Whether the action were criminal or illegal. As long as you were the proximal cause of the injury, and the other side can show negligence, recklessness, or intent to commit the act or omission, then you can be held liable for the damages.

Dropping flour barrels out of the top floor of your warehouse is neither illegal nor criminal. However, if it hits someone, you're going to be responsible for the harm caused. Selling coffee so hot that it can cause 3rd degree burns in 5 seconds is neither illegal nor criminal. However, if it does cause 3rd degree burns upon contacting someone's skin, you're going to be responsible for the harm caused.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not, I cherish dialects and I think the construct of 'positive any more' is an interesting one. But just because it's interesting doesn't mean it can't lead to confusion.

The wikipedia article gives examples of 'positive any more' where the meaning is pretty obvious, even if it still reads as an awkward construction to me.

However, when you start using the modifier 'can' within the sentence, it's very easy to mistake the positive for the negative.

For example: "You can get lawn darts any more."

Did I really mean that these days you can get lawn darts, or did I mean that you can't get them (as most would be familiar with) and I just messed up on writing "can't"?
Anybody not too familiar with the 'positive any more' is likely to assume the latter.
Those familiar with 'positive any more' may be more inclined to assume the former, but still having 'negative any more' (as it were) in their vocabulary as well, especially when familiar with the lawn dart saga, they too may have to give pause as to the possibility of the latter.

But I appreciate your reply to an AC - not many people do that :)

I didn't realize others would jump on the 'positive any more' and bash it / you personally. That's sad.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Xest]

Your argument is based on the premise that it's more important to be able to distribute pamphlets complaining about US military draft than it is to avoid being crushed to death because some jackass thought it'd be funny to shout fire.

Both make me sick in the mouth, but you've based your argument on an assumption that I do not think necessarily holds true.

Ultimately in a world where we have compromise your life can be unfairly destroyed by government taking things too far, but in your world of absolute free speech your life can equally be unfairly destroyed, whether it's by someone getting you crushed to death by shouting fire in a crowded theatre, someone causing you to lose your job or worse by slandering you by for example publicly labelling you as a paedophile with no recourse to clear your name because suing for slander would breach their right to free speech, or not having any mitigating circumstance in court for for example punching someone for getting in your face and repeatedly making insulting, perhaps for example racist comments.

The reality is you believe not compromising and having free speech as an absolute would be some magical cure for all the problems of government abuse, but really all you're doing is trading abuse of the status quo by government for abuse by private citizens.

So personally I think it is actually about compromise, the only difficulty is getting the compromise right, because a world with absolute free speech causes just as many problems as one with compromised limits to free speech.

Fundamentally though in your last paragraph, you're not actually complaining about compromise anyway, you're complaining about failure to compromise - the laws to which you refer weren't born of compromise, they were born of governments not being introduced in the will of the populace. Ultimately this is a fault born more of terrible government, and the pitfalls of a two party state with little to separate them than an inherent problem with compromise- of course the compromising wont go to well when both ruling parties want the same things, but the solution to that is a healthier democracy and in many countries they have this by having electoral systems that support multi-party coalition governments and so forth where compromise is essential to staying in power.

It's the same here in the UK - when David Cameron said he likes First Past the Post because it provides strong governments, what he really means is "I like First Past the Post because when we inevitably get back into power in this two party state because the other party fucked up so bad the electorate have no choice but to switch to us instead I can do whatever the hell I want, even if I only got the support of less than a 1/3rd of the voting population". Weak governments are the best type of governments for the people, because as soon as they stop serving the people, they can trivially be toppled.

Really, absolutes in politics are rarely ever the best solution, they're really best left to the fantasies of wingnuts who just haven't thought things through. You may dislike the current situation, but the solution is to fix your government, not become even more militant and start demanding absolutes - polarising the debate with extreme viewpoints that have equally many flaws only makes things even worse again as your opposition strengthen their stance against you even further, and are even given the ammunition of the flaws in your plan to better do so.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

It looks like you and I see language in vastly different ways, which makes sense as I'm used to evaluating statements in computer language and thinking in line with strict grammars in which tokens have meaning. Perhaps we differ there.

I've come up with a better example provided this paragraph.

Saying "I don't have no books" is like "3 - x - y". You would never argue that the two negatives in "3 - x - y" make a positive, and so it should equal 6. Saying "I don't have any books" is like "3 - (x + y)". Obviously "3 - (x + y)" is equivalent to "3 - x - y", even though the later contains a double negative.

Now, unlike the prior paragraph, saying "I have not misunderstood" is like "3 - (-x)". As "misunderstood" contains a morphological negation it is at a different level which is expanded by the "not".

Saying "I have not misunderstood nothing." is like saying "3 - (-x) - y", whilc "I have not misunderstood anything" is like saying "3 - (-x + y)". The two statements are clearly equivalent, and hopefully since you claim to be able to parse strict grammars, I hope that you can clearly understand what is negated to a positive and what is simply a negative concordance.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Kjella]

The guideline that has been around since before language was invented is "if you do something stupid then you live with the consequences".

Or you just moved so far that it's unlikely you'd run into any of your classmates, colleagues or neighbors again. Before people started blogging and tagging and newspapers came on paper it'd actually take a lot of effort to connect you with your past apart from the few glimpses you gave like here's employment references and grade transcripts. Today your history sticks with you in perfect detail forever, unless you go really nuclear and start from scratch under a new name and a new face.

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

"3 - x - y" make a positive, and so it should equal 6.

Provided x = 2, and y = 1... which was the first draft that I wrote, and didn't proofread before posting the amended version...

Re:Simple: compromise

[rich_hudds]

I've never come across 'positive anymore' before. Does everyone use it in your parts?

Got to admit that it just doesn't work for me, although I'm struggling to justify why I cannot make sense of it.

Re:Simple: compromise

[rich_hudds]

I've got to agree with Nursie on a couple of points here.

'I could care less' clearly grew out of 'I couldn't care less' via an accidental dropping of the negative, not out of a sarcastic twist. Users of 'I could care less' may well nowadays (anymore?) justify it by saying it is sarcastic, and indeed that would make it sarcastic nowadays (anymore? - am I getting the hang of this), but it was obviously originally a mistake, and I can't really see how 'I could care less' is any more sarcastic than 'I couldn't care less' anyway.

Surely with double negatives, most of the time it does resolve to a positive in English (your examples using other languages are interesting but irrelevant) but we all know when a speaker isn't meaning it to. I couldn't care less about your linguistic theory, if you say I haven't got no books, then you sound thick, and you sound thick because you haven't used the language correctly (ain't not used it incorrectly?).

I'm curious about the 'positive anymore' but something in me, and it seems most speakers, seems to rail against it, I think it's something to do with the 'more' part that seems to require a negative to set it up although I can't quite justify saying the 'positive anymore' is wrong.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Attila Dimedici]

And, as the link you gave shows, it is unique to a fairly small subset of English speakers. I have lived my entire life within the several states listed and have never heard that usage (and this is the first time I have ever read it).

Re:Simple: compromise

[V for Vendetta]

This is one good reason to just not put up information to these sites.

The problem is more about information about me put up by other people without my (written) consent. And it doesn't have to be "something stupid". Some people like me simply enjoy privacy. So even a very innocent picture of me about - say, a walk in the park, is something I don't want to see published by someone else.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Jedi Alec]

How, except perhaps for the timing, is this any different from the blatant lies and misinformation that are the hallmark of US election season?

There are already laws for libel and slander on the books that handle how these cases are dealt with between private citizens, is there really any point in making them criminal offenses?

Re:Simple: compromise

[AtomicJake]

Do people have a right to control info about themselves? I don't think so. Sure it'd be nice if all companies voluntarily would remove naked pictures of you that you regret, but to enshrine this service into law is a very bad precedent.

You would be able to control the information about yourself, if you would publish it on your Web site (and set the robots.txt to exclude spiders). But if you give it to a "social" web site, you traded it in against the "service". So, basically you sold your information (to not say: you sold your soul).

Should you be able to reclaim your postings/pictures etc.? Yes, you should.
Would reclaiming your postings be against free speech? No.
Would it make "social" web sites more complex to manage and therefore a bit less attractive from a business point of view? Yes, you bet. But since when is this an argument for a law about control of your digital data?

Re:Simple: compromise

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

I am pretty much tired of hearing about shouting fire, and how that is a legitimate reason to support censorship. There are two major issues with this. First, yelling fire causes a rather urgent problem. If there really is a fire, there is no proper time to go and question the matter. This does not apply to slander and libel. Slander and libel laws are violations of free speech. Please do not use the analogy to support those (many, many people have... and been wrong).

I am pretty much tired of hearing about lying being a right protected by the first amendment.

Re:Simple: compromise

[tehcyder]

As the person above you was capable of understanding, and even linked to, it's a positive anymore [wikipedia.org].

It's a very specific dialect used in parts of North America. I've never seen it used like that before. The OP's sentence was incomprehensible unless you happened to know that "any more" was being used as a positive, i.e. it was badly written if intended for a general US and internet audience.

Also, the wiki examples from Northern Ireland relaly just show it being used instaead of "anyway".

Re:Simple: compromise

[Anonymous Coward]

The more likely outcome is that we will get the people that have lived either a life so sheltered as to be woefully inadequate for the job, or so steeped in deception that they are unsuitable to hold any authority.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Pope]

Language is not math. Double/triple/what have you negatives are emphasis, not an exploitation of the mathematical property of multiplying even amounts of negative numbers to create a positive one. Why do you assume multiplication anyway? If anything, it's additive.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Taibhsear]

Or we could just make a law that says it's none of the employer's fucking business what people post online and that they cannot fire them or discriminate them for it...

Re:Simple: compromise

[ffflala]

It's correct that constitutional rights will conflict, but these compromises aren't easy; they're messy, and require legal expertise and courts. The conflict here is that Europeans have *two* rights that conflict, while Americans have only one in the equation. European constitutions (most constitutions, actually) ensure both (1)a right to freedom of expression, and (2) a right to human dignity.

This the conflict between these two rights that results in, for example, barring the names of Sedylmayer's convicted murderers: it pits the dignity of the released convicts against freedom of expression. The right to dignity is the constitutional approach that allows free speech countries to bar, for example, Nazi symbols. OTOH in the US, here without a right to dignity, neo-Nazi's are free to have a public parade.

One thing that seems to unite Americans of all backgrounds is a horrible fear of allowing some speech restrictions in the name of basic dignity. Think about this: the God Hates Fags WBC fucks are free to protest funerals in the US, but they are not able to pull this crap in Europe. Extreme examples of free speech as sued by hate groups have led me to believe that the US would be better off if we also had a constitutional right to dignity.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Nursie]

Your argument is that all double negatives are positives.

No, my argument is that double negatives in English are often a case of bad grammar.

Then you need your brain checked, because it's clearly sarcastic.

I humbly disagree. There may have been sarcasm in the original usage of "I could care less", but now it is said unthinkingly as an idiom meaning that someone doesn't care. I have had a complementary argument with people on this very site in the past, citing that to them the meaning was the same, and that it was the conveyed meaning of the phrase that was important, not the words used or any tone. Frankly the sarcasm argument seems like a post-hoc justification.

Double negatives through negative concordance are proper grammatical forms in many languages, which provide all the counter examples you need to invalidate the argument that a double negative is always a positive.

Didn't say it was, don't agree that that makes it in the slightest bit relevant to English, which has strong Germanic roots as well as others languages, and don't even think it that relevant anyway.

you're not getting any traction by telling me that simply by including the "anymore" that it created a negative sentence, or that double negatives always mean a positive.

I'm not sure where you think I said those things, but it wasn't my intention.

My initial response was that in light of other Americanisms by other people in which the negative is dropped, I found it very hard to understand what you were saying. My internal parser has adapted to people randomly dropping negatives. For you to use "anymore" in a non negative sense, in a sentence which I would usually parse as a negative due to the mistakes, omissions or colloquialisms of other internet users, rendered me unable to parse the sentence for meaning at all.

My comment about double negatives was mildly self-deprecating admission that British English grammar is frequently not 'perfect' either. From my perspective you then went off on one about a tangential linguistic issue, to which I frankly disagree that there is an absolute answer.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Nursie]

I understand your algebra and what you are trying to say, I just don't really agree that it's good grammar to say "I have not misunderstood nothing", regardless of whether the conveyed meaning is the same.

Irregardless, this is not the main issue.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Anonymous Coward]

I really think people are getting inured to it. I mean, we're already pretty much inured to the crap that politicians pull, seriously are you surprised or even care when you find out they had an affair/love child any more? I sort of care if they're sexually harassing people less powerful than them because that shows a certain level of sociopathic tendency (imo, I don't really have any science to back that one up). But seriously, people go out in droves to vote for these clowns.

At some point everyone may very well know whatever our dirty secrets of the today are... there's a couple possible outcomes, but a very real possibility is that no one will be able to devote the attention to give a crap.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Nursie]

Because there are plenty of examples where a double negative does make a positive. For instance - "it is not impossible", meaning that it's possible (though likely implying it's quite hard).

Re:Simple: compromise

[gfreeman]

Is it? Please elaborate.

Re:Simple: compromise

[KDR_11k]

For example there is one group of people who the rest of use want to know about before we interact with them, psychopaths. Once the pattern of behaviour has been established crimes against people, do they have the right to be able to publicly hide or do we have the right to protect ourselves from them, which we can only do if we have foreknowledge of who they 'really' are.

Exceptions like that should only be created by court decisions on specific individuals. Psychopaths are usually harmless and the insane have a bad rep mostly because of fiction depicting them as monsters. Real insane people are mostly harmless to other people, most are too busy with their sickness to do anything bad.

Re:Simple: compromise

[celle]

"The guideline that has been around since before language was invented is "if you do something stupid then you live with the consequences"."

    I guess no one has read "The Scarlet Letter" then. Since information on the net is forever and accessible by anyone that story is more true than ever.

Re:Simple: compromise

[KDR_11k]

Doesn't matter, we're talking about Europe where incitement and hate speech are banned and the freedom of expression (note: NOT freedom of speech) has certain limitations. In the EU the freedom of expression has a significantly lower priority than the freedom of speech has in the US.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Darinbob]

I think the issue here is not necessarily puritanism but common sense. If the politician was an idiot with awful judgement at age 23 then there's a very high chance the politician still has some bad judgement, and if the politician has actually matured then it's a chance to explain this.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Darinbob]

The trouble is that employers already have the right to hire and fire whoever they want for any reason at all. Ie, they will want to fire someone merely for being an embarrassment to them as an embarrassment hurts sales. A government that could restrict this would be very repressive.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Darinbob]

Well, your history today only sticks with you if you're dumb enough to post it online. Another reason to teach kids to be smart instead of letting them naively believe that they can just make it all vanish later on.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Darinbob]

I thought being steeped in deception was a prerequisite for going into politics?

Re:Simple: compromise

[dunkelfalke]

We can go there by two ways.

One way is that the right to privacy serves the human dignity. In German constitution, human dignity is the fundamental concept on which the constitution is based. Article 1, sentence 1: "human dignity is inviolable".

The other way is that without privacy, truly free speech is impossible, due to fear of repercussions. If they - whoever they might be - know about you, they can come after you. Read this thread, you'll see a lot of suggestions in the way of "if you don't want your information be used against you, don't post on the internet". Tell me, Mr. Anderson... what good is the freedom of speech... if you're unable to speak?

Re:Simple: compromise

[Maritz]

When I saw 'any more' at the end of that sentence I immediately assumed he left the "n't" off "can't" by accident. The 'positive any more' as shown in that Wiki article makes absolutely no sense to me and I hope not to see it more frequently. That's the first usage I've ever seen of it. I don't see it catching on because as you say it's genuinely confusing.

I'm still with the current of thinking that says people who say "could care less" are saying the opposite of what they want to say, and that it's a result of ignorance more so than a desire to cut new trends in grammar. I guess for me it sits along with "irregardless" or maybe "all of the sudden".

Re:Simple: compromise

[Maritz]

My instinct is that it is smaller still, as I've never heard a "positive any more" in my 30 odd years living in Ireland. I realise it's just an anecdote, but if it were common you'd expect that to be enough time to have encountered it. I'm pretty sure if I used it I'd get quizzical looks.

Re:Simple: compromise

[gfreeman]

That's the German constitution though. Has no effect outside Germany and so cannot be a fundamental human right - just a fundamental German right. Also, who gets to define "dignity"? Can I end my life in a dignified way if there is no other choice? Not in Germany I can't.

There are no fundamental right, no inviolable rights. There are rights bestowed upon us by societies, but not all societies agree on any single aspect of what is a fundamental or inviolable right. Therefore there is no such thing as a fundamental or inviolable human right.

Re:Simple: compromise

[rtfa-troll]

What you wrote wasn't clear to me, but guessing that you mean "people are able to shout fire":

Yes, you can shout fire, but if you do it when you know there isn't a fire that will be a crime. In just the same way as you can shoot someone with a gun, but if it turns out you were trying to kill them then it's murder. Unfortunately for victims and fortunately for freedom courts in most countries are almost always only able to act after the fact.

