Slashdot Mirror
'Eraser' Law Will Let California Kids Scrub Online Past
gregor-e writes "The first-of-its-kind 'eraser button' law, signed Monday by Governor Jerry Brown, will force social media titans such as Facebook, Twitter and Google let minors scrub their personal online history in the hopes that it might help them avoid personal and work-related problems. The law will take effect on January 1, 2015."
A new California law will require local bars to eliminate any alcohol consumed by minors from their bodies on demand. Supporters say this new law will reduce the amount of drunk-driving and poor decisions made by drunk minors. It might help them avoid personal and work-related problems.
Can somebody here write a cgi script (soon to come in handy) to detect which IPs are from California and ask for confirmation that they are indeed at least 18 years old? Sorry, CA teenagers, you're not coming on MY site. You know, in the same way COPPA effectively made 13 the internet age...
In T4 !! Saggy T4 !!
If they let minors do this, why not everyone?
If people post stuff on an online social media site, aren't they giving permission to publish it online? Can they really revoke that permission later? Aren't there First Amendment issues here? If I have a blog site with a public comments section, am I legally obligated to maintain that site forever so I can delete comments whenever someone turns 18 and demands it be deleted?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Will someone in California please let Jerry Brown know that the internet never forgets?
What about the government?
What about adults?
What about online information that could now be considered an important part of internet history?
Just some food for thought.
See subject line.
How does Cali have jurisdiction over anything online?
I, for one, would welcome those companies moving all their remaining business here. They make most of their money on the stock market, anyway. About time they spent most of their money in New York, too. It's a win-win for California. This way California politicians won't have to worry about how to enforce the law. They can blame the lack of enforcement on the fact that Cali is no longer solvent.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
If so, I'll be 17 forever
Eraser law with no mention of the former Governator...
Now bullies under 18 (or claiming to be) can scrub all of their dirty dealings before their victims can collect evidence.
Just the kids? I'd PAY for this.
I'd prefer a way to unerase the stuff I did as a minor. There's some info I once had on MySpace that I'd kinda like back, but apparently they wiped all of that... :(
No doubt many Slashdotters will trip over each other in their rush to proclaim that this will never work, insisting that the internet never forgets, and maybe mentioning the Streisand effect.
But the point isn't to erase the past entirely. Just to make it not so obvious. For example, a certain Republican presidential candidate used to have a "Google problem". Now, maybe that problem was well deserved given his policy positions, but he wanted to erase it. He didn't need it to disappear from the internet entirely, which would be impossible in any case, he just wanted it to not be the top result when someone searched his name.
It seems both possible and beneficial to allow young adults to bury some of the embarrassments of their college and high school years. The information is still there for anyone looking for it, but does it really make sense for it to be the top result? If I'm Googling potential employees, I'm probably more interested in papers they published than a YouTube video of them drunkenly dancing on a table.
Right now digital fingerprints hurt because they are new. When everyone has it, it will become normal and it will not matter.
"Internet never forgets" is not a problem if you were an adult when social media first became popular. For young people today it will be cruel and unusual punishment once they turn adults.
I don't think it is reasonable to judge someone based on what they said many years ago. People change. People grow up and become adults.
At the same time we know that legislative solution like that will be ineffective. Only social change would work, but that won't happen until our generation is around. So they are screwed for at least another decade(s).
What will happen is that companies that trade in this information will just grab it periodically and store it. If placed outside US jurisdiction (yes, I know the US has this fantasy the whole world is US jurisdiction, but that was over quite some time ago), there is nothing they can do. And making it illegal to query such information will not work either, it will just be buffered enough that no LEA has a chance.
This law can have negative effects though: Teens, believing themselves safe, will be even more careless.
To sum up: Clueless lawmakers with a disconnect from reality try to change reality by making a law. And fail. And do significant damage. As usual.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This is only an issue because there are five applicants for every job and more than half of college graduates move back in with their parents. Everybody now sends their resume to everybody, and HR departments are overwhelmed. The result is extensive filtering on easy to check, but not too useful, criteria by HR departments.
