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UK Privacy Watchdog: 'Right To Be Forgotten' On the Web Unworkable
An anonymous reader writes "Want to be invisible to Google? Apparently you can't, at least according to the European Commission and Information Commissioner's Office. '"The right to be forgotten worries us as it makes people expect too much," said [deputy commissioner David Smith]. Instead, Smith said the focus should be on the "right to object" to how personal data is used, as this places the onus on businesses to justify the collection and processing of citizens' data. "It is a reversal of the burden of proof system used in the existing process. It will strengthen the person's position but it won't stop people processing their data." EC data protection supervisor Peter Hustinx added the right to be forgotten is currently unworkable as most countries are divided on what qualifies as sensitive personal data. "I believe the right to be forgotten is an overstatement," said Hustinx."
That is the problem. Back in them good old days, You can make a ass out of yourself, and only a few people or perhaps the town know. But after you left the town you had a clean slate.
Now today with Google and Facebook, are assitry is now shared across the globe and will stay embedded in peoples mines for a long time. Oh wait weren't you the Star Wars Kid, or that Girl who didn't know where Canada was.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'm more worried about the crackdown on using alternate identities online. My friends know who I am, but no one else should be able to pull up dirt on me based on random dirt they find associated with my name.
At the same time, if there's an actual crime being investigated, it's takes some pretty trivial sleuthing to trace back an alternate id to a person, but takes some effort just out of reach for a telemarketer or employer or griefer, and could require an approval process and leave a paper trail back to the requester.
So I'm sort of upset that GooTube / Facebook push for realname ids. But for the most part they let you get away with using your alternicks... for now. But that's the right we need to fight to preserve.
Let's see here. We have the EU defining a legal civil right. The corporate world says "oh noez! We can't do that! Our business model is BASED around violating that civil right! We totally can't just delete all that precious and lucrative data just because some prudes don't want to be included!"
If we adapt this, and replace some other legally recognized civil right, like say-- the right to the sanctity of one's own body, the absurdity of this attestment becomes painfully clear.
"Oh noez! We can't do that, our business model is BASED on forcing prepubescent children to perform sexual services without getting any permission of compensation! We can't just let those very lucrative child prostitutes go just because some prudes don't want to take diseased cock all day! We make our money selling child prostitution services! These so called "rights" are completely unworkable! How can we sell reliable prostitution services if we can't force people to be whores for us!?"
Seriously. That's what I see when I see these kinds of arguments. If your business mode revolves round violating other people's rights, then you DON'T have any right to perform that line of business. The fact that it is "unworkable" is fucking INTENTIONAL.
I agree fully <insert your real screen name here>, but have you considered the fact that even if your regex wiped out your post above (assuming you posted it with a real name), that your regex should not modify my reply which very well may contain not just your post... but additional information? Why should your right to be forgotten override my right to speak?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
You do not have a right to be forgotten. Think about what that means. That means you do something and I witness it. Do you have a right to compel me to forget it ever happened? Of course not. My right to be secure in my thoughts, the written expression thereof (which is what they really mean by forget), and my effects is a real right. Your desire for me to forget something you did is not.
You have a right to privacy. Exercise it by not publishing information you want kept private. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, and short of fraud or some other malfeasance being responsible for the breach of privacy in the first place, you have no right to command that anyone try.
It's beyond Google, Facebook, and Twitter, though. If you use a membership card at a retailer like Costco, a pharmacy, or a grocery store then they know a lot about you. If you use a credit card then the credit card knows a lot about you. Your bank knows a lot about you. Your wireless carrier knows a lot about you, unless you keep the phone at home and don't actually carry it with you - but that defeats the purpose of having a mobile phone. Your internet service provider knows a lot about you. etc... etc... And thanks to things like the Evercookie (which we can assume most of the major advertising networks already had in place before the actual Evercookie was publicized), dozens of web companies know a lot about you. If you use hosted email, that company knows a lot about you.