Re:Simple: compromise

[rtfa-troll]

Can you just clear up what you meant by it? The way I understand it then "I will do it anymore" it should be the closed interval beginning from now and continuing forever into the future (Wikipedia says "from now on"). Right? So what I don't get is did you mean that this is now true but wasn't true before or that this was always true?

Re:Simple: compromise

[rtfa-troll]

From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

From the fourth Amendment to the US constitution

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Generally, without privacy, people have difficulty finding space to form independent views; to think for themselves. To do different things. That as a serous and bad effect.

Re:Simple: compromise

[rtfa-troll]

Your posting has been pretty much destroyed by the response from the TheVelvetFlamebait and I won't attempt to better that. However, there's another fundamental reason to use the "yelling fire" argument. It's a standard example which shows that, where there is sufficient damage caused by speech there may be a reason to limit it. Just as stampedes have killed people, so the databases kept by the various churches allowed the identification and killing of Jews and others who disagreed with the Nazis. That history is exactly why in Germany people care very much about the right to privacy and that caring extends to a lesser extent across the whole of Europe. The "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" example is something you have to overcome to have a chance of pushing forward absolute freedom of speech.

This is where we get towards the practicality of the matter. Freedom of speech is no use if you can't use it. If you have absolute freedom of speech but your employer is allowed to fire you then you will be afraid to use it. In the USA, freedom of speech is interpreted to include corporations; this means in practice that there is less free transfer of information from person to person because it is drowned out by commercial messages.

In US elections the electorate has almost no chance to communicate with anyone except a "Super PAC" because their right to "free speech" outweighs the electorates right to free and effective communication. Even "free speech" can conflict with freedom of speech. If you want to maximise freedom you have to face up to the compromises it entails.

Re:Simple: compromise

[kyrio]

You've made it obvious that you're mentally challenged.

Re:Simple: compromise

[rtb61]

Statistic, approximately 15 of the human population are psychopaths, between 15% and 25% of the prison population are psychopaths, majority of them repeat offenders with many victims apiece. When they get in leadership positions the damage they cause escalates beyond all reason and all wars, each and every single one of them can be laid right at the feet of psychopaths. So harmless is only a shameless lie that only a psychopath could spread, considering hard facts and reality. Victims of psychopaths literally number in the hundreds of millions and ever worse that have an overall negative impact upon the whole of humanity, in corrupted laws, and a dog eat dog (human eat human) socio-economic environment.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Nursie]

If the politician was an idiot with awful judgement at age 23

Many, many very good people are idiots at that age.

And that's not even to say that a few pictures of someone drunk at a party is evidence of awful judgement. To me it seems normal. As the other poster said, in the age of ubiquitous compromising photographs, who do you trust, they guy who has been in total media control since day 1? He's either a sociopath or completely and utterly joyless, neither of which is a good quality in someone supposed to represent your interests.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Darinbob]

Drunk at a party doesn't stop you from getting elected. Heck, even fleeing the scene of an accident in Chappaquidick doesn't do that. However I'm referring to things like having your pic taken with the passed out sorority girl in her underwear, or a picture shown smashing windows during your Occupy A Poor City days. If someone isn't prepared to give an explanation for this as an adult then it's a problem, and it's a bigger problem if the politician demands that the past utterly vanish.

When it comes to politicians, character does actually matter. They're all low life scum anyway so the goal of the voter is to find out which ones are the least disagreeable. I want to vote for the politician that studied in school and not the hard partying alcoholic date-rapist.

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

Can you just clear up what you meant by it? The way I understand it then "I will do it anymore" it should be the closed interval beginning from now and continuing forever into the future (Wikipedia says "from now on"). Right? So what I don't get is did you mean that this is now true but wasn't true before or that this was always true?

Indeed, prior to Brandenburg v. Ohio, it was illegal to yell "fire" in a crowded theater. However, since Brandenburg v. Ohio, it is no longer illegal.

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

What you wrote wasn't clear to me, but guessing that you mean "people are able to shout fire":

Yes, you can shout fire, but if you do it when you know there isn't a fire that will be a crime.

No, you are not correct anymore. Since Brandenburg v. Ohio it can no longer be criminal to say something that recklessly endangers another person. In order for speech to be criminal in the United States anymore, it must present a call to imminent lawless action (such as a riot). The problem with "shouting fire in a crowded theater" was that by analogy, it was being used against pacifists distributing literature opposing a draft.

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

I've never come across 'positive anymore' before. Does everyone use it in your parts?

Honestly? *shrug* I have no idea. To me it sounds odd, but grammatical. Honestly, I had never heard about "positive anymore" until another poster posted a link to the wikipedia article. Rather, when I was writing the post, it just seemed like the best choice for what I wanted to portray. Combined with the fairly typical lack of proofreading on slashdot, it went out. Maybe I would have changed it or drafted a better and more clear version if I had proofread. We may never know.

I do know that my dad used "anymore" and "yet" very oddly...

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

No, my argument is that double negatives in English are often a case of bad grammar.

My point is that it's NOT BAD GRAMMAR. It is rather poor style. Just because using your desert fork for your salad is improper and bad manners, does not make it an application of the wrong tool. They're both forks, and it's merely etiquette that determines which to use and where.

I humbly disagree. There may have been sarcasm in the original usage of "I could care less", but now it is said unthinkingly as an idiom meaning that someone doesn't care.

The original sarcasm does not vaporize simply because it is not rigorously intoned anymore. The sarcasm was there to begin with, and the sarcasm has been enshrined in the pragmatics surrounding the idiom.

Didn't say it was, don't agree that that makes it in the slightest bit relevant to English, which has strong Germanic roots as well as others languages, and don't even think it that relevant anyway.

Most other Germanic languages struggle with the exact same double negative "problem" that English does. Namely, people constantly use the double negative, because it's not actually ungrammatical. It's purely style and etiquette that determines the proper usage, not GRAMMAR. But then grammarians are so stupidly backwater anymore having been left behind by 2 centuries of linguistic studies that they frequently mistake orthographic errors, and style errors as "grammar".

My initial response was that in light of other Americanisms by other people in which the negative is dropped, I found it very hard to understand what you were saying.

Let me help you with this one. Unless it's sarcastic, or pragmatically sarcastic idiom, then it is not a case of the negative "being dropped".

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

I understand your algebra and what you are trying to say, I just don't really agree that it's good grammar to say "I have not misunderstood nothing", regardless of whether the conveyed meaning is the same.

IT'S NOT GRAMMAR... it's STYLE. And I could give a shit if you think that it's grammar, because it's not. IT'S STYLE.

Irregardless, this is not the main issue.

You're doing that on purpose.

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

'I could care less' clearly grew out of 'I couldn't care less' via an accidental dropping of the negative, not out of a sarcastic twist. Users of 'I could care less' may well nowadays (anymore?) justify it by saying it is sarcastic, and indeed that would make it sarcastic nowadays (anymore? - am I getting the hang of this), but it was obviously originally a mistake, and I can't really see how 'I could care less' is any more sarcastic than 'I couldn't care less' anyway.

And you know this from your extensive linguistic studies of the English language do you? Many linguistics agree with my assessment of the situation. In fact, my assessment of the situation is not my own, but based on linguists who actually have studied this matter.

Surely with double negatives, most of the time it does resolve to a positive in English (your examples using other languages are interesting but irrelevant) but we all know when a speaker isn't meaning it to. I couldn't care less about your linguistic theory, if you say I haven't got no books, then you sound thick, and you sound thick because you haven't used the language correctly (ain't not used it incorrectly?).

NO, it does not "automatically" resolve to a positive. "I don't have no books" does not resolve to a positive anymore than "3 - x - y" resolves to "3 + x + y". Negation is distributive across all elements of a sentence. This is a well known feature called "negative concordance". There are a selection of words that are only used in negative sentences (by most people) case in point the original "anymore" that kicked off this whole debate. But just because the "anymore" no longer looks like a negative, does not mean that it is not there solely as a result of the sentence being negative.

The cases where two negatives make a positive, is when they compound directly upon each other.

I'm curious about the 'positive anymore' but something in me, and it seems most speakers, seems to rail against it, I think it's something to do with the 'more' part that seems to require a negative to set it up although I can't quite justify saying the 'positive anymore' is wrong.

What is railing against it in your head is that "anymore" is only allowed in a negative sentence. It's a negative concordance, and it is dictated in order to ensure that the word complies with the form of a negative sentence. It "appears" to be positive, because it does not actually contain a negating word, but in fact, it is a word that indicates a negative sentence, and thus it is itself a negative element of the sentence.

It's like some person in the past decided that there should only be one negative in an algebraic sequence, and that all other negatives in the sequence should be represented with, let's say "~". As such, the sequence "3 - x - y" would be viewed as "uncouth" and should PROPERLY be represented as "3 - x ~ y", because otherwise the two negatives would cancel each other out. Except that the negatives never did cancel each other out, and the "~" symbol for subtraction would itself be a negative component of the sentence regardless of any claims that it is "positive".

The whole fact that my sentence employs the "positive anymore" as opposed to the most widely used "negative anymore" should indicate that it is a negating element of the sentence.

Shoot, Nursie was even complaining that he apparently understands the sentence to be a simple negative, because the "anymore" has to be used in a negative sentence, and thus for Nursie, "anymore" is a negative word, so "I haven't seen him anymore" is a double negative, which should cancel to a positive!

Re:Simple: compromise

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this insightful? The post is ignorant of the law and wrong.

The law is complicated, and it's not always exactly the same everywhere, but the US Supreme Court case which is the source of the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" paraphrase is expressly about what governments can and can't make illegal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater

There may be places with mostly fields and no buildings where nobody has enacted statutes regarding dropping things off buildings, but in lots of places dropping things off buildings is very much illegal. If you're in New York City and start dropping flour barrels, flower pots, or pretty much anything off a building, the cops can come and arrest you. It's against the law. Whether or not you hit someone and you're liable for damages doesn't change the illegality of your actions.

There are lots of ways things can be illegal. A governmental body can enact a law or statute making something illegal. In the U.S. and Great Britain and other common law counties, tradition and judicial rulings are the source of much of the law. Something can be illegal if it's close enough to something which tradition and past judicial rulings hold as illegal. There doesn't have to be a specific statute declaring your specific action illegal. Falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater is almost certainly illegal most places, and you're subject to arrest even if everybody makes it out of the theater okay.

Re:Simple: compromise

[snowgirl]

Apparently, you did not read the entire article at all.

The First Amendment holding in Schenck was later overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which limited the scope of banned speech to that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot). The test in Brandenburg is the current High Court jurisprudence on the ability of government to proscribe speech after that fact. Despite Schenck being limited, the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" has since come to be known as synonymous with an action that the speaker believes goes beyond the rights guaranteed by free speech, reckless or malicious speech, or an action whose outcomes are blatantly obvious.

Shouting "fire" in a crowded theater cannot be criminal anymore in the United States, because it no longer meets the NEW BAR, established in Brandenburg v. Ohio, for infringing upon Free Speech. As it does not incite people to imminent lawless action.

Why is the post Insightful? Because it corrects misinformation that people continue to spread.

Re:Simple: compromise

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes, it helps with the run for political office, EG: Bob Hawke (Aussie PM)

His academic achievements were complemented by setting a new world speed record for beer drinking: he downed 2 1/2 pints - equivalent to a yard of ale - from a sconce pot in eleven seconds as part of a college penalty.[14][15] In his memoirs, Hawke suggested that this single feat may have contributed to his political success more than any other, by endearing him to a voting population with a strong beer culture.[13]

Re:Simple: compromise

[Ardyvee]

You are right that nowadays it's easy to link you with your past. But being able to link you with your past shouldn't be a reason to judge you by it. Instead of claiming we must have a mechanism to be able to forget online, we (as humanity) should move forward and judge somebody by who they are today, instead of who they were*. I think it's more of a problem to be solved by growing as humans than by creating laws.

*Of course if you know somebody committed murder, it'd be good to be wary and not dismiss it completely. But I don't think slashdotters are dumb enough to not understand what I mean.

Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Pluvius]

The idea of a "right to be forgotten" is just stupid on the face of it. What are you going to do about people who know the thing in question that you're trying to get them to forget? Electroshock? Room 101, maybe?

Rob

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Stormthirst]

There's a difference between people knowing stuff now, and in 10 years a prospective employer looking at stuff that's on FB or Google now. What is relevant now might not be relevant later. But I know a few HR drones who wouldn't distinguish between me now and me 10 years ago.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[rahvin112]

Room 101. If anything can make you remember something differently it's room 101.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, I dont see this as a threat to free speech, I think we will still be able to publish what you think more or less. I think the EU law is more about data protection and what businesses can do with the information they have directly or indirectly gleaned from you. And your rights to have that data destroyed. To make this a threat to "free speech" issue is like wrapping the argument in a "think of the children" issue. The only threat I see is to some major (american) advertisers business models. The call of a threat to free speech sounds like a political call to rally the support of the american public.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[rahvin112]

So don't post your life story on Facebook you nitwit. Those of us that refuse to use that damn privacy breaching POS know just like you do that in 10 years you ARE going to regret something YOU voluntarily put up there that is going to come back and haunt you. Making it a law that you can demand companies delete all information you not only posted freely, but that you voluntarily signed a contract allowing them to keep the data forever is just plain stupid. If you are dumb enough to post all that personal information to Facebook you shouldn't be surprised when it comes back to haunt you, nor should you have a legal right to request it's removal.

All this bill would do is ensure that Google, Facebook and others completely shutdown all local European presence. That means all those local jobs go away and all legal recourse is gone while at the same time everyone keeps using it. Unless of course you're willing to implement the great firewall of Europe and join China in a world where the powers that be can decide to rewrite history.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

in a nutshell, it means that as a civilian, you have the right to ask a company to delete your data. That's actually a good thing in that it gives power to the consumer. And I wouldn't object if Google or FB invested that 2% into a good mechanism for deleting user data.

That differs from 'free speech' dramatically. TFA blurs this distinction. It's not "free speech" when FB or Google sits on user data and is not legally required to delete it, when the user asks for it.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know if comment was meant seriously, but 'the right to be forgotten' is actually meant to be that if you tell fb to delete a photo they have to actually delete the photo. Seems fair to me.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care if my college friends remember what we did 15 years ago. We were all equally stupid back then.
But I don't want my future potential employers finding out about it by crawling Facebook about it.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[martin-boundary]

You're broadly right, but you're missing the fact that some of the information about you is gnoing to show up without you having posted it yourself. There might be both true and false statements made by others about you, or even made by others impersonating you. There should be laws that allow you to correct that if you find out, because like you say, in 10 years time that prank statement about you that someone else made will still be around and look like the honest truth.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[K. S. Kyosuke]

What are you going to do about people who know the thing in question that you're trying to get them to forget? Electroshock?

Actually, no, we've been all recently told that electroshocks actually helps you remember. Since you seem to have forgotten the news, are you sure you don't want to try it?

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[AmiMoJo]

Before the internet if you met a stranger and wanted to know about them you had to do a lot of work. Searching through decades of past newspaper articles on microfiche for keywords is impractical, but typing their name into Google isn't. This key difference might seem like a technicality based on the available tools, but it changes a very important social norm: the fact that things we regret or are embarrassed about are naturally forgotten.

Everyone did stupid things when they were younger. Some people they were at university with know about them, but if they go to a random job interview or start seeing a new partner that doesn't matter. The problem for the current generation is that anything stupid they do is well documented on the net and available to anyone. Even if you set your privacy controls anyone can copy/paste that image and tag it, and most sites won't even let you see that other people have such images on their accounts if you don't register and become their friend first.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Deorus]

The problem is that without this kind of legal entitlement you can not control what others publish about you.

For example, I've played World of Warcraft in the past, and as a result my characters have an activity feed associated with them showing timestamps with minute precision that I've never actually intended to share. Now the only thing require is for someone to leak who my characters are in the game and everyone online can tell exactly what I've been doing. These are things that, without such protections, you can not control, and they are a lot more complex and harder to avoid than directly posting your life to Facebook.

Other examples would be, for example, someone taking an innocent picture of themselves at a specific disclosed location featuring your vehicles number plate in the background. Thanks to that picture, now everyone knows where your vehicle was when it was taken, and without such rights there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Adrian Lopez]

Libel laws already protect people against false statements made about them.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Opportunist]

You never know how the law or society turns out in the future. About 15 years ago it would have been kinda funny to dress as a suicide bomber for Halloween. Think it might be taken the wrong way if seen today?

All it takes is something you say or do and take a picture of is somehow being connected to some kind of criminal (or worse) behavior. Imagine the whole bull about "violent games" gaining traction again and you posting a pic of you playing some FPS game. Today, certainly no problem. But how's it going to work out in 5 years or 10? Maybe someone won't employ you because you're connected to "violent behavior".

How about letting the whole fat food craze go overboard as it usually does when people get hyped up? Consider yourself being shunned for that pic showing you wolfing down that Big Mac.

Or how about the worst case scenario, where you're in a picture with someone who later commits some kind of horrible crime? You didn't know about it, for you it was just some guy you knew, but now you're the guy who is very obviously a close buddy of a pedo. Here, I have the pic to prove it.