It never forgives either but apparently California can forgive the man solely responsible for California's doom. I get the Arnold wasn't an ideal governor but they are the ones that voted him in. But of course, voting Brown back into office will surely fix his mistakes and the mistakes that Brown had already made right? Not only is this bill unconstitutional but it's clearly designed with lawyers all over it. How long will it be before websites left and right (probably just right) gets sued over this, or at least fined money for refusing to take down posts. But hey, that's only applicable to California like the rest of the horse shit laws (sorry NY but California really has you beat in unbelievable stupid laws).
Sorry but if I have to move my servers overseas to protect the right of free speech, then so be it. I already moved away from analytics and quantcast and i disabled google ads by implementing my own system which seems to work better anyways. No user tracking, probably little to no NSA, and free speech is protected. So yeah, you can say whatever you want Mr. Brown but fuck you, we don't belong to you. (oh, that's kind of nice :D)
because If as an Australian I want to remove a post on a Japanese site I can get some embarrassing post scrubbed clean?
As a native Californian (who is stuck living in the bay area), this state has proved that states should make due with part-time legislatures. You can add the various anti-gun bills (lets see...no more lead ammo for hunting, a .22 semi rifle is reclassified as a assualt rifle and as such can no longer have ownership transfered (so when you die, the state gets it)) on top of this heap of shit.
What's the point in setting up another legal framework and technical hurdles to overcome and whatnot, when the solution will be imperfect anyways. If society wants to decide that things you did before you turned 18 shouldn't matter much in your adult life, then perhaps we all just need to, you know, stop caring about googling up what people did as minors. So what if you're applying for a job at age 35 and someone pulls up some stupid shit you did when you were 16. Were they not also 16 once?
ensure that everyone have a chance to succeed in their career. Their ability should not be hindered by distant past mistakes.
Who will pay for this? Since the article did not mention, I assume that will be the owners of these companies. Unless California starts paying me for development, it's going to be kind of slow to add the ($_POSTED['state'] == 'CA' && $_POSTED['age] 18) { bunch of code...} to the sites I work on....
will they be conditioned enough to do the same.
Will someone in California please let Jerry Brown know that the internet never forgets?
The open internet does not forget widely shared information. Closed, walled-garden systems such as facebook are capable of forgetting.
Don't believe me? Lets test it. I will delete a picture from facebook in the next ten minutes. Try and recover it.
I have a bridge to sell you
Just like the State 'laws' that mandated restrictions on the sales of video games, this 'law' will fail at the first hurdle. What kids do online is NOT the same as an official government record of the child's behaviour. Would Brook Shields (the actor) have the right to scrub ALL the films and TV shows she appeared in as a child, for instance (she performed as a child prostitute at age 12). The US supreme court does NOT treat online as any different from any other medium.
When a minor posts online, it is under the SAME contractual mechanism as when Shields appeared as a prostitute. Using 'free' services like Facebook is literally the same as giving a performance in a film. The exchange of value with Facebook is the fact they don't charge you to use their service. In Law, this has the same weight as the financial reward Shields or her guardians got for her film acting.
To prevent, say, Facebook arguing that they 'own' (non-exclusively) user content as a price for the user using their services would require tearing up the whole capitalist basis for corporate activities in the USA. An exception would be specific court action requiring the scrubbing of specific user content under specific legal circumstances pertaining to the individual. But such mechanisms already exist in the USA, and apply to all mediums.
The general right of users to break their contract with services like Facebook, even as minors, just because they want to, would set an unbearable precedent. Of course, a more successful approach would modify the form of contracts that minors are allowed to enter into, but again the problem here is that the law would NEVER allow online situations to be a special case. So such a law would impact negatively the output of minors in other situations, again like the afore-mentioned movies.
