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EU Approves Strict New Privacy Rules
An anonymous reader writes: The EU just approved a new set of strict rules governing privacy and data protection, which include a right to be forgotten and to "clear and affirmative consent" for any processing of private data, as well as the right to know when data has been compromised. Culminating more than four years of work, "The reform will replace the current data protection directive, dating back to 1995 when the internet was still in its infancy," the EU said in a statement, "with a general regulation designed to give citizens more control over their own private information in a digitized world of smartphones, social media, internet banking and global transfers." If the rules are broken, the new EU privacy policy includes hefty fines of up to 4% of a firm's total worldwide annual turnover.
It is scary if you believe the right to free speech trumps all else. The question is whether that right is morally sustainable in a world where it can have everlasting repercussions on individuals in a way they can't control. Until recently we weren't really living in that world and these situations didn't exist except in a few contrived cases.
I checked a subset of the leaked list from BBC last year of articles they had to remove. From those samples I could see three categories:
1: victims. Eg sexual assault victims mentioned by name. It seems OK to me that they get their name removed so that in 20 years their granchildren don't get that search result.
2: a small category of criminals wanting to have their names removed. Which mostly seems OK to me as most countries have a limit to how long such information is publicly available. Eg. I think where I live burglaries are removed after 8 years
3: a wtf category. Two examples: One neo-nazi wanted his name removed from an article about a white power demonstration.. His names is pretty unique so I checked - he is still sputing such nonsense on facebook and twitter, so I don't see why he wanted it removed. The other example is a man in an article about how his one testicle suddenly grew and he immediately went to the doctor. It turned out it wasn't testicular cancer but a benign internal boil. I think it is a positive story about cancer awareness, but I can see why he may not want that to be the first result when someone searches his name.
So basically I agree with the right to be forgotten. When information is no longer in the public interest it should be possible to get the names removed.
such data privacy laws - see John Oliver's recent episode on Credit Reports in the US. That's what happenes if 1 in 20 humans is associated with wrong, outdated information by corporations.