"Don't post an incriminating or embarrassing picture" is easily said, but you don't know today what will happen tomorrow. You don't know what pictures might come back to haunt you. So we may only post those crappy "please say cheese" lifeless pics that have been cleaned of any kind of background so they cannot, under any circumstances, be taken the wrong way?

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[martin-boundary]

And libel laws can prevent publication. But in the internet space, that would still require all companies to implement technological measures that make arbitrary removal of information about their customers possible. In other words, there's no added burden to companies that doesn't already exist from libel laws, but allowing customers to directly request removal from the company would actually save money on unneccessary litigation.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[jamstar7]

You shoulda thought of that before you hooked up with the 3 cheerleaders, the midget & the giraffe at that frat party.

I hear the giraffe is still pissed cause you didn't call her.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Gonoff]

Why should I be restricted by you? My right to privacy should exceed corporate "rights" to maximise future profit.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Man On Pink Corner]

What is relevant now might not be relevant later. But I know a few HR drones who wouldn't distinguish between me now and me 10 years ago.

The best solution to this problem being to let everybody embarrass themselves. When everybody looks like an drunk-ass moron on Facebook, employers won't be able to use those photos to discriminate against perfectly qualified applicants.

But hey, if the EU wants to plunge themselves into the IT Dark Ages, let 'em.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[AmiMoJo]

So don't post your life story on Facebook you nitwit.

So if someone makes a relatively small mistake they should be forced to pay for it for the rest of their lives? Society doesn't work like that, even quite nasty criminals are eventually forgiven and don't have to declare their crimes when applying for jobs and the like any more. Getting a bit drunk and posting some stupid pics on Facebook is a fairly minor indiscretion in comparison.

People, especially young people, make mistakes. It doesn't make them nitwits, it makes them human.

but that you voluntarily signed a contract allowing them to keep the data forever is just plain stupid.

Well apparently people signing unfair and stupid contracts is so common we had to invent consumer protection laws and contract law to protect them. There is also the fact that if a company breeches a contract your only option is to sue them which is expensive and risky, so for stuff that is blatantly abusive we legislate against it as a kind of mass civil legal action by society.

You will get modded up for ranting against all the morons living in their idiocrasy, but the need for legal protections is well established and understood.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Dan541]

However it's still a historical fact. If someone writes about you on a blog, truthfully (I don't advocate the publishing of inaccuracies) then what right to you have to censor them in 10 years time?

This seems like it's set to become the next DMCA. Don't like what someone wrote; censor them.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Dan541]

People, especially young people, make mistakes. It doesn't make them nitwits, it makes them human.

and society understands this.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

The Giraffe became a hot furry model.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

Except when it doesn't.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

So if someone makes a relatively small mistake they should be forced to pay for it for the rest of their lives?

Yes.

Well, it'll certainly make the next person think a little more before making "a relatively small mistake". Won't it?

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that without this kind of legal entitlement you can not control what others publish about you.

For example, I've played World of Warcraft in the past, and as a result my characters have an activity feed associated with them showing timestamps with minute precision that I've never actually intended to share. Now the only thing require is for someone to leak who my characters are in the game and everyone online can tell exactly what I've been doing. These are things that, without such protections, you can not control, and they are a lot more complex and harder to avoid than directly posting your life to Facebook.

Other examples would be, for example, someone taking an innocent picture of themselves at a specific disclosed location featuring your vehicles number plate in the background. Thanks to that picture, now everyone knows where your vehicle was when it was taken, and without such rights there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Your examples are great examples of what's wrong with the youth today.

You're using a 3rd party application that owns all data collected about your game play. You're making a HUGE assumption that you have any ownership of such data.

As to vehicle pictures, you're in the public space. You again should have no expectation of privacy that you were somewhere in a public space.

You got one thing right though. When you first said these are "legal entitlement(s)". Then you went and change your story and screwed everything up by calling them "rights". Again... another problem with today's youth, but one also shared with many politicians.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[PopeRatzo]

Libel laws already protect people against false statements made about them.

You must live in Europe. Here in the US, the libel laws are so porous as to be completely meaningless. When libel suits are brought, they are more likely to be harassment of the author more than anything else. And in the few actual libel cases that are brought, very few result in anything like justice.

Libel in the US has become an archaic artifact.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Dan541]

But it does.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

So the government should force all companies to implement mandatory technological measures to remove arbitrary information, just to save you money on unnecessary libel litigation?

Stupid greedy fucks like this are why totalitarianism is so easy for the psychopaths of the world to implement.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Darinbob]

But does that give you a fundamental right to make the past vanish? Everyone's pretty confident that you were stupid when you were in school, pretty much 99% of us were just as stupid. But we can't magically make it all go away. Ultimately employers are going to realize stupid stuff in the distant past is not as relevant as stupid stuff in the recent past. But maybe some employers won't hire you because of it; but so what? You don't get hired, you add a bit more onto the pile of regrets, end of story. Yes, some people may have their lives radically changed by stupid stuff they did in the past, that is in the very nature of doing stupid stuff. You just have to live with it instead of getting mommy/government to fix it for you.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

However it's still a historical fact. If someone writes about you on a blog, truthfully (I don't advocate the publishing of inaccuracies) then what right to you have to censor them in 10 years time?

Well if this law passes, the right to be forgotten. You speak of "rights" as though they have some basis in Nature or are God-given. A right is simply a legal advantage that you can enforce at law; and the inevitable clash of rights is a matter which must be resolved by the courts and the legislature.

Also if you can't deploy "truth" as maliciously as falsehoods, you are not a propagandist (or slanderer) worth your salt.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Darinbob]

This is the nature of life. Small mistakes will haunt you the rest of your life. It happens, it's sad, but you can't wave a magic wand to make stupid go away. Sometimes something bad will come of all this but that is what happens in life, other times people will forget about it. Life isn't fair that way and most people learn this in kindergarten.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Darinbob]

It would be an extremely weird world where no one learned from mistakes because there were never any consequences. Oops, time for a "do over". We'd stop talking about the impetuousness of youth because even the old people would be making stupid mistakes because they'd never have learned not to.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Dan541]

Of course you can deploy truth to discredit someone. The so called "Right to be forgotten" will be used as a censorship tool to avoid criticism.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[reub2000]

Keyword is MILD shock. ECT frequently results in retrograde amnesia.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[element-o.p.]

If I am misunderstanding you, please feel free to correct my mistaken assumptions.

Sure, it's a good thing to ask a company to delete profile data, posts, etc. that you have submitted in your user account information. The problem, however, is with search engines. In that case, Google acts as an index to information that is *already somewhere on the Internet.* There's a world of difference between me asking Google to delete a photo that I posted on picasaweb.google.com and asking Google not to index any references to me in their search algorithm. The correct way to deal with web sites that have data about me on the web is to ask them -- not Google or Yahoo or Bing or ${Random_Search_Engine} -- to remove any information about me. I mean think about it for more than half a second...just because Google has agreed not to index me doesn't mean that that information no longer exists on the web. If shadywebsite.com has embarrassing or revealing (ugh!) photos of me, people can still link to that even if Google doesn't list those photos on its search engine. It may be a bit harder to find, but it's still there! I'd rather be able to Google my own name and deal with web sites myself than have Google delete the indexes, but have the data still exist.

And honestly, I have a bit of a problem with forcing a web site to remove information about me just because I don't like what they are saying about me. The example in TFA about the convicted criminals wanting references to their crimes removed is a good example. My wife ran a business where one of her employees was skimming cash payments from the till. The employee was caught and convicted of stealing the money. Since she now has a documented criminal history, future employers will know that this person has a history of theft, and IF they choose to hire her anyway, they can at least keep an eye on her so they don't get ripped off, too. IMHO, that's a good thing -- but that's exactly the kind of "privacy" that this bill will "protect." Guess what, people? Actions have consequences. Sometimes it sucks to have to deal with the consequences of your actions, but sometimes it sucks to have to deal with the consequences of other peoples' actions too.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

"So if someone makes a relatively small mistake they should be forced to pay for it for the rest of their lives? Society doesn't work like that, even quite nasty criminals are eventually forgiven and don't have to declare their crimes when applying for jobs and the like any more. "

Society does work like that. People with "criminal records" find it near impossible to find non-minimum wage jobs. You may not live in that part of society, but if you are a minority and are thrown in prison for possession when you are young, you will have almost no ability to obtain any sort of employment in most of the country when you get out.

And there is one particular type of "criminal record" that is impossible to get rid of it, is so stigmatising that you will not get decent employment or rent, and you'll be required to tell your neighbours all about it. Urinating in public can get you it. Twelve year olds txting have been given it. And to pad their resumes on the way to the courthouse, DA's compete ferociously to force it on anyone poor and/or stupid enough to not have competent legal counsel through a plea bargain, which is how 95% of the victims of this label are hooked.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[greenreaper]

The picture would be covered by copyright, since you took it. More generally, why should you have the right to control what (true) things others publish about you? Why does anyone deserve such privacy?

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[greenreaper]

What right to privacy? Why is that suddenly a right?

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[drinkypoo]

This seems like it's set to become the next DMCA. Don't like what someone wrote; censor them.

I'm pretty sure someone wrote a book about retroactively erasing the past by manipulating media, called Fahrenheit 451... Instead of firemen breaking open your possessions to find your secret cache of banned books, though, we'll have euphemistically-named "information technology specialists" who show up at your house to rifle through your files looking for banned JPEGs.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

The so called "Right to be forgotten" will be used as a censorship tool to avoid criticism.

If the "truth" amounts to little more than regurgitating someone's youthful indiscretions for no greater purpose than humiliation, then that is criticism which is better censored. It would be a problem If it were able to be used to censor criticism which it is in the public interest to air, such as criticism pertaining the the performance of public duties by a public official. The question is to what extent the proposed law could be exploited in this fashion and if it can what safeguards are written in to prevent it.

Since the law seems concerned with rights to data collected about private individuals, it seems an unwieldy tool to censor criticism which is clearly in the public interest.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem lies in that something you posted in 1997 while still in high school will come back to haunt you 20 years later when applying for a job.

The alternate problem is people with the same name (do you know how many people have Christopher or William as part of their name?) being confused for that other person. Forget identity theft, try mistaken identity on quite a large scale.

When you start doing genealogical research this comes up as well. Something your father or grandfather, or uncle might be associated with (say a religious or political movement that you don't want your name associated with) might come back to haunt you. Just look at the TSA's profiling to see how much this becomes a mess. Let's say that maybe you had an uncle that did something 50 years ago that today would be considered a terrorist plot, and he has the same name as you... well guess you won't be flying any time soon.

The policy has to be placed in the other direction. When you apply for jobs, the employer should be required to notify you exactly why you were not granted an interview. No more of this bullshit about "other people are more qualified" canned response.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[LordLucless]

Society doesn't work like that, even quite nasty criminals are eventually forgiven and don't have to declare their crimes when applying for jobs and the like any more. Getting a bit drunk and posting some stupid pics on Facebook is a fairly minor indiscretion in comparison.

And yet, we don't expunge all public records of your crime; if your employer goes looking for it, they're going to find out about your criminal past. I quite agree you shouldn't be forced to add your employer as a friend on facebook as part of the hiring process - which is about the equivalent of being forced to disclose convictions.

morons living in their idiocrasy

The irony. It hurts.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Ihmhi]

You're broadly right, but you're missing the fact that some of the
information about you is gnoing to show up without you having
posted it yourself. .

This is not a "Facebook" problem. This is an "Internet" problem.

The concept of privacy and the ability to protect it is changing *rapidly*. Look how much has changed with connectivity, communication, and privacy in the last ten years alone. I cannot even fathom what things will be like 10 years from now.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

But they don't, that's the problem.

I know several people who posted dumb crap when they were teenagers and now, 10 years later, are being hassled, denied jobs or whatever for doing it.

They absolutely would not post it today. They absolutely would take it away if they could and in ANY other generation, nobody would EVER know that they did it because nobody who is close to them would EVER tell about it.

But some dickwad from SomethingAwful or EncyclopediaDramatica or whatever decides they want to do an expose about you and you're fucked. Like... literally will never apply for a job again without having to explain that dumb thing you did when you were 14. And seriously, people don't forgive shit. They assume if they can find out about it, then it's serious. If you have a picture of yourself holding a bong that is the first result and a page that says "teen arrested for selling weed" and it all happened as a prank when you were 14, you will NEVER work with kids again. You will NEVER work at a bank or insurance company. You will NEVER work for the government, you will NEVER work in law enforcement, and if you currently do, you are likely to be fired or reprimanded for this.

See, a prank when you were 14 is no big deal, until it becomes viral online... and then it destroys you.

That's wrong. Maybe someday, people will chuckle and shrug and say "ohh, teenagers" but that's REALLY not how it works today. Go try to find a job when the first result under your name is actually you, and it's something illegal and/or extraordinarily dumb that you did decades ago. People don't just forgive shit like that.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[rastos1]

So if someone makes a relatively small mistake they should be forced to pay for it for the rest of their lives?

You haven't been through a divorce, have you? ;-)

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

If it only would be HR drones you had to fear.

One day, in a not too distant future, you are judged by algorithms. Computers brings your best and worst sides (as perceived by your internet presence) to any potential employers attention. In a clear, summed up way, so even a PHB will understand.

When I was a teenager in 1993, I posted a less ... political correct USENET posts. I could never fathom that post would really haunt me 20 years later. The thinking was "who will read it here" or "if they read this group, they are into the same thing...".

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[JasterBobaMereel]

Whereas in Europe, and especially the UK, libel law protect the rich and famous from anything being said about them that they don't like ...

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[dunkelfalke]

Article 12 of the universal declaration of human rights.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Luckyo]

First of all, you're not going to be shutting down your presence in the biggest economic zone of the world. That's suicide, because someone else will pick up your slack, end up having more resources then you because they are functioning in the biggest economic zone of the world, and then come to challenge you in your favourite territories.

It's the reason why MS makes a point of not really caring about piracy in the 3rd world countries beyond mandatory whining in various "reports". Alternative, linux taking over MS desktop market share in those countries and thus becoming a viable alternative to windows on desktop is simply far worse of an alternative.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Luckyo]

The point of the legislation is to make it illegal to misuse such data. Not to "nullify ownership".

As in you can own the gun. You cannot go and shoot people with it.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Jamu]

Would you want your (true) medical history to be public knowledge?

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

In the uk there is a law called the rehabilittion of offenders act - basically crimes can be "spent" after which time you do not need to declare their existence - obviously some crimes are never spent - but with "the internet" you would always be able to easily see that master x was caught shoplifting aged 18 even though he is now 38

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[TheRaven64]

This is not a "Facebook" problem. This is an "Internet" problem.

Well, kind of. Most of the time, the problem is not that the data exists, but that it's aggregated. This has parallels with usenet over a decade ago. Lots of people said stupid things online, but most news servers only stored the last 30 days of messages (if that), so it wasn't a big deal. A few people kept more complete archives, but they usually weren't online and they weren't searchable, or if they were then they were of individual newsgroups. Then Deja News came along, and suddenly every stupid thing you'd said was publicly archived and searchable.

If you put something on your own web site and then decide to take it down, then it may still be cached, but it's no longer easy to find and caches generally expire over time, so eventually it's gone. If you put something on Facebook, then you've agreed in their T&Cs that they can keep it forever, can sell it to third parties, and so on.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

Try telling that to my 12 year old self. And don't start on that "the parents" bollocks.

People's opinions change. Not just inherently because of age but because new information becomes available.

People make mistakes and do things they regret. This is good - it is how we learn. To do otherwise makes you a small minded, ignorant bigot incapable of adding anything of worth to the sum of human experience.

Our legal system states that one is only punished once for a crime as defined by the court.

The right to be forgotten _is_ the right to free speech.

And of course, if anyone's still interested in last years news, they can always repost it.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Stormthirst]

Except the TOC with FB means they take ownership and therefore the copyright to the photo.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Attila Dimedici]

What gives you the right to remove from the Internet a statement that I made, even if it is about you? Maybe I made that statement intending that people would know what I thought about you ten years from now?

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Attila Dimedici]

Except that this particular law allows you to censor other's speech about you.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Attila Dimedici]

Why should I be restricted by you? My right to privacy should exceed corporate "rights" to maximise future profit.

So, in order to maintain your "right to privacy", you want to infringe on my right to talk about you?

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Attila Dimedici]

Even if someone else posted it?

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[AmiMoJo]

More generally, why should you have the right to control what (true) things others publish about you? Why does anyone deserve such privacy?

Seriously? I should be able to spy on you 24/7 and post the details to the web because it's all true?

The European Convention on Human Rights recognises that privacy is a human right because without it your life would be unlivable.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[AtomicJake]

All this bill would do is ensure that Google, Facebook and others completely shutdown all local European presence. That means all those local jobs go away and all legal recourse is gone while at the same time everyone keeps using it. Unless of course you're willing to implement the great firewall of Europe and join China in a world where the powers that be can decide to rewrite history.

If this would be true, Europeans would have a big interest in implementing this law right now. While some local jobs from Facebook and Google might disappear, large European competitors for those sites would appear that implement the technical possibility to delete this information that you have published before, and creating new jobs and tax income for a state within the EU. Win-win for the Europeans I would say.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[V for Vendetta]

You're making a HUGE assumption that you have any ownership of such data.