The right to be private EXPECTS a person to act privately- not for a person to act like a jackass in the most public way possible, and then demand a 1984-style revision of recorded history. Facebook and Hollywood could be forced by Law NOT to allow the output of minors to be used in their medium in the first place, but where goes one goes the other. Or Facebook and newspapers. Or Facebook and TV. Or Facebook and the records created by a students time at school (like the yearbook). Should a minor (or adult referring to his/her years as a minor) have the right to have every yearbook they appeared in located and destroyed? That is the EXACT SAME legal logic that this new law creates, and that is why this law stands exactly ZERO chance of surviving its first test.
I thought FB was 18+ so minors shouldn't be on it anyways.
Be seeing you...
Since when has reality ever factored in when politicians try to legislate technological issues they don't understand and can't control?
As well intentioned as it is, between jurisdictional issues and technical issues ... you just can't hope to make this work.
Kind of like do-not-call lists and rules which require spam to identify itself as spam and give you a way to unsubscribe. People just ignore them too.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
What if my website has no legal presence in USA? How do you apply your laws to me? Extradition for a state law, for something not illegal in my country?
So now Slashdot is illegal in California?
Because no one can delete comments.
Can somebody here write a cgi script (soon to come in handy) to detect which IPs are from California and ask for confirmation that they are indeed at least 18 years old?
That's simple, but I'm against "one size fits all" CGI "scripts" (since they don't exist), and also my CGI is not scripted, it's compiled C code. It's quite an easy bit of logic: In addition to the age verification for 13 year olds, simply also ask their state of origin. If they check the box:
[_] I am a resident of California, or am connecting ultimately from California (regardless of proxy).
Then you simply add five years to the output age from your date checking.
That way, you can be sure they're old enough to use your services. What I've discovered about my website visitors is that those who are not my target demographic for games forums (18-35) are octogenarians with severe potty-mouths! Some said this method was suspect, so I allowed the users to enter the actual year of their birth instead of drop-down boxes. The results were Astounding! Those that are not 18-35 are now 80% likely to be Ancient Ones who've lived for over two thousand years! I'm not an ageist, so I don't discriminate against those timeless immortals by denying them access. XxHalo343xX celebrated her 2013th birthday the same day she signed up, far be it from me to spoil her special day.
Additionally, a far rarer but greatly more mind-blowing fact is that there are time travelers among us from as early as 2038! Now, I'm not racist or sexist and I see no reason to block the chrono-displaced due to a mere CGI program oversight, so we welcome these visitors as well. I'm sure the regulations for operating a time machine ensure far more responsibility than merely deciding to say stuff on the Internet... Despite our prying, they remain tight lipped about the future, revealing only that global warming will cause another ice age, and that the PRISM leaks were caused by one of their ilk: Snowden? It seems so obvious in retrospect! Where else would you live during an ice age? Besides, I'm of the opinion that rather than inconvenience the entire space-time continuum, parents could simply be actual parents and monitor their kids' time-traveling activities if they're concerned.
It light of my recent discoveries I plan to change the date-based age verifier with a single simple checkbox:
[_] I am at least 13 years old, Not an enemy of the (current) USA, am 18 years of age if hailing from present-day California, and want cookies.
Surely you don't need a "contest" to write code that verifies if a single boolean value is true?
if ( 0 > false && G_theCheckBox > -1 || true < 0 ) { /*...*/ }
Blam! You're welcome. Even handles both negative and positive values of 'true' and 'false'!
Such a terrible state that it has the 12th largest economy in the world. A fairly diversified economy.
Let's go piss in Jerry Brown's pool and watch him try to get it out.
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
Why restrict this law to just Cyberspace? Sure, criminal records can be expunged, but what of the rest of reality?! What if someone else REMEMBERS seeing the stuff and writes about what you did? See? We must also erase the memories of everyone alive. NO, that would be too draconian, far more ethical is to wash the brain which did the deeds.
Excellent! I've been waiting for inroads to install wireless thought conveyance devices in the humans, but you have to install the implants while the neuro-plasticity is high... under 13, yes! This could be it! The hive mind could be made real! Soon, my Legions of infant minds will dominate the world! I will fool the powers that be by giving them a means to control the erasing of single minds -- They may not know what to call themselves, but as a whole, They will never forget! Expect them! Ha ha-- wait... deja vu? That only happens when I re-remember plans I purposefully forgot....hmm.
