It's really odd how all the people here who complain about government snooping and interfering in their lives, and how there is an absolute right to privacy, seem perfectly fine with abandoning even the possibility of future privacy because internet.
"We shouldn't be held accountable for our actions because reasons!!! Unfair!"
I assume you'd be happy for your juvenile crime record, bank and credit card statements and medical records to be available online because you've got nothing to hide? Right?
Once these idiotic teens who post embarrassing things on the net reach the age and station where they are the hiring managers they would be more forgiving of the applicants with embarrassing on line history.
It is only in the interregnum it is an issue.
That's not how the world works.
People in power are most certainly not going to give up all their privacy in the future.
It is easy to put others to work for "free" with the power of the legislator pen. Being more practical, good look in enforcing that all over the world, and to erase things from pages that the owners or companies no longer exist, and somewhat survive in dormant accounts. Or in bit torrents of defunct hosting sites... Or some photo turned viral, and in the inbox and backups of millions of people. Legislator truly do not understand the Internet. What next, besides blacklists the UK will implement image blacklist based on signatures of things you do not want people to see? What comes ahead them, middle-in-the-man wide country config to open the all-widespread SSL sites? Good luck.
The point is, if you can't find it on a google search, it's effectively not there. So as long as you can get it deleted from the obvious places (Facebook, Twitter) you're probably safe.
Of course, if you're an attractive girl with a nude selfie, it's going to be in a lot more different places than a drunken racist Facebook post.
But a law that is not 100% effective is (potentially) still better than no law at all.
you can pass a law banning something, but the law can't magically remove that something from the world. Murder is already illegal yet we still have murders.
Yes, but we have far fewer murders than if you were allowed to kill anyone you disliked with no recompense.
If you allowed people to delete their old Facebook messages (etc) there would be far fewer examples of embarrassing old information turning up.
Obviously, it wouldn't make it impossible to find stuff, because anything can be copied and saved somewhere else, but in the vast majority of cases your teenage Facebook post about how you want to make the sex with Justin Bieber won't be saved anywhere except on Facebook's servers.
Speak for yourself. Anyone pushed enough fights back. When those that prefer peace (not bullies) finally lash out it is with with much greater ferocity and lack of control.
Yes, but when you fight back against a bully, you are punished by the system as an example to others. When a bully constantly picks on you, the system looks the other way, sometimes actually chanting "zero tolerance policy" while they look the other way.
Not where I live (UK). If anything, schools are over-sensitive about the whole subject and count as "bullying" things which would just have been considered unpleasantness when I was younger, such as name calling.
However, it is better to err in this direction than ignore actual physical bullying, as used to be the case.
Bullying does not make kids violent: it makes them meek. Bullies are a small minority and, often, either tomorrow's Ruling Elite or its enforcers. The rest learns their place in the world: heads down, backs bowed.
No, victims of bullying often internalise the violence, and it shows itself in later life as relationship problems, addiction and so on.
Relatively little of what teens do is going to cause them problems in later life. It's what people do between about 18 and 25 that tends to screw them. Mainly because they're old enough to drink (without having to hide it) but not yet old enough to think (well).
Newsflash: reaching 26 does not magically remove the power of alcohol to make you do out-of-character things.
iRights also wants children to be protected from illegal or distressing pages
This is the part that is the real reason. They will try to impose a government mandated filter on the Internet. Again. Give up Your rights, we are doing it for Your protection. Think about the Children! (TM)
Preventing children from accessing certain parts of the internet is no different morally than preventing them from buying alcohol, driving a car or serving in the armed forces.
It does not mean that "the government" also has to ban adults from those parts of the internet, any more than it stops adults from drinking, driving or dying for their country.
The practical problems associated with filtering the internet for children are obvious, but that doesn't mean it's inherently wrong or stupid. Obviously, anyone under 18 here will disagree.
Little problem: when I was a teenager and blew up the school's mailbox, plug the toilets with paper and flooded the place up, or posted a bomb threat on the board, if I got caught I would be reprimanded, suspended and maybe pay for the damages. Now I would be on a no-hire, no-fly and no-rent list forever.
Juvenile criminal records aren't published in civilised countries. Why should they be available on the internet?
That's a bit neurotic. Who defines one's emotions if not the individual? I'm not embarrassed just because someone tells me to be.
Things like embarrassment and shame are social constructs. If you were alone on a desert island, you really wouldn't worry about how your hair or waistline looked.
Considering these posts are an example of your decision making abilities, judgment and character I'd say it's useful information for employers. A good predictor of future behaviors is past behaviors. Posts about skipping work, stealing from previous employers, and other past employment is useful info for potential employers. So are posts about willingness to take on extra responsibility, actions that have resulted in positive outcomes for employers and examples of good decision making skills.
