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...
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?
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.
By the virtue of having jurisdiction over the land on which the server farms are located and the land on which most of these companies have their HQ's.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
If so, I'll be 17 forever
Now bullies under 18 (or claiming to be) can scrub all of their dirty dealings before their victims can collect evidence.
Translation: "Oh, you want us to move out of state? We can do that. 'bye."
Relax.... you've been erased.
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.
The problem is that they have to get in line behind all the other people leaving. That includes two Northern counties.
"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).
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.
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.
Yeah, sure. Facebook and Google are going to leave California over the right to keep incriminating information on minors. Do you REALLY think that will happen?
The culture will eventually obviate the need for such laws, but its going to be a rough transition. As a wiser man than me(Dan Savage) pointed out, admitting to smoking pot used to be a career killer, but the culture changed and it became more and more acceptable. Bill Clinton was the first to admit to using it at all, but he "didn't inhale". 16 years later Obama was asked the same question and said he did inhale, that was the entire point. Eventually posting youthful hijinks online will be the norm, just like trying pot.
However, as with any cultural shift, the "pioneers" are often the ones who get shafted. I feel bad for the generation born between roughly 1990 and 2005, they are young enough that their youthful digressions are often posted online, but not old enough to avoid the blowback from the older generation who refuses to admit that they once did stupid shit....However those born after 2005 or so will grow up in a world where sexting and posting stupid stuff you did while drunk is the accepted norm.
Monstar L
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.
To sum it up another way, our prisons are full of people who think and act as you do. Dishonest people always get caught.
Jack of all trades,master of none
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'!
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...
1. Some reading comprehension would help. Unless you actually mean pointing out deficiencies in stupid schemes should get people sent to prison?
2. If you believe "dishonest people always get caught", you have a severe reality perception problem.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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 if site B replies "Vete a la chingada" because they are not in California, or even the US, then what?
If it suits their business needs, then yes, it could happen. There is a million reasons to stay in California and a million reasons to leave. If the do leave, they can claim any one of the other reasons for leaving.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
And does this cover information that has been gathered without our consent?
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
As Californians see it:
http://www.delphine-ephemera.com/display/ShowImage?imageUrl=/storage/USA-Map-Infographic.jpeg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1301444910595