The law on "long arm jurisdiction" is a real treat for people who like Fizzbin.
Well, I guess you showed me. I guess there is also zero possibility that on one of your friends copied the picture and so it might still be out there. Or that someone not your friend might have snagged it during one of the times that facebook has had a little 'oops' when they were changing their security policies yet-again to at least temporarily make things you wanted private, public.
This law is rock solid. Forget my misgivings. I'm sure it will work at least as well as the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. There's no more spam! Oh, wait...
Now, I understand that Google has every right to dump the Usenet archives down the memory hole, and to protect the Yalees as they enter into positions of trust and authority, but the problem is that prior to their purchase, there existed an informal social network among early Internet admins that tried to ensure that the entire archive was redundantly copied across multiple institutions. They tended to get together at the annual Hackers' Conference is Santa Rosa. That informal effort was abandoned apparently on the assumption that Google could be trusted.
Ah, well. At least the Yalees got into their positions of trust and authority.
Seastead this.
What this makes me wonder suddenly: will we see an increase in people applying to change their name in the future? That's after all the main search key used to look up a person's online behaviours. Provided companies don't get to ask for login names and so (which may be illegal anyway).
Don't believe me? Lets test it. I will delete a picture from facebook in the next ten minutes. Try and recover it.
Sure just give me it's old URL. I think you'll find it's still accessible. In fact I suspect all you need is the photo's unique facebook filename e.g. 11855_1269540174526_6600783_n.jpg
Login to facebook copy the URL of a random uploaded photo, replace the photo filename in the URL with the unique facebook filename of a deleted photo. Visit the resulting URL, voila deleted photo is accessible.
For many cloud services the static files aren't deleted - it's just too much trouble.
The open internet does not forget widely shared information. Closed, walled-garden systems such as facebook are capable of forgetting.
Don't believe me? Lets test it. I will delete a picture from facebook in the next ten minutes. Try and recover it.
Are you issuing that challenge to Facebook and/or NSA? Since Facebook is a closed system only a few people have any way of knowing what might happen when a user tries to "delete" something. (Even if this differs depending on user attributes...)
There are roughly 400 nations connected to the internet. Only a part of one of those comes up with a law. Granted, it's one of the "bigger" ones when it comes to internet presence and hosting services, but it's not a majority any way you look at it. If stuff these kids do happens to be stored by a non US company on a non US server, they have exactly no US constitutional, or CA state jurisdiction whatsoever.
Given the fact that a lot of companies are now very aware of the way the USA government treats data that is on USA servers, or hosted by companies that are located in the USA, chances are that in the near future, popular sites will choose not to work from the USA. FaceBook and such may now be USA based and I don't see them leave in a hurry, but who knows what will happen in four years from now? What sites and services will be popular and where will those be hosted? Apart from these things, mirrors of data are made everywhere and a stupid drunk kid that makes it as an internet meme, will be all over the internet in every country you can think of.
I really wouldn't worry about how constitutional it all is. I'd worry about the stupidity of the people that thought this would fly. After all, they are elected by the people of California and this is evidently the smartest thing they can come up with. California really needs to flush their politicians and find people with functioning brains to replace them. Now it's just some fad about how the internet should be enforced to protect your privacy, but what if it's about something like taxes, education, road building, city planning, criminal law and such? Those things matter to the people of California and I don't have a lot of hope for them if this is the level at which the decision makers operate.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Gee Whiz! This post is really just made to cancel out my unintentional bad moderation of a good post. This JavaScript interface sucks without a confirm feature.
Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
But if your posts are captured by the wayback machine, your little piece of the internet is forever.
Why so complicated? Simply have a site outside California and/or US. So long as they have no presence in California they have no need to implement an erase button.
Jerry Brown for president!