Just like you assume that I (or he) don't. FYI, in Germany that (="owning my data") is a constitutional right.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[dunkelfalke]

So in order to maintain your "right to talk about me" - there is no right to talk about me mentioned somewhere - you want to infringe on my right to privacy? Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Attila Dimedici]

My right to talk about you is called "freedom of speech". Because you want the ability to tell people what they can say about you online, you are willing to give politicians the power to tell you what you can say about them online?

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[greenreaper]

If telling people accurately you were a criminal is an 'attack on your reputation', we are going to have a problem.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[greenreaper]

If it's in a public place, yes. What you do in your house is your own business, as long as it stays there, but if you step off your property, you're fair game.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[tehcyder]

Whereas in Europe, and especially the UK, libel law protect the rich and famous from anything being said about them that they don't like ...

The libel laws protect the rich and famous from having lies printed about them.. The newspapers they sue are perfectly capable of paying any damages when they mess up and can't prove the truth of what they have written.

While I agree that the same recompense should be available for everyone, you can't blame the rich and famous for exercising their rights.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[tehcyder]

The picture would be covered by copyright, since you took it. More generally, why should you have the right to control what (true) things others publish about you? Why does anyone deserve such privacy?

Ah, I see, it's Tuesday, so today on slashdot we value corporations' freedom of speech above individual privacy, and think copyright is a good thing to defend.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[tehcyder]

Or how about the worst case scenario, where you're in a picture with someone who later commits some kind of horrible crime? You didn't know about it, for you it was just some guy you knew, but now you're the guy who is very obviously a close buddy of a pedo. Here, I have the pic to prove it.

Oh, that is just ridiculous. If there's ever a society where you can get in actual trouble for having your photo taken next to someone who ten years later commits a crime, the whole world is fucked to buggery anyway, and they're probably crucifying people for having grey eyes or something.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[dunkelfalke]

You have the freedom of speech. Nowhere stands that it is the freedom of talking explicitly about me.

Your argument about politicians is completely moot, since they are subjects of public interest so their right to privacy has got explicit limits. I am neither a politician nor other subject of public interest, so my right to privacy goes far further. In fact, personally I consider a right to privacy more important than freedom of speech because without privacy a truly free speech is not possible due to fear of repercussions.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[dunkelfalke]

This is just another version of "when you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear". This attitude will bite you in the arse someday.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

So you wouldn't mind if your ex-gf posted your pin code online? Or your credit card number for that matter.
Or if someone say, posted both your address and the dates of your next holiday.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

The idea of a "right to be forgotten" is just stupid on the face of it. What are you going to do about people who know the thing in question that you're trying to get them to forget? Electroshock? Room 101, maybe?

Rob

Errm, if anyone at Google or Facebook actually know what is in your personal data, something bad has happened. And punishment should be hard.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

So don't post your life story on Facebook you nitwit.

Your nitwit buddy still might. Gee I hope someone has posted something incriminatory about you when you were drunk in Tijuana on their Facebook page.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Eponymous Hero]

you're the nitwit. you can't stop people who know you from posting those stories on their walls and making it public. abstinence is not enough.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Attila Dimedici]

OK, so you believe that the law should be different depending on who you are. That different people should be treated differently under the law based on who they are. In the long run such an approach to law ends up favoring the rich and well connected.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[K. S. Kyosuke]

That's why I should have added a joke tag. :]

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[KDR_11k]

Welcome to Earth. Dominant species: Homo Sapiens Sapiens. We love seeing others suffer.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[KDR_11k]

Your right to free speech is limited by applicable laws and treaties. Privacy has a higher priority so it's getting the laws in its favor. Since privacy serves the most important right (dignity) it's much more important than speech.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[quintin3265]

And why is this a problem? You used World of Warcraft during those times; nobody is lying about your use. As with anything else, people can draw their own conclusions about you based on your behavior.

I still don't see what the issue is here. If they don't want to be friends with you because of your playing habits, then that's fine. Some people complain about lawsuits and the legal system being able to obtain information that hurts them - but isn't that what the justice system is about? I want people to lose custody of children because their shoppers' cards prove they are feeding them junk food, not retain custody by destroying or hiding that data - because the kids will be better off for it.

Our society does have too many laws and policies, and they need to be reduced. That's what voting, and failing that, demonstrating, is for. But prosecuting people for violating the existing laws using all available data is not wrong. It is being fair to upstanding citizens who follow the law.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[quintin3265]

I don't see what the problem is with people thinking badly of people for posting drunk pictures on facebook is. In the past, it was possible for people to unethically hide their drunken behavior from parents and employers. Now, it isn't. To me, that is a positive change.

Keep in mind, we're not talking about fake pictures or lying here, both of which are unethical. The truth is that if you don't want to show up drunk urinating on a lightpole on facebook, then don't urinate on a lightpole. Whatever happened to the notion of personal responsibility? How did it suddenly become wrong for people to post pictures, and yet it is somehow right for people to act like idiots?

Employers correctly think badly of excessive drinking because it demonstrates a lack of responsibility. They don't want such people going out at night and representing their organizations in such a negative light. I can't blame them. It is a good thing for society, especially for people who act responsibly, that such behavior is recorded because doing so encourages honesty and rewards positive behavior.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Attila Dimedici]

Keep telling yourself that while politicians and other powerful individuals use the "right to privacy" to consolidate their power over you.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Anonymous Coward]

That giraffe party brought new meaning to the term deep throat. mmmm

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Luckyo]

Only in reference to privacy, yes. "Offline" speech has been managed by similar law for decades with minimal problems.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Deorus]

I own all information relating to me in the EU, according to Directive 95/46/EC, which has been transposed to local law in 1998. The only real change here is that from this point forward I will own all information relating to me worldwide, because anyone who doesn't comply will be sanctioned in the EU.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Luckyo]

Correct, hence "no change". The change is about legally disallowing the "granting IRREVOCABLE right to use personal information..." clause in the commercial licenses. It basically allows you to legally revoke the license to use your personal information. Such right has existed for "offline" information for a long time.

My gun example was aimed at people from US being confused about the difference, and was probably an improper one in this context.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Deorus]

It has existed for online information for a long time too. Opinion 4/2007 on the concept of personal data cites several examples of online data (in fact, if I recall correctly, all examples refer to online data). The only thing that was NOT covered by Directive 95/46/EC was the ability to demand that data stored outside of the EU abide to the same requirements. In the EU you are required by law to allow citizens to easily refuse processing, modify, or delete personal data without prejudice to themselves (i.e.: you can't tell me that because I don't give you my personal data you won't offer me a service) unless that data serves a fundamental or legal purpose (for example: if I am registering to receive a paper magazine, they can't offer the service without at the very least a snail mail address).

Regarding the question of ownership, by the IPRED (Directive 2001/29/EC), personal information falls outside of the scope of copyrightable material, so a third party can't claim ownership over it since it can't be appropriated. Furthermore, Directive 95/46/EC is directly mentioned as applying whenever personal data is involved, so if you take a picture and either I or anything that could identify me directly or indirectly is in it, currently I have the right to demand that you either take it down or mask all personal information relating to me in that picture (which is why Google is forced to mask vehicle plates and people's faces here).

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[khipu]

This is a threat to free speech. Don't "think of the children", think of the sleazy businessmen and politicians who want to be able to hide their past and their true convictions. Think of criminals who go through an ineffective criminal justice system that has little demonstrated ability to keep them from reoffending and then are let loose on society. Think of a justice system that itself is above public scrutiny because many of its judgments and decisions can only be accessed with special permission by the government under the pretext of protecting the rights of the convicted criminals.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[khipu]

in a nutshell, it means that as a civilian, you have the right to ask a company to delete your data

You're swallowing the propaganda. You already have that right in Europe, so this can't be what this law is about. In fact, this law is uch broader than that. Go read it.

Re:Not sure why this is even up for debate

[Luckyo]

Thanks for that clarification.

Well, self-regulation hasn't worked, so ...

[stereoroid]

Facebook et al have been warned about their misuse of users' data for years now, and have shown no signs that they take privacy seriously. So it's going to take regulation to rein them in. I'm not sure how I feel about this, , but my opinion wouldn't change anything, and the "free speech" argument is spurious. Was speech somehow artificially "restricted" years ago, just because the Internet hadn't been invented? "Social networking" could go away tomorrow, and we'd all survive just fine.

Re:Well, self-regulation hasn't worked, so ...

[mosb1000]

Yes, I'm sure this will be better.

Re:Well, self-regulation hasn't worked, so ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to see Facebook hog tied with strict privacy laws.
If it survives then ok. If it dies, nothing of value was lost.

quick - send in the army

[Anonymous Coward]

and try to take over europe as well, how dare these europeans do something we don't like?

Re:quick - send in the army

[khipu]

We don't like Europe becoming totalitarian, and for good reason. And we don't need to send in the army, they are already there, for that very reason. Or did you think the US has 70000 soldiers and a dozen military bases in Europe just for fun?

And requires tracking

[saikou]

One aspect that doesn't seem to be obviously stated in the article, that in order to be certain what is related to the person who wants to be forgotten, online systems have to implement a rather tight tracking of this information. So if someone re-post picture on the Facebook, Facebook would have to check it against hashes of all other FB-hosted images to know where the origin is from (and re-share tags for all depicted users).
If I can't find something related to you -- I can't remove it.

And bonus -- multi-user content. If user A wants to be forgotten, but photo contains also users B and C, removing it might violate rights of other users (unless there's going to be a little digital eraser applied to the tagged face)

Re:And requires tracking

[AmiMoJo]

One aspect that doesn't seem to be obviously stated in the article, that in order to be certain what is related to the person who wants to be forgotten, online systems have to implement a rather tight tracking of this information. So if someone re-post picture on the Facebook, Facebook would have to check it against hashes of all other FB-hosted images to know where the origin is from (and re-share tags for all depicted users).

Not hard, there are plenty of sites that do just that in fact. Tin Eye, for example, can take an image you upload and find identical but resized or partially distorted (with logos or cropping etc) versions.

If I can't find something related to you -- I can't remove it.

The onus would presumably be on the person asking for the information to be removed to find it. That is the way the law currently works - someone could write something libellous about you but keep it in a locked drawer in their house and there would be no way for you to find out about it, but then again why would you care?

And bonus -- multi-user content. If user A wants to be forgotten, but photo contains also users B and C, removing it might violate rights of other users (unless there's going to be a little digital eraser applied to the tagged face)

What right is that? The EU is talking about human rights, so stuff like copyright is trumped. That has always been the case.

Re:And requires tracking

[Adrian Lopez]

"The EU is talking about human rights, so stuff like copyright is trumped. That has always been the case."

Absolute privacy is not a human right. Construed as a human right, there's no such thing as a right to be forgotten.

Re:And requires tracking

[Johann Lau]

more importantly, "absolute privacy" is a strawman? who's talking about absolute privacy?

http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox/right-to-be-forgotten

In theory, the right to be forgotten addresses an urgent problem in the digital age: it is very hard to escape your past on the Internet now that every photo, status update, and tweet lives forever in the cloud. But Europeans and Americans have diametrically opposed approaches to the problem. In Europe, the intellectual roots of the right to be forgotten can be found in French law, which recognizes le droit à l’oubli—or the “right of oblivion”—a right that allows a convicted criminal who has served his time and been rehabilitated to object to the publication of the facts of his conviction and incarceration. In America, by contrast, publication of someone’s criminal history is protected by the First Amendment, leading Wikipedia to resist the efforts by two Germans convicted of murdering a famous actor to remove their criminal history from the actor’s Wikipedia page.

Re:And requires tracking

[xaxa]

"The EU is talking about human rights, so stuff like copyright is trumped. That has always been the case."

Absolute privacy is not a human right. Construed as a human right, there's no such thing as a right to be forgotten.

There is if we decide to make it one. You may as well say there's no such thing as rights.

The first right of the European Convention on Human Rights is the right to life, and even that isn't absolute -- e.g. if the police shoot someone that can be acceptable (if they are protecting other lives with the minimum force necessary).

(Note: the ECHR covers different (many more) countries than the EU. They are not related.)

Re:And requires tracking

[Adrian Lopez]

"more importantly, 'absolute privacy' is a strawman? who's talking about absolute privacy?"

When I say "absolute privacy is not a human right", it's not to argue against claims to the contrary but to avoid making the unqualified claim that privacy is not a human right. Humans do have a right to privacy, but such a right must be narrowly construed in light of competing rights such as freedom of speech. The quote you've offered is an excellent example of a case where free speech should trump a perceived right to privacy.

Re:And requires tracking

[Adrian Lopez]

"There is if we decide to make it one. You may as well say there's no such thing as rights."

A legal right is not the same thing as a human right. A legal right can be anything the law defines as such. A human right, on the other hand, has more to do with ethics than it has to do with law.

Re:And requires tracking

[Johann Lau]

sure, in the US. which is not the EU. so this is relevant, how?

Re:And requires tracking

[Adrian Lopez]

sure, in the US. which is not the EU. so this is relevant, how?

Freedom of speech is a human right. From a moral standpoint, jurisdiction is irrelevant: Europeans have as much right to free speech as Americans do, even if the law doesn't recognize it.

Re:And requires tracking

[Capsaicin]

Absolute privacy is not a human right. Construed as a human right, there's no such thing as a right to be forgotten.

Sure and absolute freedom of speech ain't a human right either. In fact in societies of 2 persons or more any personal right is necessarily limited vis-a-vis all potentially conflicting personal rights.

The question here is not whether the (non-absolute) right to privacy should give way to the (non-absolute) right of free speech, or vice versa, but as always, where the law ought to draw the line in balancing competing rights. Different cultures and jurisdictions will potentially strike a different balance. There is a right to be forgotten if the law says there is. I think it should be left to the people in the various jurisdictions, as electors of their lawmakers, rather than Adrian snatching absolute rights out of thin air, to determine what works best for them.

Re:And requires tracking

[Johann Lau]

and, and what about privacy? right or not? what about libel and slander? "freedom of speech" doesn't mean you can say what you want in all cases, that's rather obvious, so what's your point really? if you cry "freedom of speech" for every single thing, like wikipedia trivia, that just makes it cheap.

Re:And requires tracking

[Adrian Lopez]

Sure and absolute freedom of speech ain't a human right either.

I agree. It's just that no one should be forbidden to speak without a very good reason for it. Protecting one person's perceived right to privacy is not, in most cases, a good enough reason to force another to keep quiet.

Different cultures and jurisdictions will potentially strike a different balance.

But not necessarily a correct balance.

There is a right to be forgotten if the law says there is.

There's a right to kill if the law says there is. There's a right to discriminate against others if the law says there is. A legal right is not a moral right.

I think it should be left to the people in the various jurisdictions, as electors of their lawmakers ... to determine what works best for them.

Certain rights are important enough not to be left to the electorate. Such rights should never be subordinate to democracy.

Re:And requires tracking

[Anonymous Coward]

DNRTFA, but how can someone prove that it's a picture of them? If they don't remember their old username/password/security question, and no longer have the same email address, they can't submit a request from the account that posted the info/picture. Will it rely on people using their real names in their account profiles, and then providing valid ID?

Re:And requires tracking

[Adrian Lopez]

The point is not that "I can say what I want in all cases", but that preventing me from speaking is a significant enough restriction as to demand a very good reason for it. A presumed "right to be forgotten" is not such a reason.

Re:And requires tracking

[Capsaicin]

Protecting one person's perceived right to privacy is not, in most cases, a good enough reason to force another to keep quiet.

That's just a bold assertion of your personal opinion. Bob could just as easily claim that in most cases a person's right to shoot their mouth of is not a good enough reason to invade someone else's privacy. On what basis can I adjudicate between Adrian and Bob's opinion here? More importantly how do we resolve a conflict, should it ever occur, between your right to free speech (the right you regard as paramount), and Bob's right to privacy (the right he regards as paramount)?

Different cultures and jurisdictions will potentially strike a different balance.

But not necessarily a correct balance.

That depends on how we define the "correct balance." If you mean the correct balance as defined by Adrian Lopes, then no, obviously only Adrian Lopez can decree the right balance and that decision is inscrutable. If you prefer (as you clearly do not) accepting the messy outcome of the democratic process on the other hand, then it is "correct" almost by definition.

There's a right to kill if the law says there is. There's a right to discriminate against others if the law says there is. A legal right is not a moral right.

A legal right is (relatively) easy to apprehend and it's source is clear. What on earth though is a moral right?! And where, outside your personal predilections, does it come from?

Certain rights are important enough not to be left to the electorate. Such rights should never be subordinate to democracy.

But should instead be determined by Adrian Lopez alone?

Re:And requires tracking

[Adrian Lopez]

Bob could just as easily claim that in most cases a person's right to shoot their mouth of is not a good enough reason to invade someone else's privacy. On what basis can I adjudicate between Adrian and Bob's opinion here?

On the basis of Bob's reasonable expectation of privacy and Adrian's right to speak. I do not have the right to enter Bob's home and reveal whatever I find there, but I do have the right to disseminate information that is legitimately available to me, with some exceptions according to Bob's reasonable need or expectation of privacy. A so-called "right to be forgotten" is, for the most part, neither reasonable nor necessary.

