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'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?
Will someone in California please let Jerry Brown know that the internet never forgets?
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 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?
What about if the screen shots are printed in an art book? Must the book be burned on demand?
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
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).
If people post stuff on an online social media site, aren't they giving permission to publish it online?
Minor cannot legally enter into a contract. By the virtue of this, they cannot give legally binding consent to anything.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
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.
> If people post stuff on an online social media site, aren't they giving permission to publish it online?
Minors cannot enter into contracts. They cannot assign the right to redistribute the works to which they own copyright.
> Can they really revoke that permission later?
Yep. Because they cannot enter into contracts in the first place.
> Aren't there First Amendment issues here?
Nope, FB can say that so and so signed up and posted stuff... but they cant say what it was since the minors own the copyright and *cant enter into a contract* to allow FB to repost it.
> 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?
Nope, but whoever hosts it would have to respond to a DMCA request since you dont have license to display it.
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?
Minors can enter into contracts. There are just different rules.
http://nationalparalegal.edu/public_documents/courseware_asp_files/domesticRelations/FamilyRelationships/Contracts.asp
TL;DR: Yes, yes, no, probably not.
I am not a lawyer, I am certainly not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice. I just read a lot of laws, and have far too many lawyer friends for my own good...
aren't they giving permission to publish it online? Can they really revoke that permission later?
Per the conditions of your site's Terms of Service (you do have them, don't you?), the content your users give you may or may not be retained, retransmitted, adapted, or whatever else. By using the site, your users agree to that and grant you permission. Those terms govern what you can do with what you're given. For example, Slashdot's terms say that by commenting, you're giving them permission to publish your comments indefinitely, in pretty much any form they want. Under Slashdot's terms, that permission cannot be rescinded.
Minors are special. Despite the apparent common opinion here, they can enter into a contract... they just usually can't be forced to uphold their end of it. As far as copyright permission goes, this means you probably are already under a legal obligation to remove it if they want, because they can choose to void the contract giving you the permission... but to make you do that, the minor would have to realize the intricacies of contract law, realize that they still have exclusive copyright over their posting, and figure out how to contact you to request removal.
California's law requires an accessible way to remove (or request the removal of) a minor's own posting, that stops whatever's deleted from being published further. It's practically irrelevant, since most sites already have such a function... the problem is that it's hard to find, and people don't use it nearly as quickly as they should. The law only requires that such a function be "clear". Good luck with that.
Aren't there First Amendment issues here?
The First Amendment has no real part in this. The First Amendment is between you and the government, only. It does not come into play in contracts between you and a web site operator, unless the operator is a government entity itself. That might involve the First Amendment, but I doubt it will be a significant issue.
am I legally obligated to maintain that site forever
The law doesn't have any time limit built into it, so time limits will be up to the courts to decide, but the law also doesn't require you to actually erase the data. You're only forbidden from retransmitting it, so if your site has a self-service delete button, that's probably fine. If you take your whole site offline, nobody can get to it, so that's probably fine, too. Bringing it back later with all the old content intact is riskier. The exact type of site also matters, because the law only comes into effect if you know that minors are using it. A forum dedicated to the latest teen heartthrobs would obviously fall into that category, but a forum for discussing do-it-yourself RV repairs probably wouldn't.
I highly recommend reading the actual text of the law. The first part is prohibiting certain advertisements toward minors, but the erasure part starts at section 22581. As with all legal text, realize that it's written to cover as much as possible, so try to ignore the repetition and it becomes much easier to read.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
It's a double-edged sword. If they can't agree to Facebook's TOS, then they can't register an account at all.
Minors are not immune from the law just because they fraudulently entered into a contract (i.e. lied about their age).
True, but irrelevant for the matter of hand.
You see, in this case, it is not the minor than needs to do something to rollback the effects of a fradulent contract, it is the other side entering the contract. It is up to you (as a "service provider") to take any precautions against potential losses resulting from entering contracts with minors.
Here's another example: if you buy in good faith a stolen car, you can still incur the loss of the car when restituted to the lawfull owner even if you did not know the car you bought was stollen.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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!
Minors most certainly can enter into a contract. That contract is legally binding against the company but the minor has the ability to walk away from the contract with no penalty.
It is a significant difference because the minor can enforce the contract if they want. This is precisely why most business refuse to execute a contract with a minor, it puts the minor, or their guardian, in a preferential position in the contract allowing them to walk away penalty free when it's not in their favor or to enforce the contract when it is.
If minors couldn't execute contracts business wouldn't even bother saying they don't contract with minors because any contract signed would be invalid. The problem is that the minor decides if it's valid or not which means the business has to say explicitly that they won't contract with minors and require disclosure of age. This gives them an out to cancel the contract in the event the minor lies, or in other words it takes away the ability of the minor to enforce contracts that are unfairly in favor of the minor.
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
even if you did not know the car you bought was stollen.
It's hard to imagine that anyone with a working nose and taste buds wouldn't notice pretty soon that their car was stollen.
I am not a crackpot.