I will be Fuhrer one day
I will command all of you
Your kids will meditate in school!
Zen fascists will control you
100% natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face
Close your eyes, can't happen here
Big Bro' on white horse is near
The hippies won't come back you say
Mellow out or you will pay!
Now it is 1984
Knock-knock at your front door
It's the suede/denim secret police
They have come for your uncool niece
Come quietly to the camp
You'd look nice as a drawstring lamp
Don't you worry, it's only a shower
For your clothes here's a pretty flower.
DIE on organic poison gas
Serpent's egg's already hatched
You will croak, you little clown
When you mess with President Brown
Since they're generally lazy fucks with no idea of how to manage, they go looking through people's ancient online info no matter how old or irrelevant and then use that information to decide whether the person is able to be hired or not.
Since they'll do this shit, they have caused the case this law is designed to rectify: you don't get eternal and global bad reputation for shit you did in your childhood in meatspace, and someone investigating your past like that in meatspace would be stalking and at the very least creepy.
But on the internet, they insist "It's all public". Well so is what you said to that brat down the street when you got pissed off at them. But if someone goes trawling through every public appearance of you, you'd be rightly pissed off and worried.
Because the answer to your question is answered by the consequence of answering my question.
Did you not read "on request"?
If I were to ask you to delete stuff you held on me, since it is my personal information and copyright me and your license to HAVE that copy has been rescinded, you would be committing copyright infringement. So you ALREADY have to delete stuff that isn't yours.
This law is to stop a disclaimer "We have a perpetual and irrevocable right" being legal (which is something you don't use because you aren't running a business on copying informaiton such as Google, FB, Twitter, Linkedin, etc).
Nothing more.
That you think that it's somehow a "proof" of how silly this law is by pointing out it would be impossible to enforce 100.0000% effectively would also be "proof" that copyright laws are silly for the exact same reason.
You could have at least tried to post something useful, instead of requesting more JavaScript bloat. Here's the link to the actual bill: http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140SB568. I hope clintonthegeek@gmail.com gets lots of hate mail from people who don't want more JavaScript on slashdot.
When you've gone to prison you have your record cleaned of it for most misdemeanours and a few crimes within a few years (is it three in the USA?).
Why is it that the government has to delete information about you but if Facebook or whatever has to, it's a huge first ammendment problem? Is it because you hate government and love corporations?
Moreover, this is saying that if someone ASKS you to delete data, you have to.
If you're trespassing on a shopping mall and the guard asks you to leave, are you going to complain it's an infringement of your right to assembly? Or do you acknowledge that you're being asked to leave and that you can therefore ACTUALLY LEAVE?
This is no different.
If you ask someone to delete some stuff you gave them (or return a book you bought and lent to them) would you expect to get it back? Would you think that they were scum if they merely returned a copy, merely said they deleted it, or kept a copy of the book you gave them instead?
Yes?
Well, why is it if you asked a business to do so it is suddenly so bad?
Is it because in this case you think it's SOMEONE ELSE who would be doing that, not you, therefore it's not a right someone else should have, therefore the law is wrong?
On the subject of kiddie porn: "What's the point in setting up another legal framework and technical hurdles to overcome and whatnot, when the solution will be imperfect anyways" applies just as solidly.
KP is still out there.
If society wants to decide that KP shouldn't matter (since your assertion seems to be that if something will always happen, it must be wanted by society), then perhapse we all just need to, you know, stop caring about child porn.
I bet that even as we speak there are bots operating which are scraping every single publicly available comment and photo in anticipation of the day in 10 years when it might prove commercially valuable to sell that info to potential employers, newspapers, governments, or political parties.
You can't have sex with a minor even if they ask or beg or even climb into bed and start humping.
Why?
Because
a) Minors cannot enter into some agreements because they are considered too immature to know the consequences.
b) Some rights are inalienable
And in this case, please tell me where there's the right to keep stuff that isn't yours? If someone says to you "I no longer give you the right to have that", then you no longer have the right to it if it's copyright: the license can be rescinded and therfore only basic copyright remains.