If I found that someone had been posting examples of their good decision making skills on Facebook, I would assume they are a creepy arse-licker and/or a liar.
Only a transitional pain. Once everyone had immature dirt, no one person will stand out more than another.
That is such bullshit. There is, and always will be, a huge difference between someone who had a few ciders and threw up at a teenage party, and someone who raped and murdered his dog.
Or do you really think that with the effective abolition of privacy there will be no more crimes?
If, for whatever reasons, an employer wants to know, what sort of a person you are with your friends — and they all will, once the positions they are considering you for reach a certain height, they'll find out. With private investigators, if need be.
Apart from people requiring high level security vetting, I think this is simply being paranoid.
Admittedly I have not reached any sort of "height" but I've never worked anywhere where the employers cared a fig about the private lives of their employees (as long as they didn't become crack addicts and regularly not turn up for work or something).
The internet has not fundamentally changed human nature. Privacy of some kind will always be needed, otherwise you will have a generation of howling lunatics, and then the human race will die off.
A broom leaves lots of dirt around. A broom is also useless in households with allergic people. There is a reason the vacuum was invented in 1901. It's not a 21st century luxury item, by far.
And those people are allergic mostly because everywhere is cleaned too well. A bit of dirt is good for you.
Central heating is a f*cking retarded idea - heating the whole house when the simple fact is an individual can only use one room at a time. Radiators in the halls - WTF is that for?
You are assuming that everybody lives on their own, but even then it's still useful to have a central boiler on a timer and simply adjust the individual room radiators down to zero if you're not using a room.
Slashdot Mirror
It's really odd how all the people here who complain about government snooping and interfering in their lives, and how there is an absolute right to privacy, seem perfectly fine with abandoning even the possibility of future privacy because internet.
"We shouldn't be held accountable for our actions because reasons!!! Unfair!"
I assume you'd be happy for your juvenile crime record, bank and credit card statements and medical records to be available online because you've got nothing to hide? Right?
Once these idiotic teens who post embarrassing things on the net reach the age and station where they are the hiring managers they would be more forgiving of the applicants with embarrassing on line history.
It is only in the interregnum it is an issue.
That's not how the world works.
People in power are most certainly not going to give up all their privacy in the future.
... we really want be able to delete every stupid thing that happened before we were 30. Especially those political posts.
Yeah, it's really embarrassing when people find out you voted for George W Bush and weren't receiving treatment for a mental illness at the time..
It is easy to put others to work for "free" with the power of the legislator pen. Being more practical, good look in enforcing that all over the world, and to erase things from pages that the owners or companies no longer exist, and somewhat survive in dormant accounts. Or in bit torrents of defunct hosting sites... Or some photo turned viral, and in the inbox and backups of millions of people. Legislator truly do not understand the Internet. What next, besides blacklists the UK will implement image blacklist based on signatures of things you do not want people to see? What comes ahead them, middle-in-the-man wide country config to open the all-widespread SSL sites? Good luck.
The point is, if you can't find it on a google search, it's effectively not there. So as long as you can get it deleted from the obvious places (Facebook, Twitter) you're probably safe.
Of course, if you're an attractive girl with a nude selfie, it's going to be in a lot more different places than a drunken racist Facebook post.
But a law that is not 100% effective is (potentially) still better than no law at all.
you can pass a law banning something, but the law can't magically remove that something from the world. Murder is already illegal yet we still have murders.
Yes, but we have far fewer murders than if you were allowed to kill anyone you disliked with no recompense.
If you allowed people to delete their old Facebook messages (etc) there would be far fewer examples of embarrassing old information turning up.
Obviously, it wouldn't make it impossible to find stuff, because anything can be copied and saved somewhere else, but in the vast majority of cases your teenage Facebook post about how you want to make the sex with Justin Bieber won't be saved anywhere except on Facebook's servers.
Speak for yourself. Anyone pushed enough fights back. When those that prefer peace (not bullies) finally lash out it is with with much greater ferocity and lack of control.
Yes, but when you fight back against a bully, you are punished by the system as an example to others. When a bully constantly picks on you, the system looks the other way, sometimes actually chanting "zero tolerance policy" while they look the other way.
Not where I live (UK). If anything, schools are over-sensitive about the whole subject and count as "bullying" things which would just have been considered unpleasantness when I was younger, such as name calling.
However, it is better to err in this direction than ignore actual physical bullying, as used to be the case.
Bullying does not make kids violent: it makes them meek. Bullies are a small minority and, often, either tomorrow's Ruling Elite or its enforcers. The rest learns their place in the world: heads down, backs bowed.