A legal right is (relatively) easy to apprehend and it's source is clear. What on earth though is a moral right?! And where, outside your personal predilections, does it come from?

American plantation owners once had the legal right to own slaves. Once you understand why that is immoral, you will also understand the difference between a moral and a legal right. I'll leave it as an exercise for you to determine where a slave's moral right to freedom comes from.

Re:And requires tracking

[Johann Lau]

unless it's not "presumed", but legal reality.

maybe the US can try out the whole "privacy is dead. get over it." thing, while the EU checks out the benefits ad pitfalls of another approach?

Re:And requires tracking

[Capsaicin]

American plantation owners once had the legal right to own slaves. Once you understand why that is immoral, you will also understand the difference between a moral and a legal right. I'll leave it as an exercise for you to determine where a slave's moral right to freedom comes from.

Come on Adrian. don't be lazy. You were being asked where you thought these moral rights came from. You answer with merely another statement of personal opinion (in radical disagreement with Biblical authority for example), that a slave has a moral right to freedom. They do? Where does this moral right come from? Is this even relevant to the rights under discussion.

Let's run with that for a moment. Is the right to free speech so fundamental a right that, were it alone among all rights granted as a legal right to the slave, it would extinguish the putative immorality of slave holding?

Bob could just as easily claim that in most cases a person's right to shoot their mouth of is not a good enough reason to invade someone else's privacy. On what basis can I adjudicate between Adrian and Bob's opinion here?

On the basis of Bob's reasonable expectation of privacy and Adrian's right to speak.

When I look around the world and back through time I find it much more reasonable to expect to be left to live your life in privacy than it is to be left un-harassed for speaking one's mind. Except in the few places where freedom of speech is protected as a legal right and privacy is not, Bob's expectation of privacy would seem more reasonable than Adrian's expectation of freedom of speech. However, I'm not ready to find for Bob, since I doubt usefulness of reasonable expectation as a criterion here.

I do not have the right to enter Bob's home and reveal whatever I find there, but I do have the right to disseminate information that is legitimately available to me...

Because Bob has a legal right to the free use and enjoyment of his land, which includes the right at law to determine who may enter. Again your right, if you have it, is a legal right, such as the constitutional right in the US jurisdiction. You still haven't explained to me what grounds moral rights.

A so-called "right to be forgotten" is, for the most part, neither reasonable nor necessary.

It's necessity aside, the right to be forgotten is more than merely reasonable. It's the right almost all humans in all places and times have successfully enjoyed. ;) Yes that's a joke, but the point here is that a state of affairs (even if it is not "right") that all except celebrities have hitherto enjoyed is being taken away by communications technology. If falls to those governing that technology, should their employers (ie. We the People) wish it, to consider what ought to be done to ameliorate against this. Different Peoples may come to different conclusions about this.

Re:And requires tracking

[Adrian Lopez]

You answer with merely another statement of personal opinion (in radical disagreement with Biblical authority for example), that a slave has a moral right to freedom. They do? Where does this moral right come from?

At this point I feel I have no choice but to dismiss you as an idiot.

Re:And requires tracking

[Adrian Lopez]

unless it's not "presumed", but legal reality.

A legal reality without proper justification.

Re:And requires tracking

[Capsaicin]

At this point I feel I have no choice but to dismiss you as an idiot.

You feel have no choice? You mean you can't even show (beyond merely stating it) why a slave has a "moral right to freedom?" You can't point to any ground for your moral rights; You can arrive at no criterion by which to rank the right to expression above below or equal to the right of privacy? You can do none of the things you've been asked beyond floating ever more ungrounded opinions. So the best you can do is dismiss someone whom you are unable to answer as an idiot?! What does that make you then?

But you're wrong Adrian. You DO have a choice. Rather than just spouting uncritically held opinions, you could actually think reflectively about them. Maybe even examine them against the background of some moral-philosophical frame (eg. Rawls' veil of ignorance might have relevance to the question of slave-holding and even speech and privacy). Perhaps you have one and are merely too timid to make it explicit, but it does rather seem that you regard as obvious those things you have never questioned and for no better reason than that you never have.

Re:And requires tracking

[Luckyo]

Neither is absolute right to free speech. On the other hand, both right to privacy and right to free speech are human rights.

You're using a strawman to disrupt the argument.

Re:And requires tracking

[Attila Dimedici]

And bonus -- multi-user content. If user A wants to be forgotten, but photo contains also users B and C, removing it might violate rights of other users (unless there's going to be a little digital eraser applied to the tagged face) What right is that? The EU is talking about human rights, so stuff like copyright is trumped. That has always been the case.

The right to post information about myself that I want others to know (such as, perhaps, the fact that I was at such and such an event with you).

Re:And requires tracking

[V for Vendetta]

Freedom of speech is a human right. From a moral standpoint, jurisdiction is irrelevant: Europeans have as much right to free speech as Americans do, even if the law doesn't recognize it.

Privacy is a human right. From a moral standpoint, jurisdiction is irrelevant: Americans have as much right to privacy as Europeans do, even if the law doesn't recognize it.

Let me introduce you to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Re:And requires tracking

[khipu]

What right is that? The EU is talking about human rights, so stuff like copyright is trumped. That has always been the case.

The EU is pulling one human right out of its ass (a supposed "right to be forgotten") and destroying a very real human right in the process (the right to fee speech). That's how totalitarianism gets started: "for your own good / for the good of the country / for the good of humanity, we need to curtail this right".

Read the speeches by which German parliamentarians voted freely to give Hitler absolute power; it's the same kind of reasoning.

Summary

[aaaaaaargh!]

Europe's new privacy law could cost Google up to 2 percent of their income, which obviously threatens online free speech.

Re:Summary

[vlm]

Thats actually pretty cheap as far as tax rates go. I wish my local sales tax was only 2 percent, or my income tax was only 2 percent.

Re:Summary

[chrylis]

GP is a troll, but the law's talking about revenue, not profit (which is what's usually meant by "income").

Re:Summary

[Entropius]

The (often erroneous) assumption is that your taxes go to pay for useful government services. Of course, that's a big fat lie half the time, but that's at least how it's supposed to work.

Re:Summary

[Luckyo]

Well, my taxes that went to EU paid for, among other things, MS monopoly investigation. I'd say that was worth every penny.

And yes, there will be wasteful spending. Newsflash: there is wasteful spending in everything that humans manage. The only reason you hear about public but not private wasteful spending is because private corporations are not legally required to disclose such things until they're under criminal investigation Take a loot at Enron for a great example how wastefully private corporation finances are often managed.

Re:Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Offtopic, but its foolish for people to refer to profit as "income" .. why? Because revenues are gross income (not to be confused with the accounting term 'gross profit') and profits are net income. Notice the use of income in both terms.

If one wants to be vague about income, sure use income. But if you mean profit, please for the love of all that is holy, unholy, or just true bloody neutral.. say profit, not income.

Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless the right is defined more precisely when it is promulgated over the next year or so, it could precipitate a dramatic clash between European and American conceptions of the proper balance between privacy and free speech, leading to a far less open Internet.

Speaking as an American, I want the European version of privacy and the American version of Free Speech.

In other words, I don't want some motherfucking marketing firm tracking me to sell me their shit - and it's always shit - and sell my information to the Government because they want to track "terrorists" or whatever to justify they're existence.

Which implies the desire for European privacy. They don't need to know who the fuck I am. WTF? Speaking as an atheist in the Bible Belt, I can tell you, anonymity is a goddamn blessing.

Otherwise, I'd need a god given machine gun to defend myself against these Goddamn Jesus freaks who think they need to kill me for not believing in their Sky God.

God Damn Motherfuckers!

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[unity100]

In other words, I don't want some motherfucking marketing firm tracking me to sell me their shit - and it's always shit - and sell my information to the Government because they want to track "terrorists" or whatever to justify they're existence.

you are talking as if the two are two different parties. facebook's ancestor started as a university project to find saddam hussein through his social connections, and it still has connections to 'intelligence' services.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ix=sea&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&site=webhp&source=hp&q=facebook%20backed%20by%20cia&pbx=1&oq=&aq=&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&fp=2ea555e16508ec1f&ix=sea&ion=1&ix=sea&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=1d3c910caa16445a&biw=1177&bih=934&ix=sea&ion=1

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[Experiment 626]

Speaking as an atheist in the Bible Belt, I can tell you, anonymity is a goddamn blessing. Otherwise, I'd need a god given machine gun to defend myself against these Goddamn Jesus freaks who think they need to kill me for not believing in their Sky God. God Damn Motherfuckers!

Have you ever considered that the difficulty getting along with the more spiritually-inclined might have less to do with them prying into your affairs and more to do with how you can't even get through a post on a completely unrelated topic without a profanity-laden bashing of their religion?

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[Dark$ide]

Speaking as an American, I want the European version of privacy and the American version of Free Speech.

Speaking as a European. I 100% agree with you.

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever considered that the difficulty getting along with the more spiritually-inclined might have less to do with them prying into your affairs and more to do with how you can't even get through a post on a completely unrelated topic without a profanity-laden bashing of their religion?

Have YOU ever considered that in person that I'm a respectful of others beliefs and I listen to them witness and preach to me - without saying a word?

Have YOU considered that maybe living in cognito that that I've heard some ridiculous shit from people of "faith" or "spiritually inclined"?

Have YOU even considered that my online posts are nothing like I am in real life because I really need to blow of steam?

Have YOU considered that I am incredibly isolated because all of my neighbors believe in an adult version of Santa Claus? It's like being around children who in all seriousness are talking about how they are asking (praying) for toys (money, good health, people's souls, etc....)?

Have YOU considered that YOU are making some serious assumptions and complete irrational judgments about me because of one post (and this one of course)?

You see, in normal everyday life, I HAVE to listen to the nonsense of the spiritually inclined. Which leads me to another thing: YOU assume I'm not "spiritually inclined". Actually, I am - I just don't believe in all that super natural magical childish horseshit.

You'd think after 2,000 years,the human race would have gotten beyond believing in the magical super natural superstitious horseshit.

Believe it or not, you can be spiritual without having to believe in such non-sense as a Sky God.

Just being kind and following the Golden Rule that Confucius invented 3,000 years ago (which Jesus mistakenly got all the credit for) and be compassionate towards others - which I am NOT doing right now - which makes me a hypocrite.

I guess I could be a GREAT Christian after all!

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you're the only anonymous non-them soul, and your neighborhood figures out that you're the oddball atheist by elimination.

It is surprising (disturbing) how quickly the collective can work this out...

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[Anonymous Coward]

To quote George Carlin:
"Do you believe in god? No. BAM! Dead.

How about you? Do you believe in god? Yes."
Do you believe in MY god? No. BAM! Dead!"

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[xaxa]

Speaking as an American, I want the European version of privacy and the American version of Free Speech.

Speaking as a European. I 100% agree with you.

All of it? The US free speech leads to "God Hates Fags" at funerals, and other cruel harassments.

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[Xenx]

While I agree with the sentiment, which right comes first? Not everyone's opinion is the same on this.

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[Anonymous Coward]

True as that may be, I'd rather have a bunch of religious nutjobs protesting a funeral than allow government a sweeping edict on what can or cannot be said. We got to this point in the US about free speech because we were worried about the slippery slope. I prefer protestors over [The Department of Homeland Security has edited this reply in an ongoing investigation]

If you know what I mean.

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[Silverhammer]

This is one of those times when Slashdot's +5 cap is not enough. Bravo.

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[domatic]

muffed a mod. posting to cancel....

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as an American, I want the European version of privacy and the American version of Free Speech.

You are aware that in many European countries your income and assets like bank account balance are published by the government?
Who you live with, how, where, how old you are, .. all online.
Your face get 3d scanned and you get fingerprinted just to get a government approved ID (which you need for a bank account, and you need a bank account for a job) etc.
Your location is tracked at all times if you have a cell-phone (which everyone have). You internet activity is (or could be) recorded (without warrants or suspicion). I could go on...

The concept of "privacy from the state" does not really exist. Privacy means (at best) privacy to keep some things from non-government entities.

In many ways the US protects the privacy of its citizens way better than many European countries.

(The Orwellian example country above is mostly Sweden, where I lived for quite some time. Others, like Norway and Finland are pretty much the same.)

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[jrumney]

Speaking as an American, I want the European version of privacy and the American version of Free Speech.

You do realize that in a significant proportion of the EU, it is compulsory to carry Government issued ID on your person at all times and produce it on demand to law enforcement officials who request it.

I suspect what you really mean is that you'd like to cherry pick bits of privacy law from both Europe and US.

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[mvdwege]

What does mandatory carrying of ID have to do with privacy? People can't read my ID while I'm carrying it, now can they?

Really, it looks more like you are cherry picking.

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[Anonymous Coward]

Freedom of Speech is a dogma unto itself in the US, no matter how many people are harmed in it's pursuit... unless profit is at stake, then all bets are off.

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[Luckyo]

I suspect that would be impossible. Right to free speech often is in direct conflict with right to privacy, and you will have to decide which one to prioritise.

That said, I agree that both free speech and privacy both being respected is important for the modern Western society.

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[Zironic]

I'm not sure what alternative reality you live in, but my ID didn't require anything beyond a standard photo-booth photo and the government is legally prohibited from PUBLISHING any of that information on-line.

What you're confusing it with is the fact that Sweden has for a very long time had an extremely powerful version of the FOIA which allows you to request any non classified documents from for instance the Tax Department.

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like pretty much everything else in the holy scripture known as the Constitution.

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[khipu]

Speaking as an American, I want the European version of privacy and the American version of Free Speech.

Unfortunately, you'll have to make a choice. Like so many things European governments do, it seems "right" and "good" in the short term, and it leads to disaster in the long term.

Re:Hi. I don't see a reason for a clash.

[khipu]

Perhaps he is just mirroring the behavior of the so-called "spiritually inclined", who miss few opportunities to insult atheists and denigrate their moral convictions and humanity.

Just the distinction you draw between "atheists" and "spiritually inclined" is insulting, since you imply that atheists are not spiritually inclined. Many atheists are not only spiritually inclined, they are religions, they just don't believe the monotheistic bullshit you seem to identify with "spirituality".

please erase

[pinfall]

Do not read this comment. I regret it already.

Re:please erase

[AmiMoJo]

Random comments won't be covered. They are talking about personal information, i.e. your real name, photos of you, explicit statement of membership of certain groups (religions, political parties) and so forth.

This is not a right to censor stuff you wrote on any web site.

Re:please erase

[Teun]

You got it!

The proposal for this law is about things you have personally supplied to a website, it's not about what others have done, defamation is covered in other laws.

The idea this has anything to do with limiting free speech is absurd.

Re:please erase

[Darinbob]

Ok, so all those guest books I signed while visiting my old house of worship can now be expunged because I go to a different house of worship? I don't want my future employers to know which cult I used to belong to, so does that mean I have a right to demand someone manually black out my name everywhere it used to appear? What about when I registered with a political party and my bank has records of checks showing I supported the campaign of a now disgraced politician. can I have those expunged? If I decide not to be in the phone book this year can I have all the old phone books expunged so my name is not in them?

These are all issues of privacy. Of course I voluntarily gave up my right to privacy when I gave this personal information out and it would be ridiculous to demand that it be removed retroactively. If I told someone online what church I go to or who I voted for I have no rights to retract that information.

Re:please erase

[Anonymous Coward]

And why should that have a "right to be forgotten"? Should Senator Byrd have a "right" that everyone needs to "forget" he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan?

Wow. bullshit.

[unity100]

right to be forgotten exists in offline-world, and it did not cause any free speech issues. something which is personal information, is not something that is related to free speech. your ideas expressed, public posts made, public statements, discussions may be considered free speech. but, photographs of your son and daughter, can not.

what im i saying. taking this shit seriously : the real issue is google, facebook and similar going deprived of 2% of their annual income. that's the whole point of this anxiety.

well. we, the people dont give two shits about google or facebook's 2% annual income. they can lose it, and still sit pretty.

and, this does not have any kind of effect on the 90-100% of the rest of the internet, where content is created by small people or businesses - they are not making money selling people's personal information to megacorporations anyway. (ads are not relevant - small sites cant run all encompassing tracking networks like facebook )

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[jandrese]

right to be forgotten exists in offline-world

I'm confused. If I want to, I can order other people, even total strangers, to rip up all of their pictures of me with some sort of legal threat if they don't comply? Even public photos where I'm in the background or something? Where does this law come from?

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[weiserfireman]

My only problem with this law is it does't apply to just content I create myself, but content other people created. If I take a picture and post it online and later want it removed, I should be able to get it done. Under US Law, I have a copyright interest in the photograph. If I decide I don't want it published, I currently have the DMCA to assist me in getting it taken down, but finding every reposted copy might be difficult.

The problem with the proposed European Regulations is that it can potentially apply to not only my copyrighted content, but the copyrighted content of other people that mentions or depicts me.

If someone post's some story about me, about a night I later regretted, I could demand that it be taken off line. I have violated the other person's right of free speech, because they said something about me, I would rather people not know.

