The poll is barebones because there are far too many arguments and considerations for a neat list of
options. I’ve just hit some of the high points.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s pre-internet where most of my worst mistakes were soon forgotten and there was
no option of immortalizing them forever in the electronic ether. Kids these days though, and some
‘challenged’ adults have information online that will haunt them for as long as someone cares to Google
them.
Judith Griggs of Cooks Source had her own thread on here a while back.
CEO Desmond Hague was forced to resign over his puppy kicking video.
Rebecca Martinson with her cunt punt email is a textbook example.
Nope. No links. Google knows all. None of these examples would have been widely remembered for more than a year in the time before the internets. The people would all have moved on and hopefully learned something, but new employers and new friends would probably have never known.
I’m going to quit before this turns into a wall of text and let some of you pick up with the first amendment right to publish anything factual and if/how the US could implement a right to be forgotten policy.
I support the general idea of letting things be forgotten. I still get spam e-mail because an idiot friend of mine once sent a mass e-mail to everyone in his address book saying (short version) “If you’ve changed your e-mail, please let me know.” (Yes, he really sent that :smack: ). One of those addresses was a listserv that posts the results to a web page, and that 15-year-old e-mail is STILL THERE, advertising my 15-year-old e-mail address to every spider out there.
But the problem I see is how we separate what should be forgotten from what’s really valuable. There are posts here on the SD that are 15 years old, but which provide excellent answers that are still relevant. I would hate to have a privacy law destroying the good and the bad in the name of privacy. Especially so when it’s a hypothetical privacy anyway - anyone could download and save a copy of anything right now. If you’re running for President in 2050, don’t count on a “right to be forgotten” to prevent your stupid frat boy tweets from being resurrected.
The idea of destroying good content in an imperfect attempt to protect idiots from themselves just doesn’t sit well with me. If we could protect the idiots without losing anything, that would be nice, but I just don’t see how it’s possible.
No, it’s a terrible idea. But I’m not losing too much sleep over it, since it would never pass muster with the First Amendment. I mean, what’s the justification–I deserve to be free from the consequences of my actions? I deserve to control what other people think of me?
How could it be implemented without being an intrusion on someone else’s rights?
You want to come in to my system and delete my data? Screw that!
Even if the data turns out to be untrue, and it would be libel if I transmitted it or published it, I still get to keep it in my personal archives. You can sue me if I’m stupid enough to put it on a web-site, but you don’t get to come in to my home and make me erase it from my backup disks.
(Some of my backups are ROM. You gonna smash my DVDs?)
I agree with dracoi on this, separating the chaff may be next to impossible.
Good people make mistakes all the time and I feel they should be shown a modicum of empathy. So you got drunk one night and posted nekkid pictures of yourself on the internet? Okay, really dumb move but I think after ten years you’ve suffered enough.
But still, I’m not sure where the line should be drawn with what deserves to be forgotten and what deserves to live on the internet in perpetuity.
I think the easier solution would be to change our culture. As parents, we really need to drive home the fact that what goes on the internet stays on the internet. There’s no take backs.
i should probably have included this in the OP, but i really didn’t have time to edit and revise everything before i posted. My apologies.
My understanding of how the process works.
Consider the internet to be a huge collection of filing cabinets with every website being a folder in a drawer sorted alphabetically. Anyone knows where to find any site, but won’t know the exact contents until they open the file/site. Google/Yahoo/Bing provide the service of scanning through all of the accessible folders and creating an index to the contents. So there’s a card somewhere with every reference to ‘Projammer’ on it. Presuming I once enthusiastically endorsed Miller Lite as the greatest beer ever and have now realized my error, i would send notice to Google/Yahoo/Bing to remove a list of sites that have a record of that.
The result would be that while those sites still had that information, they would never show up when anyone did a search on my name. Effectively making them invisible.
It is (currently) the individual’s responsibility to monitor the search engines and request that specific individual entries be removed.
But having thought about it a bit more it seems to me that if some item hasn’t been looked at for, oh just off the top of my head, 2 years it’s deleted. I’m speaking of the run of the mill internet stuff that seems to make up so much of the embarrassing though ultimately unimportant things out there.
Postings on, for instance, actual scientific, legal, legitimate research, etc stay forever.
By law? Compulsory? What if somebody opens “Bad Boy Searches” which specializes in searching for such things. When they receive a request to silence a particular search, they laugh in glee and put it on their top ten list.
The respectable guys, like Google and Yahoo, would black out sensitive sites – and would also black out “Bad Boy Searches,” but once I learn of the Bad Boys by word of mouth, how do you intend to block my access?
This all sounds too “Red China.” I don’t agree with Edward Snowden or Pirate Bay…but I don’t agree with this, either.
Even Google has limited the number of search results — there are 3,890,555 results, but for your viewing pleasure we will only show you the first 1000 — for many years. As the internet grows exponentially, millions of pages will drop out for good daily, but many more millions will be added daily until there is far more information possible that a million scholars reading non-stop could ever process.
And of course, Google searches include so much dross and duplication, they are becoming ever more limited in finding stuff. Still, we have to be grateful for much of what they do.
I’d personally have to think about it more, so I’ll also say “I don’t know”.
I understand the general idea behind privacy, but I can also see it getting abused by people who have a motivated interest to be forgotten, as opposed to those making legitimate mistakes.
I can see arguments for or against it, so it’s certainly a good question and something to think about.
This. Eventually people will get used to the idea of, “here’s a picture of Projammer shotgunning Miller light, but it’s from twenty years ago – he probably drinks better now” and discount old shames automatically, if they actually are “youthful indiscretions”.
Hell no. The whole idea is an affront to democracy. It’s a way to whitewash the past.
It’s not like simply saying something online is going to be found. You have to have put your real name in there, which everyone knows is stupid. The stuff we’re talking about removing are old news stories. The point is to limit the freedom of the press, so you can’t post on something that is relevant.
If something in the past is truly irrelevant, then people will stop caring. The fact that people care means it is still relevant. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but the solution is to change the culture, not have the government pop in and censor stuff that you aren’t supposed to care about.
And, yes, while Google is making the decisions, it’s still government censorship, as they are only doing it to comply with the law. Though the fact that such a “right” is being farmed off to a company lets me know how important they really think it is.
If there were extenuating circumstances (I was a teenager. I was drunk. etc) those can also be found and considered. But you have no right for what you have done and said to be forgotten.
I think some stuff that’s out there forever concerns me, like revenge porn or hacked data. You didn’t put that stuff out there, you didn’t get caught doing something wrong. You had your privacy violated and now your info can really never be taken back.
And distributing stolen stuff is already illegal. So I have no problem with Google being told to not index that sort of thing. That’s not what the “right to be forgotten” seems to be about. It’s about censoring legitimately public information because the person who it is about is ashamed of it.
I might argue that a person (or their parents/legal guardians) might have a right to have incriminating and/or prurient stuff from their juvenile days expunged from search engines, but that adults should just suck it up.
I mean, they do something similar in the court system, so why should something stupid someone did at 14 haunt them for the rest of their lives?
Then again, I think that Alessan is onto something- nobody will care, either because it’s so commonplace that it’s unremarkable, or because things like that are becoming rather ephemeral due to sheer quantity and frequency.
For example, who knows or cares what that fat kid with the light-saber dance is doing these days, and even if you did happen to have him come in for a job interview or something, would anyone really care that he did something goofy at 14 that made it onto the internet?