That means you cannot create another copy.
Which since this is what this law is saying you cannot do, and anyone not you wanting it will need either to talk to you or you have to make a copy for them, would already be against the law.
So does this mean that I can, like, cause massive disruption, troll WP:ANI and be a total WP:DICK and then apply for adminship without creating a new account? Cool!
If Site B is asked, then they will have to delete that information.
How in hell is this supposed to be so difficult to work out? Is it motivated ignorance or just ignorance?
And thus, instead of teaching our children to act responsibly, we can just erase their ferk ups with a simple click potentially hiding people with low moral values.
I guarantee that you have done more than one thing incredibly stupid looking but harmless, that had it been captured in picture or video by your friends and shared online would make you much less employable. What's that? You don't remember doing anything like that? Yeah, that's the point.
I am not a crackpot.
The significant physical presense is not relevent. The real issue is whether or not a state court can successfuly enforce a fine or a tax collector can garnish. In the matter of sales taxes, if the assets and operations are out of reach, it is really hard for a state to collect money or even show that it is owed money.
As far as a scrub button goes, given the number of court orders that facebook/twitter/etc receive where the order is to preserve evidence, it is unlikely that such a scrub button would actually remove every trace.
Well kudos to Brown for being forward thinking at his age, but the truth is it doesn't matter, since the NSA siphons *EVERYTHING* the record exist somewhere, maybe not for your boss at McDonald's (or maybe) but it's there for anything paying a decent salary.
Have doubts? I refer you to this: http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/09/26/013254/nsa-director-wants-threat-data-sharing-with-private-sector
In addition all of the information collected goes to Israel unfiltered, can you imagine? How could that go wrong? Sharing everything with the most paranoid group of people on the planet, can you imagine the insider trading knowledge that could come out of that data?
The World is splitting into 2 distinct kinds of people, connected and unconnected.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Shouldn't we teach kids not to be idiots in the first place rather than letting them know they can screw up and just wipe it clean?
Nannyfornia... Glad I left.
I demand that Slashdot remove all posts I have ever made!
It's cute that the Assemblyman thinks he's getting that Djin back in the bottle. Sadly, he has failed entirely to understand how distributed information systems work.
Easy Online Role Playing Campaign Management
I'd like to propose what I believe to be a much more useful new law that will immediately benefit every single citizen of the United States.
We make IQ testing of all politicians mandatory and retroactive. All politicians not posessing an IQ of at least 120 will be compelled to leave office, immediately. Moving forward, all candidates for public office must meet or exceed the 120 IQ test before being considered qualified to run for public office of any kind.
Furthermore any policitian making policy on technology-related matters must pass standardized testing indicating they're qualified to even be discussing the technology in question.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Can somebody here write a cgi script (soon to come in handy) to detect which IPs are from California and ask for confirmation that they are indeed at least 18 years old?
That's simple, but I'm against "one size fits all" CGI "scripts" (since they don't exist), and also my CGI is not scripted, it's compiled C code. It's quite an easy bit of logic: In addition to the age verification for 13 year olds, simply also ask their state of origin. If they check the box: [_] I am a resident of California, or am connecting ultimately from California (regardless of proxy). Then you simply add five years to the output age from your date checking.
That way, you can be sure they're old enough to use your services. What I've discovered about my website visitors is that those who are not my target demographic for games forums (18-35) are octogenarians with severe potty-mouths! Some said this method was suspect, so I allowed the users to enter the actual year of their birth instead of drop-down boxes. The results were Astounding! Those that are not 18-35 are now 80% likely to be Ancient Ones who've lived for over two thousand years! I'm not an ageist, so I don't discriminate against those timeless immortals by denying them access. XxHalo343xX celebrated her 2013th birthday the same day she signed up, far be it from me to spoil her special day.