If you don't think this would be abused, you are crazy. Celebrities, Politicians, and Crooks around the world are begging for the chance for you not to know about their misdeeds. If this passes, the only thing you will every be able to look up about people in Europe is positive flattering things. No hearing, no trial, no "but it's true" defense.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[unity100]

you cannot do that to people, but you can do that to corporations. on internet, corporations are taking that for granted.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[fahrbot-bot]

you cannot do that to people, but you can do that to corporations

Haven't you heard? Corporations *are* people - at least here in the US - sigh.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[icebraining]

If I take a picture and post it online and later want it removed, I should be able to get it done. Under US Law, I have a copyright interest in the photograph.

You do, but as soon as you post it to Facebook (and any other service, really), you gave them have a worldwide, sub-licensable, royalty-free, non-revocable license to it.

So the DMCA doesn't really help you, since they're not violating your copyright.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[AmiMoJo]

I'm confused

Yes, you are. Well spotted.

If I want to, I can order other people, even total strangers, to rip up all of their pictures of me with some sort of legal threat if they don't comply?

Depends who they are and what they are doing with the pictures. Someone with a private collection on their PC? No. A company that hosts said pictures in a searchable index on the web? Yes.

Even public photos where I'm in the background or something?

No, only where you are a primary part of the picture, except in very specific cases like if you were in a shower room or other place with an expectation of privacy.

Where does this law come from?

It isn't a law yet, but will most likely be either an EU directive or maybe worked into European Convention on Human Rights.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[sgent]

You can????

No, you cannot order corporations to destroy records they create on transactions with you, pictures they take in a public place, etc.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[Jakeva]

Yeah right. Try getting the Mormon church to take your name off their records. They really don't like doing that, and they rarely if ever do. Even when they say they have, you're still on a secret list they keep for the same fucked up reasons they baptize the dead. If corporations in America are considered legal persons, religions in America have the status of a fucking deity.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[AmiMoJo]

If someone post's some story about me, about a night I later regretted, I could demand that it be taken off line. I have violated the other person's right of free speech, because they said something about me, I would rather people not know.

That would not be covered by this law. If it is true then you can't stop others talking about it.

Having said that you could stop the press publishing the story. Unless they can show that the story is in the public interest then mere gossip is not acceptable. Unfortunately the definition of "in the public interest" is rather loose these days, but the principal is there. As a non-public figure and assuming you had done nothing illegal or harmful to society you would have a fairly good case.

And there is the problem. People talking had a very limited audience until the internet came along and made some random blog or Facebook post easily findable via search engines.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[Meeni]

Yes, such a law exist in europe. You have a right to access files that corporations make on you and to amend them (amending for precisions, or deletion).

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[Adrian Lopez]

"... photographs of your son and daughter, can not [be considered free speech]"

Sure they can. It depends very much on context. Filmmakers use minors all the time, and their actions are generally considered protected speech.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right to be Forgotten is what causes stupid shit like Super Injunctions in the UK with that Ryan Giggs dude.
It is retarded. Period.

It is an absolute abuse of every single thing society has worked at for centuries, BASIC RECORD KEEPING.

If you want to be forgotten, LEAVE society and go live in the woods or underwater or some other weird fantasy world.
Don't forget to file an official record of Faking Your Death so we can record it.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[Teun]

No, this law is about stuff you published all by yourself.
If you feel bad about stuff someone else has published about you you can pursue it on grounds like defamation.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't you heard? Corporations *are* people - at least here in the US - sigh.

Not just in the US. Personality is the sine qua non of the corporate form.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[Rockoon]

That would not be covered by this law. If it is true then you can't stop others talking about it.

The argument about a person simply not creating a facebook account is that someone else may tag you in photos, and what not.

But now you are claiming that the tagging of photos and what-not will not be covered.

Looks to me like the supports of this bill cant get their stories straight.. that any excuse to push this law forward is a good one... complete lack of intellectual honesty.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

right to be forgotten exists in offline-world...

No it doesn't. You have never had the right to order every newspaper publisher and library to destroy every copy of a newspaper that included a picture or story of you.

The question is why the European parliment, (and the German courts) would see information held online in similar sources any differently.

Alas, posting anonymously, as I moderated a couple of replies...

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[xaxa]

Search "Data Protection Act" for the UK (or Irish) implementation of this EU law.

Also, note that the corporation must delete the records of you once they are no longer needed, even without you asking -- and they don't get to define what "needed" means. If I close my Facebook account, Facebook must delete everything they know about me in a reasonable time.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[Reelin]

A company that hosts said pictures in a searchable index on the web? Yes.

It isn't a law yet, but will most likely be either an EU directive or maybe worked into European Convention on Human Rights.

In which case, you're begging the question by presupposing that this law which has not been passed yet applies. I'm not aware of any current law in either the online or offline worlds that would allow me to order pictures of myself destroyed, at least in the US.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[nosferatu1001]

Only if they no longer have a valid reason to hold those records - so records of transactions with you can be retained by them, even if you dont want them to be, for a specified period

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[Luckyo]

You can in EU, which is what is being talked about here. Privacy in USA is taken far less seriously then in EU, all the way to the cultural level.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[Luckyo]

In various EU countries, there are various exceptions to privacy laws when relating to "matters of state, importance to society" and so on. These usually cover things like politicians, celebrities and to a limited amount, criminals.

What these do not cover are average people. On purpose.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[Luckyo]

You're strawmanning the argument. Right to be forgotten exists for commercial indexes, like google and facebook. This is what this is being compared to, not public libraries carrying newspaper archives.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

It comes from other laws such as this in the UK

Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 19741974 CHAPTER 53

An Act to rehabilitate offenders who have not been reconvicted of any serious offence for periods of years, to penalise the unauthorised disclosure of their previous convictions, to amend the law of defamation, and for purposes connected therewith.

1 Rehabilitated persons and spent convictions.

(1)Subject to subsection (2) below, where an individual has been convicted, whether before or after the commencement of this Act, of any offence or offences, and the following conditions are satisfied, that is to say—
(a)he did not have imposed on him in respect of that conviction a sentence which is excluded from rehabilitation under this Act; and
(b)he has not had imposed on him in respect of a subsequent conviction during the rehabilitation period applicable to the first-mentioned conviction in accordance with section 6 below a sentence which is excluded from rehabilitation under this Act;
then, after the end of the rehabilitation period so applicable (including, where appropriate, any extension under section 6(4) below of the period originally applicable to the first-mentioned conviction) or, where that rehabilitation period ended before the commencement of this Act, after the commencement of this Act, [b] that individual shall for the purposes of this Act be treated as a rehabilitated person in respect of the first-mentioned conviction and that conviction shall for those purposes be treated as spent.[/b]

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[AmiMoJo]

Try looking up the rules on the press publishing things that are embarrassing but not "in the public interest". It is already the case that if someone takes a photo if you doing something stupid and plasters it all over town you can it removed, unless there is some overriding public interest reason why people should be able to see it.

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Data protection laws in the UK state that you do have that right and the onus is on companies and corporations to justify their reasons if they refuse.

In fact, it's not even required that you ask - the laws states that information simply should not be kept for longer than is absolutely necessary.

Even transactional data should not be kept longer than the legal requirement (3 years I think?).

Re:Wow. bullshit.

[khipu]

right to be forgotten exists in offline-world

No, it does not. You can't force anybody to "forget" you, you never have been. And when most people lived in small communities (until the 19th century), any slight mistake was with you for life. It didn't take the Internet.

what im i saying. taking this shit seriously : the real issue is google, facebook and similar going deprived of 2% of their annual income. that's the whole point of this anxiety.

No, the whole point of "this anxiety" is that Europe is increasingly turning towards totalitarian structures, structures in which the past can be rewritten and in which speech can be controlled.

and, this does not have any kind of effect on the 90-100% of the rest of the internet

No, it doesn't not. In fact, it doesn't have any kind of effect on 99.999% of the internet. It's the 0.0001% you have to worry about: the murderers, criminals, politicians, church leaders, etc. that can hide from their past and get into positions of power. It's the system of secret justice that now exists in places like Germany, where you can't easily find out what the legal system is doing. That's what you should worry about.

Eraser to the Mind

[LionKimbro]

You have a right to be forgotten; You do NOT have a right to make me forget!

Re:Eraser to the Mind

[Stormthirst]

But I should have the right in 10 years time, not to be searched for by some HR drone to find out what my opinion was 10 years ago. Me now won't be the same as me in 10 years time. Do you think the HR drone will differentiate?

Re:Eraser to the Mind

[Xphile101361]

May I suggest finding a job at a company that hires actual HR people instead of drones?

Re:Eraser to the Mind

[jamstar7]

Probably. I got turned down for a customer service gig at an insurance company because I 'failed the background check'. They couldn't verify my high school GPA. Not surprising, I graduated 40 years ago.

Re:Eraser to the Mind

[SydShamino]

I have a unique name; I'm the only one. I just searched on Google for myself and verified that in the first 12 pages of results, every single one is me. (The top of the next page had a few generic "name finder" database entries with my last name only, then the results returned to me.)

Since I've known this for a long time, I've been very careful about my online presence. There's a few things in those 12 pages I'd delete if I could, but nothing that terrifies me or that I truly regret.

I think too many other people assumed their non-unique name would lead to pseudo anonymity (or they just didn't care), and now they regret things they've done and said. You can't take things back!

Re:Eraser to the Mind

[SydShamino]

Sounds like a company looking for any excuse to discriminate against older workers.

Re:Eraser to the Mind

[jamstar7]

Mebbe so, but you can't sue for age discrimination because you failed a background check. Age discrimination suits sound like a winner, but actually proving it is a bitch. Like, if you fail a background check, how do you prove it was age discrimination?

Re:Eraser to the Mind

[Darinbob]

If people could be forced to forget this stuff, then Anthony Weiner would still be in congress!

Re:Eraser to the Mind

[Darinbob]

No, I really don't think you have that right.

What if you run for political office? Do you think the past history of politicians running for office should be off limits? If someone posted about their love for the KKK on Facebook then it shouldn't just vanish when they decide they want to go into politics. People have to live with their mistakes, even if this means someone in HR might not hire you.

Re:Eraser to the Mind

[Jay L]

They couldn't verify my high school GPA. Not surprising, I graduated 40 years ago.

Suuure, you did. In Kenya.

Re:Eraser to the Mind

[Stormthirst]

So you think there's no redemption?

Besides, if you post that you love the KKK, you'd probably end up running as Republican President and winning.

Re:Eraser to the Mind

[SydShamino]

Like any other discrimination, unless its overt (i.e. someone slips up and tells you) then you have to look for patterns. "Hey, all fifteen of you in my local IEEE society applied to the same job I did, and you were all turned down for various stupid reasons? Then the job went to THAT guy? Maybe there was age discrimination; let's get a lawyer."

It's why we need regulation to monitor and report on gender/age/race hiring practices, long after we no longer need affirmative action programs. Without monitoring the crimes can resume without a chance of being caught. (I'm not arguing that affirmative action is/is not needed right now, just that whenever it ends, monitoring and reporting regulations need to continue on.)

Your own speech

[Anonymous Coward]

Free speech is not about re-posting pictures of someone else Free speech is about your blog entries and your own pictures. That law would not threaten that.

Re:Your own speech

[Curunir_wolf]

Free speech is not about re-posting pictures of someone else

Sure it is. If it doesn't cover that, imagine what police and politicians and corporate bad actors could get away with if their "right to be forgotten" is allowed to trump your free speech to tell people about what they did.

Re:Your own speech

[Dan541]

By own blog?

You mean the thing I use to write about scammers and con-artists. I wonder how many of them would like to censor a blog that exposes them?

Re:Your own speech

[Lazy Jones]

If it doesn't cover that, imagine what police and politicians and corporate bad actors could get away with

I don't know where you live, but police and other officials are "public organs" and not private entities around here when they are acting officially, so none of the privacy protection laws/rights apply. You may film or otherwise record them as long as you don't obstruct them in the process (and it's not easy to defend that right due to paranoid and arbitrary US-influenced anti-terror legislation that is often interpreted to contradict these rights popping up everywhere).

Re:Your own speech

[Curunir_wolf]

I don't know where you live, but police and other officials are "public organs"

LOL! Too easy.

so none of the privacy protection laws/rights apply.

Well I don't know where "around here" is, maybe Europe it's better. Here in Gitmo Nation West, people are routinely arrested for filming police. There have been many egregious cases. Unless there are specific exemptions in the policy, I have no doubt that police and public officials will use this to keep their dealing secret. It will be especially easy for public officials, since their nefarious activities are usually "out-of-the-office" or "after-hours" (so arguably not "acting officially"), even when it will affect the public.

Re:Link to racy pictures of Argentine pop star ple

[snowgirl]

Apparently her name is Virginia Da Cunha, so just go to Google pictures and search for "Virginia Da Cunha racy photos" (warning: NSFW! )

Re:Link to racy pictures of Argentine pop star ple

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

You know,

I would be totally cool wit the idea of re-setting the entire planet to, like, 1977.

Public vs. private citizens

[Anonymous Coward]

The law has made this distinction for a long time. For example, a tabloid can't report on the sex lives of random people not in the public eye, without getting consent. Privacy trumps free speech in such cases.

Re:Link to racy pictures of Argentine pop star ple

[ColdWetDog]

I would be totally cool wit the idea of re-setting the entire planet to, like, 1977.

Jimmy Carter again?

Surely, you jest.

Rights and Responsibilities

[Adrian Lopez]

The right to be forgotten? What about the responsibility to keep one's own private information private?

I have no problem with regulating the dissemination of private information held in confidence by online services, but information published by users or by people not affiliated with the online services in question should not receive any such protection in all but a few special cases (medical and financial information, for example).

When privacy and free speech are in conflict and there's no urgent and compelling reason to keep information private, free speech should always trump privacy.

Re:Rights and Responsibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

When privacy and free speech are in conflict and there's no urgent and compelling reason to keep information private, free speech should always trump privacy.

On the other hand, when privacy and free speech are in conflict and there's no urgent and compelling reason to publish the information, privacy should always trump free speech.

Re:Rights and Responsibilities

[Adrian Lopez]

On the other hand, when privacy and free speech are in conflict and there's no urgent and compelling reason to publish the information, privacy should always trump free speech.

No, it shouldn't. Thuthful information should always be fair game, except in certain special case where privacy is essential.

Re:Rights and Responsibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it shouldn't

Yes it should. The right to privacy is a basic human right outranking the right to freedom of speech.

Thuthful information should always be fair game ...

No, it should a case by case question of whether the damage that information is causing outweighs the good brought about by its dissemination.

Re:Rights and Responsibilities

[Adrian Lopez]

The right to privacy is a basic human right outranking the right to freedom of speech.

Nonsense. The right to speak is the right share one's knowledge and experiences. The right to privacy is the right to prevent others from speaking. Without good reason, the former must trump the latter.

No, it should a case by case question of whether the damage that information is causing outweighs the good brought about by its dissemination.

You conveniently left out the bit where I said: "... except in special cases where privacy is essential".

Re:Rights and Responsibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. ... Without good reason, [free speech rights] must trump [privacy rights].

I can do that too! Nonsense. ... Without good reason privacy rights must trump free speech rights. This is just simple contradiction. Like saying Vanilla is better than Chocolate ice cream. There seems no objective basis on which you are elevating one right above the other.

You conveniently left out the bit where I said "... except in special cases where privacy is essential".

OK then, it should a case by case question of whether the damage that information is causing outweighs the good brought about by its dissemination, not on the basis that one right is the default and eg. privacy is trumped only where freedom of speech is regarded as essential (or the other way round).

Re:Rights and Responsibilities

[Adrian Lopez]

If allowing people to speak is permissive, preventing others from speaking is restrictive. In a free society, it is the responsibility of those who would restrict the actions of others to show that such restrictions are necessary. If you wish is to shut me up, you better have a damn good reason. Your desire to be forgotten is not a good reason.

Re:Rights and Responsibilities

[Luckyo]

You two are having a case of cultural clash. In EU, culturally and legally privacy often trumps free speech. In USA it's the polar opposite.

Neither of you is wrong or right. There is no "right way" in issues like this, only opinions and intentions.

Erm

[Anonymous Coward]

I really, really, really am trying to find some sympathy for the mega buck earning Google and Facebook corporations. Really. Not.

Let's not forget humanity

[Anonymous Coward]

Free speech and privacy should ALWAYS trump profit. There is and should be no exception to this. Modern sensibilities, which really are not sensible, have twisted the idea of the value of people, and have, instead, placed greater emphasis on that of corporations -- actually going so far as to declare them "persons". Really?

We have fallen too far from the tree of common sense. The world is becoming an "every man for himself" kind of world.

People make mistakes. Youth lacks wisdom, and while the two are not mutually exclusive, an eighteen-year-old man who lacks discretion and who isn't thinking about the future beyond this weekend's date with the hottie in his Literature survey course, will think nothing of posting potentially damaging photos of himself or of making ill-advised statements online -- that could potentially ruin his chances -- or hers -- down the road. Indiscretion, while basically being stupid on the whole, should be forgotten, as a persons' merit and worth is not ascribed from their lack of common sense, rather their contribution to society as a whole.