No, victims of bullying often internalise the violence, and it shows itself in later life as relationship problems, addiction and so on.
Relatively little of what teens do is going to cause them problems in later life. It's what people do between about 18 and 25 that tends to screw them. Mainly because they're old enough to drink (without having to hide it) but not yet old enough to think (well).
Newsflash: reaching 26 does not magically remove the power of alcohol to make you do out-of-character things.
iRights also wants children to be protected from illegal or distressing pages
This is the part that is the real reason. They will try to impose a government mandated filter on the Internet. Again. Give up Your rights, we are doing it for Your protection. Think about the Children! (TM)
Preventing children from accessing certain parts of the internet is no different morally than preventing them from buying alcohol, driving a car or serving in the armed forces.
It does not mean that "the government" also has to ban adults from those parts of the internet, any more than it stops adults from drinking, driving or dying for their country.
The practical problems associated with filtering the internet for children are obvious, but that doesn't mean it's inherently wrong or stupid. Obviously, anyone under 18 here will disagree.
Little problem: when I was a teenager and blew up the school's mailbox, plug the toilets with paper and flooded the place up, or posted a bomb threat on the board, if I got caught I would be reprimanded, suspended and maybe pay for the damages. Now I would be on a no-hire, no-fly and no-rent list forever.
Juvenile criminal records aren't published in civilised countries. Why should they be available on the internet?
Yet I don't think I ever wrote something of significant embarrassing consequence to me now.
You probably didn't post using your real name. The problem with Facebook is the lack of deniability.
The individual does not define embarrassment.
That's a bit neurotic. Who defines one's emotions if not the individual? I'm not embarrassed just because someone tells me to be.
Things like embarrassment and shame are social constructs. If you were alone on a desert island, you really wouldn't worry about how your hair or waistline looked.
Considering these posts are an example of your decision making abilities, judgment and character I'd say it's useful information for employers. A good predictor of future behaviors is past behaviors. Posts about skipping work, stealing from previous employers, and other past employment is useful info for potential employers. So are posts about willingness to take on extra responsibility, actions that have resulted in positive outcomes for employers and examples of good decision making skills.
If I found that someone had been posting examples of their good decision making skills on Facebook, I would assume they are a creepy arse-licker and/or a liar.
Only a transitional pain. Once everyone had immature dirt, no one person will stand out more than another.
That is such bullshit. There is, and always will be, a huge difference between someone who had a few ciders and threw up at a teenage party, and someone who raped and murdered his dog.
Or do you really think that with the effective abolition of privacy there will be no more crimes?
If, for whatever reasons, an employer wants to know, what sort of a person you are with your friends — and they all will, once the positions they are considering you for reach a certain height, they'll find out. With private investigators, if need be.
Apart from people requiring high level security vetting, I think this is simply being paranoid.
Admittedly I have not reached any sort of "height" but I've never worked anywhere where the employers cared a fig about the private lives of their employees (as long as they didn't become crack addicts and regularly not turn up for work or something).
The internet has not fundamentally changed human nature. Privacy of some kind will always be needed, otherwise you will have a generation of howling lunatics, and then the human race will die off.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Christmas cracker quotes are not the sum of human wisdom.
Minimum wage cashiers already have high end smartphones.
Oh well, it's back to dangling your Ferrari key ring in front of them then.
A broom leaves lots of dirt around. A broom is also useless in households with allergic people. There is a reason the vacuum was invented in 1901. It's not a 21st century luxury item, by far.
And those people are allergic mostly because everywhere is cleaned too well. A bit of dirt is good for you.
British toilets are crap too, using much more water than necessary
We overcome this with our native cunning and shove a couple of bricks in the cistern.
lacking all but the most basic features
What other features do you need in a toilet apart from a bowl, water and a way of flushing it? Air conditioning? Leather upholstery? Cruise control?
Don't forget the low flow toilet you have to flush three times.
You are so full of shit...
Central heating is a f*cking retarded idea - heating the whole house when the simple fact is an individual can only use one room at a time. Radiators in the halls - WTF is that for?
You are assuming that everybody lives on their own, but even then it's still useful to have a central boiler on a timer and simply adjust the individual room radiators down to zero if you're not using a room.
work out its commercial kinks
So would that be a straight BDSM dungeon, or are we going the whole way with specialists in urolagnia, acrotomophilia and menophilia?
No way I'm looking those last two up at work.
Flame bait? You lot have no sense of humour at all.
Slashdot has unwritten laws when it comes to humour.
I transgressed the unwritten law once, and the mods nailed my head to the floor.