In all of those cases a skilled hacker, an unethical employee, or a corrupt goverment agent can get an unsettling amount of information about you. Avoiding it is difficult but plausible for educated, upper middle class or wealthier people - don't use a membership service for your pharmacy and grocery store. Don't have credit cards. Pay cash for your shopping. Use multiple banks, and do most of your transactions using prepaid credit cards and money orders. Switch phone numbers and wireless carriers frequently, or forego a mobile phone entirely. Set up all of your internet devices to use TOR or a VPN service. Host your own email, and only communicate using encrypted messages with other people that likewise host their own email and communicate only via encrypted messages. Avoid all social networks. All of that is a lot of work, and not practical for most of the population - it's so uncommon I wouldn't be surprised if you end up on a government watch list simply for conspicuously protecting your own privacy.
That said, legislating the problem away is simply unworkable. I don't know what the practical broad solution for privacy is, but simply passing a law demanding that Google, Facebook, Comcast, T-Mobile, Costco, Mastercard, etc... abandon large aspects of their business model is a nice fantasy but it won't fly.
Who says it does?
If the regex nukes only his own posts, and any quoted portions of his posts, replacing it with "User has exercised his or her right to be forgotten. This post deleted." Over and over again, doe NOT remove "your" side of an argument, on whatever service or forum you post on. Your quotes will just end up looking silly, and you will just end up looking like a douche.
Nothing would prevent you from keeping your own personal version of the dialog for personal posterity, but your redistributing it after the other party has expressly stated that they do not authorize such, runs foul of not only this civil liberty, but also copyright law, and as such is *already* illegal.
Personally, I like some (SOME! Not all!) Of the features of this right to be forgotten. But in a lot of cases, a better solution is just to allow users to set privacy restrictions on content they provide, and then actually fucking obey them.
Contrary to the behavior of many social networking sites, landlords can't randomly decide to sell their rentors' stuff on a whim, nor rifle through their posessions, papers and effects, just because they own the property on which those items are stored.
Simply enforcing such things, and treating all uploads as being defacto unauthorized for marketing purposes unless explicity flagged and personally endorsed as such would basically remove almost all need for this, other than for getting old forum posts redacted.
Again, your appeal to freedom of speech about block quotation runs headfirst into current copyright law, since it is written text, and has natural copyright ascribed to its author, and not to you. Your ability to quote and use it is already limited to fair use only. You can make a parody of the post, and that can stay, but any direct quotations that don't fall inside fair use are flat out not authorized, and not protected.
You can call the person wanting the scrub job done a douche and anything else you want, but your rights end where his begin, and vice versa. If you parody his post, its totally safe, for example.
Of course, large regular expressions filters would already exclude parodies, since they aren't identical. :D
Well, presumably, "not doing stupid shit" entails avoiding doing things that have some reasonable chance of costing you any desirable opportunities in the future... whether or not you necessarily personally think that those things are unwise or not.
But ultimately, nobody can be perfectly prescient, or make perfect choices all of the time, and it's a exercise in futility to try. If some future possible employer gets offended at what they find out about you after googling your name, that's unfortunate, but that's also life. Sure, we'd all like it if other people could just forgive and forget any of the past crap that we've done, but nobody else actually *owes* us that. The question, as I said, is not what needs to happen so that other people don't remember, or can't be reminded of what you did, as much as it is what you are planning to do with the rest of your life in spite of that having happened... instead of trying to pretend that you shouldn't have to face up to some unforeseen consequences that might arise from your past choices or actions just because they may be unpleasant.
In the end, assuming you are adult, you are ultimately accountable for yourself. Nobody else is. Make the most of the life you have now, because it's a one-shot deal, and the more time in it that you spend wallowing in regret or wishing that other people wouldn't judge you, the less time is going to be left over for you to really *feel* alive.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Of course when this is about free market and destroying states as economic actors, there is no problem with member states different sensibilities, democracy can be trumped for the good cause. When we come about protecting citizens against megacorporation, it seems to be different.
I don't know how MI5 managed it but somehow the Data Protection Commissioner (now the Information Commissioner) was somewhat ambivalent about Stasi-like surveillance. The latter bit was told to me by Phil Booth, ex-national co-ordinator of NO2ID.