"Let anyone here who has not sinned cast the first stone."

How is this supposed to work?

[mark-t]

I mean... let's say that you decide to tell facebook to "forget" you, but before you did, somebody who had perfectly lawful access to see your info copied some of it to his local computer... say it was pictures or whatever. After you were "forgotten", the person who copied your stuff uploads it back onto facebook. For argument's sake, let's suppose that the person who does this is outside of your country's jurisdiction. Who do you get to sue?

Re:How is this supposed to work?

[TFAFalcon]

Demand to have him extradited!

At least the US feels that as long as the 'wronged' party is in a jurdiction that they control, they have the right to have foreign citizens extradited. Just look at the case of the UK hacker Gary McKinnon. Let's just hope Europe will be just as determined to have those evil foreigners punished.

Re:How is this supposed to work?

[khipu]

At least the US feels that as long as the 'wronged' party is in a jurdiction that they control, they have the right to have foreign citizens extradited.

A lot of other nations feel the same way. European nations have extradition treaties among them, and use them. The only reason you think this is anything special when it comes to the US is because of some latent anti-Americanism.

Re:How is this supposed to work?

[TFAFalcon]

But does America extradite it's citizens when a European country requests their extradition for (for example) slander?

Jeffrey Rosen Doesn't Understand What "Hosting" Is

[Anonymous Coward]

Would someone please explain to that guy that private companies would be liable for the stuff that they host, as they should be, not for the stuff that they link to, which is hosted by someone else?

300 years and still battling

[backslashdot]

i can't f'ing believe this crap .. is it ever going to end??
i have a worrisome feeling that mankind's inalienable rights, the ones the US founding fathers identified, will eventually be completely squished under a boot of tyranny. I mean every year there's a relentless assault on it. It's starting to feel like we're all huddled inside the Alamo. Except there's no Texian Army to avenge it.

Re:300 years and still battling

[Alex Belits]

mankind's inalienable rights, the ones the US founding fathers identified

This is precisely the problem that the rest of the world has with US and Americans.

Re:300 years and still battling

[russotto]

i can't f'ing believe this crap .. is it ever going to end??

No. Imagine a boot stomping on a human face... forever.

Re:300 years and still battling

[isorox]

i can't f'ing believe this crap .. is it ever going to end??
i have a worrisome feeling that mankind's inalienable rights, the ones the US founding fathers identified, will eventually be completely squished under a boot of tyranny. I mean every year there's a relentless assault on it. It's starting to feel like we're all huddled inside the Alamo. Except there's no Texian Army to avenge it.

You are an american, and you believe that mankind has specific inalienable rights. That's fine. The rest of the world may disagree, or broadly agree, but disagree to some parts (the right to bear arms for example). I'm certain that the rest of the world couldn't give a monkeys about the 10th amendment for example, but are much more concerned about the right not to be owned -- something that your founding fathers didn't identify.

Your precious founding fathers didn't enshrine a right to privacy. Doesn't mean it's not an inalienable right. Perhaps people in Europe have different opinions.

Your constitution isn't perfect.

Re:300 years and still battling

[khipu]

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of the US Constitution: it doesn't "enshrine" specific rights for human beings at all, it defines the rights that the federal government has, a small list of specific rights. All other rights belong to the people. (And the phrase "inalienable rights" isn't part of the US Constitution at all, it's part of the Declaration of Independence).

This is much better than the European legal tradition, which does indeed enshrine specific rights of citizens--and leaves all the remaining rights to the king or some nebulous government or society. It's a recipe for totalitarianism.

No, the US Constitution isn't perfect, but it has served the US quite well, along side a civil society and a legal system that have had a commitment first and foremost to keeping as many people free as possible. Sometimes, this entailed ugly compromises (like living with slavery for nearly a century), sometimes this means making hard choices.

This is in stark contrast to Europe, which like a drunken schoolboy would fall in love with one ugly, dangerous ideology after another and over and over again sacrifice its democracy and liberty for it. The US Constitution isn't perfect, but it's a whole lot better than anything European nations have produced in 2000 years.

The biggest threat to the US is to adopt a European-style view of government, a government that is paternalistic and tries to invade every aspect of people's lives with its supposed benevolence and help. In the short term, this may make lives better, but in the long term, it spells disaster.

Keeping the civilization in a obsolete age

[jcdr]

It's a pathetic situation. Historians work hard trying to find evidences of past events because retaining information is so hard. Now we have a Internet able to retain virtually everything, making de facto the greatest source of information that ever existed, and those stupids guys are only trying to keep the whole civilization in a obsolete age. The governments must do exactly the opposite: founding Wikipedia and the like to keep the information over the age. There is no way in denying the existing facts, even if so many manipulators have gain profit in shadowing information to others. The only way forward is learning to live with all informations available in detail.

Re:Keeping the civilization in a obsolete age

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way forward is learning to live with all informations available in detail.

Please repeat your credit card information in detail. Tnx.

Re:Keeping the civilization in a obsolete age

[jcdr]

I was talking about public information, not private one.

Still a good example of the main point: if your credit card information detail became public, there is no way to erase them. The bank simply invalids his use and create a new private one for you.

Re:Link to racy pictures of Argentine pop star ple

[JeanCroix]

I think they tried that on Lost.

Simple Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Require facebook, google, et all to remove the copy you uploaded, upon request, and nothing more. All other copies belong to those who copied them.

wait a mimute...

[Anonymous Coward]

...an american said that?

Whatever it is, it is not a right.

[jcrb]

So I followed the links down to the actual EU document, at which point the problem becomes clear. All the other issues aside, if it takes you 117 pages to explain a "basic right" then it seems to me that....

You're Not Doing It Right

Re:Whatever it is, it is not a right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you looked at any other EU laws and regulations?
This one is actually quite short.

Re:Whatever it is, it is not a right.

[Anonymous Coward]

So I followed the links down to the actual EU document, at which point the problem becomes clear. All the other issues aside, if it takes you 117 pages to explain a "basic right" then it seems to me that....

You're Not Doing It Right

I suppose that depends on the way you look at it. The First Amendment to the US Constitution is very short - only a few lines. However it also doesn't explain the interactions with other rights or other legitimate goals of government. Judges have been largely left to work out reasonable compromises on their own, over time, as relevant cases came before them.

If you were to look at all the case law on free speech and religion rights and the interaction with (for example) RICO/conspiracy statutes, sedition, military classified material, KKK marches, prisoners, Westboro 'God hates fags' Church protests, abortion protests, the rights of Rastas to smoke pot, school students wearing stupid t-shirts etc it would be way more than 117 pages. The European approach is closer to the civil law tradition of specifying more detail up-front so judges aren't left to guess what legislators might have meant.

Re:Whatever it is, it is not a right.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's EU legislation. It would take 117 pages to define the word "word".

Re:Whatever it is, it is not a right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Simplicity is never truly simple. Unfortunately in law, the shorter it is, the more loopholes there are. I personally welcome our draconic lawyer overlords in their flying space ships of legal documents. At least I know that when they fuck me over, it'll be neat and tidy.

Re:Whatever it is, it is not a right.

[qbast]

While in US it would takes a court case and several boxes of documents to establish a precedent.

Re:Whatever it is, it is not a right.

[Attila Dimedici]

Except that this 117 pages will generate just as much case law over 200 years as the First Amendment has and because it is 117 pages that case law will be even more inconsistent than that on the First Amendment. The U.S. Constitution works as well as it does because it does not attempt to spell out how it applies to edge cases. It leaves that to the judgement of those who are actually involved in dealing with such cases.

Re:Whatever it is, it is not a right.

[dunkelfalke]

Except that case law is the rule in only two EU member states out of 27, namely UK and Ireland.

Re:Whatever it is, it is not a right.

[Attila Dimedici]

So, this law, which has 117 pages, tries to spell out how judges should decide every possible scenario that might come up from this law? Do you think that the crafters of this law will have done a good job of deciding how this law will apply to a technology that will not even be thought of until ten years from now?
The OP in this thread was correct, if the law is 117 pages, you are doing it wrong.

Re:Whatever it is, it is not a right.

[dunkelfalke]

In that case the law would grow obsolete and be replaced with another one.
But in the case law, where the judges get to interpret the laws depending on their mood, you get a decision that will be applied two centuries after even if it would be completely ridiculous in more modern times.

When it gets to laws, I prefer extensive ones if they leave no room for ambiguity. For the same reason I don't like computer languages that make undefined behaviour possible.

Re:Whatever it is, it is not a right.

[LaRainette]

You think 117 pages is a long bill ? For regulating the privacy issues on the internet so that is can be compatible with the laws of 27 countries ?
Dude FFS ! It took the senate 3000 pages to make a half baked healthcare reform that's not even close to what French people have been enjoying since 1945 ! (And all the other European nations from roughly the same period of time)
Get over yourself ! Yes it is long, because it is a complicated issue and contrary to what the OP (who's definitely on Google/Facebook payroll) tries to implie they did take a very serious look at what the consequences would be on free speech. Is it a complexe issue that you might not be able to grasp in its full complexity by spending 5 minutes on slashdot : HELL YES.

Re:Whatever it is, it is not a right.

[LaRainette]

Given the fact that the US constitution was written by agnostic humanitarians inspired by the Enlightenment and is now supposedly the basis of the far right-wing nutjob christian extremist ideology I'd say they might have wanted it to be a little more self explanatory.
That or do something about education...

Re:Whatever it is, it is not a right.

[Attila Dimedici]

You might want to re-evaluate your understanding of people's positions in light of this apparent discrepancy. Either you misunderstand the position of the Framers of the U.S. Constitution or you misunderstand the position of those you call "right-wing nujob christian extremists". As far as I can tell the vast majority of those called "right-wing nutjob christian extremists" have a better understanding and greater respect for the document those framers produced than any of those who call them that since it is typical of the latter to think the Constitution is hard to understand because it was "written over one hundred years ago."

Re:Link to racy pictures of Argentine pop star ple

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I'm not joking. And stop calling me Shirley.

Damn Anti-Darwin rights, fuck'em US and EU

[OldHawk777]

Human foolishness has historical value for teaching values to the young, naive, and possibly stupid.

Invoking Anti-Darwin will protect the rich, politicians, popes, mullahs ..., but endanger the public from a lack of information that could save their lives from idiots being leaders. Yes, George Bush is the poster child for Anti-Darwin rights. Fight Anti-Darwin rights/laws and protect US and EU from drunken idiots in politics.

Becoming an adult

[KingofSpades]

Another unintended side effect is that it makes people believe that such a "right" exists.
It doesn't. The sooner people understand it, the better. This problem should be solved through education, not by forcing other people to forget, which can't be done.
Don't treat people like children, let them become adults.

i wanna move to europe

[Anonymous Coward]

why is europe so much better than america?

Re:i wanna move to europe

[c0lo]

Try Greece. I heard is cheap.

It ain't America

[Anonymous Coward]

The "limits" or "restrictions" or "exceptions" of freedom of speech in a constitution purposefully stand in opposition to the phrase "make no law".

Re:It ain't America

[WillAffleckUW]

Corporations aren't People.

In fact, though they and Wall Street pre-exist the Constitution, corporations are specifically not mentioned in the Constitution, because they are only Legal Fictions, and only an insane person - or group of elderly insane people - could possibly think they were People.

Your corporate right to my data ends where I - a real Citizen - says it does.

Re:Link to racy pictures of Argentine pop star ple

[jamstar7]

Compared to Ronny RayGun, the Bush Bandits, and Slick Willy, Jimmy Carter was a breath of fresh air. And of course, who could resist the tales of his brother Billy? The 'bubbah' was a train wreck, but amusing as hell.

"Perfect Remembering" isn't necessarily good

[Kaikopere]

I was reading Delete by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger recently and he has a very simple solution... put expiration dates on all data. I don't know that it's a basic human right to be forgotten, but it's pretty harsh to have a picture of one act of foolishness follow you around for 20 years.

Re:Link to racy pictures of Argentine pop star ple

[rudy_wayne]

an 'Argentine pop star [who] had posed for racy pictures when she was young, but recently sued Google and Yahoo to take them down.

Fortunately, Google sucks so badly now that she doesn't have much to worry about. A search for her name in Google Images brings up mostly pictures of other people, including various men, and many pictures that contain no people at all.

Interesting..

[crossmr]

I see The New Republic doesn't seem to have a single story about ACTA in their pages.. yet the europeans are out protesting it in droves...Europeans want to protect privacy and suddenly someone from America is all over them..
I also notice the Standford law review doesn't return a single article written about that either..

Clean up your own house before you go telling others how to run theirs.

Re:Interesting..

[M. Baranczak]

I was gonna post the exact same thing, you beat me to it. They also didn't say one word about SOPA until the protests were too big to ignore.

Re:Interesting..

[Torvac]

moneyeating hypocrite future lobbyists

Different from IRL how?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I don't want my ex to keep or post pictures of me to the internet, there is absolutely nothing I can do about (nor should there be!). It's the consequence of living and breathing in a society, or am I mistaken?

Fee

[Tablizer]

If those services charge a removal fee that covers removal cost plus a small profit margin (for commercial vendors), then it shouldn't matter to them. It's more revenue.

Re:Fee

[nosferatu1001]

Good job theyre not allowed to make a profit from it then

Re:Jeffrey Rosen Doesn't Understand What "Hosting"

[jamstar7]

Possibly, that's the plan. After all, it could be Yet Another Nail Gun in the War Against Online 'Piracy' if sites were held responsible for their content. Somebody posts a link to a magnet file or a torrent file, you can nail them with enabling 'piracy' even though it's copyright infringement.

pandering and fear mongering

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it hard to disagree that such legislation threatens freedom of speech and information, but if one extends the logic... Really The whole matter is a reductio ad absurdum for DMCA take downs and similar legislation.

It was a nice bit of distraction though with the murderers and Argentinian pop-star. Oh ya, what were we talking about?

Re:Link to racy pictures of Argentine pop star ple

[Anonymous Coward]

Compared to Ronny RayGun, the Bush Bandits, and Slick Willy, Jimmy Carter was a breath of fresh air. And of course, who could resist the tales of his brother Billy? The 'bubbah' was a train wreck, but amusing as hell.

What ever happened to Billy Carter and Billy Beer?

Re:So don't post your life story on Facebook

[TaoPhoenix]

Sorry, I think a bigger risk is at stake.

You're right in the "coldly rational" sense that the old Economists used to go by. The problem is that there are a couple of smart evil critters at senior manager positions in these companies, who discovered that 20 billion dollars of influence can create the greatest Social Hack of the last 25 years. America forgot that the chief problem of small insular towns with only 200 people in them was that you could never escape The Day That You Insulted Mrs. Chadwick, because Nobody Insults Mrs. Chadwick.

With the advent of city conditions, people became too busy working to worry about The Disgraceful Remark. In a Post Insult-To-Mrs. Chadwick World, the world ... in a city... would be ... the same!

Now with the social services, the search engines are creating a passive version of that Long Memory, that does nothing for you when you behave, (mostly), but records forever when you don't.

Combined with outright malicious abuse by both the companies and the government, people aren't "just choosing" anymore. They need a little help.

Here's an idea

[Vinegar Joe]

Why doesn't Europe set up it's own version of Facebook?

Re:Here's an idea

[Zombie]

Why doesn't Europe set up it's own version of Facebook?

We did. It's called netlog. And then the event horizon of Facebook's socio-gravitational pull engulfed the whole planet and surrounding satellites.

Re:Here's an idea

[xlsior]

There's a bunch of them that are very popular in certain regions, but nothing that has critical mass across Europe -- Facebook has eclipsed them. (But for example, in The Netherlands 'Hyves' was the most popular -- over 10 million accounts on a population of 16 million)

Re:Here's an idea

[lordholm]

Several have tried, but many of the attempts where localized to one or two states, no-one tried to make their system global. Which is why they failed. Now that Facebook have achieved world domination, it is very tricky to fix the mistakes of the past for the smaller companies.

In NL, a system called Hyves was very popular, they are still there but virtually no one is using it anymore; I would not be surprised if they declared bankruptcy in the next two years. In SE, there was a company called Lunarstorm, they failed by only supporting social stuff in Sweden and Finland (for the Swedish speaking finns), plus their user interface was horrible and essentially only tested with Internet Explorer; this company folded a couple of years ago. I am sure that there have been similar systems in the other states of Europe.

The big problem is that these companies never realized that Internet is a global thing, people have friends that are spread out in all of the world and would probably want to be in touch with them over the social networks. So, when you apparently need at least one "global" Facebook account in addition to your local "national social internet service here" account, why stay in the local service?

Re:Here's an idea

[LaRainette]

You do realize Facebook is a private multinational corporation yes ?
It is not and will never be in any sense whatsoever a representative of the USA and/or affiliated with it's government.
There are hundreds of social networking sites all over the world including of course some which were created in europe, but believe it or not social networks extend beyond "the great sea" (you know the one Jesus crossed barefoot to take away all the indians to his father so the pilgrims can have all the turkeys and found the United States to save the world from the devil's reincarnation in the form of a 5feet5 black haired dude with a mustache and a funny accent).
Yes that one, and also the other one that extends from California to the land of the yellow people who make awesome game consoles and Godzilla movies
the whole idea of Social networking is to reflect the actual social connections between real people, which most of the times are global.