Additionally, a far rarer but greatly more mind-blowing fact is that there are time travelers among us from as early as 2038! Now, I'm not racist or sexist and I see no reason to block the chrono-displaced due to a mere CGI program oversight, so we welcome these visitors as well. I'm sure the regulations for operating a time machine ensure far more responsibility than merely deciding to say stuff on the Internet... Despite our prying, they remain tight lipped about the future, revealing only that global warming will cause another ice age, and that the PRISM leaks were caused by one of their ilk: Snowden? It seems so obvious in retrospect! Where else would you live during an ice age? Besides, I'm of the opinion that rather than inconvenience the entire space-time continuum, parents could simply be actual parents and monitor their kids' time-traveling activities if they're concerned.
It light of my recent discoveries I plan to change the date-based age verifier with a single simple checkbox: [_] I am at least 13 years old, Not an enemy of the (current) USA, am 18 years of age if hailing from present-day California, and want cookies.
Surely you don't need a "contest" to write code that verifies if a single boolean value is true?
if ( 0 > false && G_theCheckBox > -1 || true < 0 ) { /*...*/ }
Blam! You're welcome. Even handles both negative and positive values of 'true' and 'false'!
I typically put the largest age possible on those age pickers. If I'm not at least 80, I probably have no business looking at all the filthy things on the internet, and should get a job.
If they let minors do this, why not everyone?
The more appropriate question is why do people put inordinate weight into things that aren't readily verifiable or don't draw rational conclusions?
* Is the John Doe you Google is the same one whose resume you are looking at?
* Is the John Doe that wrote an offensive post you found is actually John Doe and not someone else?
* Do having idiot acquaintances now somehow reflects on you personally?
* Do having spiteful enemies online who airs your public laundry or worse, makes unfounded slander "appear" real reflect on you?
* Are you responsible for unintended use of software features? If someone tags you as part of an event / photo you never went to, does that really reflect on you?
The answer here is not a law, it's common sense. Stop believing you can put trust into something that has so many holes. Stop funding, purchasing or believing in companies that say they can profile you for a job, for something else based on lossy, incomplete, shitty data.
They're poised to be number 8 actually but that's not as impressive as you think it is. California has 12.1% of the US's population and they have something like 12.8% of the GDP.
I'm guess that the wealth created by the crazy real estate there might cover the higher than average difference. Finally, if you consider government debt (current and future) it doesn't look so good.
I live in a small town, which gives me a different perspective on this.
In small towns there are all kinds of (older) people in positions of "authority" who have wild wild stories of them in their teens and early twenties. Somehow small towns and communities have a mechanism that can deal with both the reality of "people do dumb stuff when young" and "we can actually remember that they did dumb stuff, and laugh about it."
Seems like the healthier and implementable change needs to be a culture shift back to those that small communities have, rather then attempt to implement erase buttons or do name changes when people are in their mid twenties in a way to attempt to hide the past.
I work in the insurance business, and we are legally required to keep certain information about customers and their dependents. As Jerry Brown has clearly stated, we will be required by California law to delete information that both Federal and California law requires us to keep. California lawmakers prove again that they do not understand logic, do not read laws, and don't give a damn about their constituents. They want to make sure we are all criminals
While perhaps good in concept, once something is put online there is a good chance somebody will save a copy, even if protections are put in place against saving. Enough Said
And does this cover information that has been gathered without our consent?
Considering that there are records of myself and people floating I know around on the internet still out there from 30 years ago I believe this is even possible when they actually achieve it. Entropy doesn't follow quite the same laws on the internet.
But is it even a good idea? Doesn't consequences provide a feedback correction? Doesn't this mean that you can do anything you please without fear of the consequences (or a false lack of fear in reality)?
Honestly this seems like law makers dictating the number of angels *allowed to* dance on the head of a pin. Fantasy piled upon ignorance.
Instead of trying to force the ability to undo all child-hood indiscretions on Google/Microsoft et al., why don't they simply make a refusal to hire on the basis of "unsuitable internet postings" as a minor an act of discrimination equivalent to the usual race, gender, religion/creed issues.
It could even fit under "age discrimination" which is unlawful in Australia.
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post