The roman empire has never ended

[roguegramma]

-pkd

Re:Link to racy pictures of Argentine pop star ple

[Hatta]

Anyone for Pong?

This is a Feature, not a Bug

[WillAffleckUW]

In fact, MYOB.

Your right to my data ends where I say explicitly that you - and you alone - can have it.

Don't like it?

Don't sign International Data Treaties with the EU and Canada which have strong Privacy rights and Liberties then.

Comprende?

Job of Winston Smith

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK that's what Winston Smith was doing as his full time job in 1984. He deleted (and modified) "facts" from the past. What could go wrong id such a tool was brought to life on the Internet?

Re:Not sure why a debate (or the Memory Hole)

[WillAffleckUW]

I know you're too young to understand this, but until we created ARPA NET, which later became the Internet, there in fact was an American right to be forgotten.

You could literally move 2 states away and nobody would know who you were.

It is a recent corporate aberration that has permitted people to track you in such a manner.

Some states still retain a high Right of Privacy in their state constitutions, particularly in the West.

Its a European upper class thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

The USA is still the only place in the world where Free Speech trumps other legalities.
We are raised to beleive that America is a place the truth goes to die, but Europe is where the truth gets aborted.
Take these three things:
- Only three things could get you hung in Victorian England.. Murder, Treason and Blackmail. If a servant knew a dirty secret it could get them killed by a state.
- The liable laws of Europe (especially Britian) immediately protect the guilty. In America are you guilty of liable if you tell the truth?
- An investigator cannot take a photo of a French president cheating on his wife.

Now they want to use force to make others to forget.

Respect My Authoritay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps we need to get to a point where each person has complete authority of (and responsibility for) their own personal information. You would have an account somewhere for you to keep all of your information. Other sites would publicly link to (but not store) that data if you allowed them to. If anyone wanted their data removed, then they would be the ones responsible for doing so.

This could even be built in at the protocol level. Kind of like DNS has authoritiative servers for naming things, this would have authoritative servers for information ownership.

If you can't remove info, dilute it.

[srobert]

I wonder though, if you find you just can't remove all of the info about yourself that's out there on the net. Perhaps you could just dilute with nonsense. Prospective employers looking for you years from now will find that you kidnapped the Lindbergh baby, were the inventor of Slinky football, were a U.S. Congressman in 1979 who successfully passed legislation outlawing cat juggling, and you were the original drummer for the Banana Splits, before you became an astronaut on Apollo 22.

Re:If you can't remove info, dilute it.

[retroworks]

Exactly. Nature never makes anything invisible. Creatures evolve camouflage.

Some kind of balance is in order

[Anonymous Coward]

Speech should be free. People should not be protected from their past misdeeds, exactly, but should have some way of starting over again. Say, why don't we give them a new identity and a new life? We could call it the Witless Protection Program.

News Crews

[Anonymous Coward]

If a news crew catches me naked dancing on the suspension bridge suppport wire and plays it on the evening news should I be able to sue to have it "forgotten"? I would expect an incident like that to follow me forever!

Re:So don't post your life story on Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

This... is the best explanation of the need for online privacy that I have read in a long time. Thanks.

Re:Link to racy pictures of Argentine pop star ple

[Anonymous Coward]

They died.

Privacy mostly used by criminals.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right to be forgotten? Sounds like people trying to erase their tracks.

If you did something in life that you regret... deal with it... accept it... move on, live on.

Free speech, free expression and free market is heavily opposed by gangs, criminals, and tyrants...

They could care a less about the evolution of man, they simply want to maintain power.

Free speech, free market, individualism, communism, capitalism are all disliked by tyrants.

They prefer dictatorship, absolute rule, nothing less.

Re:Privacy mostly used by criminals.

[Torvac]

well, this pro fact spinner makes it look like it. but he forgot other laws in his edition that cover publications of public interest so this whole story is FUD, nothing more. e.g. in the case of the murdered actor the names could stand on the site of the dead actor because of public interest. you could try and get it from the murderers fb page with the new laws tho. Making the privacy laws sound like it helps criminals is pure FUD. Just take a guess about what helps criminals more, the current or the new laws ?

Re:Privacy mostly used by criminals.

[lordholm]

The right to be forgotten is about one thing: If I delete my Facebook account, they should also delete all the data associated with that account (including face tags in other people's photos).

It does not force Facebook to delete comments written by others mentioning your name, just the material you posted.

This is not that unreasonable. It does in no way effect free speech (although, the preliminary text in the directive may not be clear enough, but it has to go through the parliament and the council that will amend the directive), except that you have the right to delete all the posts you made, but if you are the one who expressed yourself initially, you are still free to repost the information elsewhere.

Re:So don't post your life story on Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

The other point is that you don't even have to post the information yourself. I don't use Facebook, but my partner does, everytime she says 'we' went to a party or to dinner she is posting information about me. By now there is probably quite a lot of it, but none of it was posted by me, and some of it I might later disagree with or think was factually incorrect.

Re:Link to racy pictures of Argentine pop star ple

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

By '77 we already had Spacewars. Space Invaders was a year away.

A more limited version would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly the "delete all current and future posting of my image/info automatically" idea is impractical, and, as mentioned in the summary, a great risk to free speech.

But what I think *should* be written in to law is that a company must delete ALL data -- including from archives (to avoid Google's "it's impractical to dig up the backup tapes" excuse) -- submitted by a user to the services of a company.

So, if a person enters a lot of information on Facebook, and post pictures, etc, then that person should have the right to request that ALL of that data be removed permanently -- including from ALL archives that the company has -- in a *timely* way, and in a manner that must be explicitly audited on a regular basis (e.g., annually).

But if one person posts a picture of another person in to their Facebook account, then there would be no requirement to delete that photograph. This is the limitation that will prevent such a law from becoming a threat to free speech.

Sure, when text and images are put online, the world is free to copy, archive, and share that information. But unless that information is conveniently hosted by sites like Facebook, Google, etc, then it will likely fail to turn up in search results. So, if the user has the right to delete their OWN account in its entirety, including all archived copies, etc, then the data will, in most cases, be GONE. For any given person's name, there are probably ten thousand people with the same name -- and a lot of those people are also on social networking sites.

I'm against the idea of burdening corporations with the risky and futile task of identifying and deleting any data matching particular patterns (e.g., copyrighted content, or politically censored data, or in this idea of deleting *all* past/present/future instances of personal data posted by other people), but having the right to delete data associated with an account that a user created himself or herself seems fair and good for society.

Re:A more limited version would be nice...

[russotto]

For any given person's name, there are probably ten thousand people with the same name -- and a lot of those people are also on social networking sites.

That's great if you're name's Mohammed Chang. There are lots of names which aren't so common.

Re:A more limited version would be nice...

[LaRainette]

Exactly, if you google my name you have exactly one person that comes up : me.

It's like having copyright in your own stuff

[Animats]

It's like owning the copyright in information about you, even if someone else collected it.

Re:Link to racy pictures of Argentine pop star ple

[koan]

lawl you got modded up for linking teh pron.

Re:Link to racy pictures of Argentine pop star ple

[koan]

LOL I love it, I think you got modded down for using the jew word, other than that not far off the mark.

US "freedom".

[Alex Belits]

In US, anything some group of rich assholes wants to do with information or art is either "copyright" (when a cult does not want its beliefs and practices discussed in public, or public domain work becomes inaccessible after some company makes an animated movie based on it and claims its ownership) or "freedom of speech" (a cover for fraud, blackmail, libel, conspiracy, propaganda and harassment).

Yeah and this is a threat to freedom how exactly?

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Please. Rosen is acting as a proxy for Google et al who can't be seen going up against this for PR reasons.

I am not saying in its present form it's workable, but the idea that somehow the right to be forgotten is at odds with free speech is total bullshit.

At least it will create a set of significant disincentives to people who want to come forward with this material, who can expect to be prosecuted for doing so, and that's a good thing.

Why are these two rights even being compared when the more obvious comparison is between the right to be forgotten and the threat of being blackmailed, manipulated , artificially limited and determined by your youthful mistakes and bad judgement before your brain had even finished maturing?

I know that Slashdot is filled with techie types and programmers and a supernormal number of those are people who have varying degrees of Asperger's Syndrome and therefore will voice comments like "meh. They made their bed. Let them lie in it". The whole POINT of the EU decision is to prevent that type of attitude from doing the damage it would do. Such "tough luck" attitudes represent nothing but an abysmal lack of insight into human character and the calculus of human relations.

Never before in human history have people been unable to walk away from truly youthful indiscretions. The consequences of this are far reaching and it's a brilliant insight on the part of the EU to recognize the potential for destructive and malignant power plays and the potential for people who would otherwise make real, vital contributions to society to exclude themselves from the public scrutiny that accomplishment would necessarily bring if a woman thought that the picture of the . of herself with the banana would inevitably surface one day.

This is something completely new- a forever memory machine focused in on you from the time of your birth, relentlessly taking pictures recording thoughts and documenting events. No creative person can survive that unscathed.

Now please, let the "fuck them, tough luck" commenters take the floor. ... but before they do, please, give generously:

http://www.autismspeaks.org/

personal freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Every person's civil liberties are always bound by the next person's freedom. We as a society have to set the borders. We have to weigh which liberty is more important to us. Different societies will always come to different limits. Example: Hate speech in Germany, by all standards a country with a free press and free speech, is a felony, as to where it is pretty much protected in the US. This has historical reasons.
Amongst the European population, in general, the personal privacy has a much higher priorit than in the US. So naturally they will set the rules different, than the people in th US.

Free Speech?!

[Lazy Jones]

How does personal information about other people and their pictures constitute "free speech"? What a dumb attempt to defend the Googles and Facebooks who want to monetize every bit of information, no matter how harmful or embarrassing it is ...

Re:Free Speech?!

[oh_my_080980980]

Thank you. This is about profit and liability nothing more. Facebook's ability to profit from your property and limit their liability from profiting from your property.

Since when do corporations have more rights than people. Flip it another way: if corporation A's information ended up in the hands of corporation B after corporation A purged said information, you know that that corporation A would be going after corporation B. You would not claim free speech. You (Rosen) would claim violation of property, not free speech violation.

Re:Free Speech?!

[LaRainette]

Dude, you live in a country where the supreme court judge unlimited corporate donations (aka bribes) to political parties and candidates is considered free speech.
It's about damn time you wake up...
In the US, if you can make money off it it's free speech, if it's about ideas it's communist propaganda

Personally...

[yuhong]

I have been saying that the illusion that people are perfect is fundamentally flawed for a while now.

You're going to have a problem here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because USians, since their constitution is the ONLY DOCUMENT IN THE WORLD (apart from all the others) that enshrines "Freedom of Speech", to almost every single USian, Freedom of Speech is mom's apple pie, truth, justice and the American Way (tm) all rolled into one.

You'll often hear them quote Voltair, though by their subsequent actions, there's an unsaid coda "as long as I don't actually have to do anything but *say* I'll fight to the death". Very frequently you'll see them whine about OWS et al for "interrupting other people's work lives" by, you know, protesting, where everyone else can see them! The cheek!!

So, since Free Speech is at the very heart and soul of the USA and this enshrines the American Specialism In The World, you WILL NEVER get them to admit that there's ANYTHING WRONG with it. And by trying to do so, you will be placed with Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler.

And they won't have budged an inch.

And here is the problem

[aepervius]

non revocable could certainly be unconscionable under EU law, thus making FB/Google EULA or whatever is the agreement, NIL. And i betcha later in the agreement it says something alike "some clause might not apply depending on your juridiction blahblahlbah".

Re:And here is the problem

[icebraining]

non revocable could certainly be unconscionable under EU law

That'd be fun. Guy contributes for months to an OSS project, then has a disagreement with them and revokes the license to his code. Suddenly hundreds of distributors are now illegal, the project is half dead until they can get someone who didn't know the code to reimplement it, etc.

Or: photographer puts picture oo stock site, which then sublicenses it to websites, newspapers, etc. Then he revokes the license and sues all of them.

Copyright exists outside of pictures you upload to Facebook. Eliminating the possibility of non-revocable licenses just because of them is ridiculous.

The reasonable course of action is for the EU to create specific legislation about those items, not to mess with copyright just for them.

Reaction in re ACTA?

[wrencherd]

The proposed "right to be forgotten" seems very much like the already accepted "right to informational self-determination".

However, the naming of this latest version shifts the intent of the citizen exercising such a right from trying to retain some privacy from institutions and governments to trying to "cover up" the past.

I would say this is an attempt to position the implicit police goals of ACTA as being "pro-free speech" when really those are fairly clearly anti-privacy.

Law sounds silly

[seeker_1us]

It's basically the legislature trying to make entropy illegal....

Totally Wrong Question

[Jawnn]

The right question is "Why would anyone who truly cares about their privacy give private information to a another party who, as part of a legal agreement between the parties, promises to share that information with others?" You have the "right" to not enter into such an arrangement. Nothing else matters, dumbass.

Re:

[davide marney]

I see what you've done there: you've taken an argument for privacy, and made it equivalent to an argument against freedom of speech.

Re:Link to racy pictures of Argentine pop star ple

[ciderbrew]

We all do.

Re:Yeah and this is a threat to freedom how exactl

[oh_my_080980980]

I think it's more than hiding youthful indiscretions. It's about not having every click, every site visited and product purchased being tracked. It's about privacy. Facebook tracks everything and stores it. So beyond deleting your profile, it's about stop tracking everyone move people make without their consent.

Go diaspora.

[LaRainette]

This is about saying to Facebook and Google and many others : Okay you tell you users to trust you with their data, then get this data in fucking control.
Right now Facebook is pretending to let you control the data you upload when in fact neither them nor you control it.
A] Facebook deletes data based on algorithmes that you know nothing about as a user.
B] You do not own any of the data you upload to facebook
C] They pretend it is for you own good, but they fail at being able to remove data that would be considered illegal.
i.e. someone who is my friend on facebook tags me on a photo of me naked. I can get untagged but the photo will remain on facebook and I have no legal recourse other than this new proposed right to be forgotten.
Right now there is absolutely NO legal channel for users of social networks to hold Facebook accountable for the data they make available.
There is a pratical solution though : diaspora, or diaspora-like architecture, which is what facebook should have been (had it not been a machiavelic plan to get every last bit of possible data on anyone in the planete in the wrong hands)
On diaspora you own your data, if something is on the network that you posted and you want it removed you just delete it.

Re:Law sounds silly

[LaRainette]

No it's a legislature that make Facebook accountable for the data they said they'd control if you gave them.
In other words the positive outcome I can see from this is : Facebook/google+ close because they get prosecuted for false advertising and breach of their EULA, peopleget a $100 each and we can allsafely move to diaspora where we will actually be in control of our data (or alternatively stop giving a fuck about social networking, which is fine by me)

Re:Yeah and this is a threat to freedom how exactl

[khipu]

I am not saying in its present form it's workable, but the idea that somehow the right to be forgotten is at odds with free speech is total bullshit.

No, it's not. Under US law, you have a legal right to say pretty much anything, true or false, insulting, upsetting, offensive, as long as the act of speaking doesn't threaten someone's life. Period.

The limitations on that are civil in nature: if your speech violates copyrights, patents, or trademarks, you may have to pay. If you obtained the information in a position of trust or through surreptitious means, you may be guilty of violations of privacy. And if you make false statements about someone, you may be guilty of libel.

But you can make truthful statements about another human being even if that harms them. In fact, in part, that's the whole point of free speech: we want free speech to "harm" bad politicians, bad businesses. We want free speech to discredit bad political ideologies and bad religions.

Never before in human history have people been unable to walk away from truly youthful indiscretions.

In Europe, until the 20th century, most people effectively couldn't "walk away" from anything: they had nowhere to go, except perhaps emigrate to the US. And the tiny communities in which they lived remembered their lives in minute detail. Serfdom existed in Europe well into the 19th century, meaning people couldn't even legally walk away, they were owned by their lord. The idea that the "right to be forgotten" is a long-standing right people enjoyed is ludicrous.

Furthermore, unlike Europe, the US does give you the option of changing your name and identity easily. So, if you really want to "be forgotten", you have that option in the US, without infringing on anybody's free speech. There are some limits on that, for example, the US has limits on your ability to make past sex offenses or murders go away; you may disagree with those limits, but they are a deliberate choice.

Yes Of Course

[IBitOBear]

The only thing Jimmy Carter did wrong was -not- assinate Nixon.

Nixon, behind the scenes, negotiated wiht the Iranian "hostage takers" to have them -keep- the hostages in order to sabatoge Jimmy Carter's presidency. Note how the hostages were released on the day of R.R.'s inaguration.

Yes, this is the same Nixon who arranged to have the Viet Nam war extended to undermine the sitting president so he could get elected instead. Once elected he had "no choice" but to follow through on his promises to a foriegn power and so six-plus years of dead Americans.

See http://consortiumnews.com/2011/12/23/the-gop-history-of-hostage-taking/ and start at the Nixon Legacy. (Not the best citation, but the easiest for me to look up right now.)