“What if you could essentially fake your death online – completely delete any trace of yourself from Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, Usenet, and anywhere else there might be some record of your existence. Such a concept is largely impossible today, especially given complications from services like Facebook combined with caches and mirrors of practically everything ever e-created. The European Commission wants to change that.”
Why do governments keep trying to regulate the Internet?
In this case I can answer : some guys have really screwed up on the internet around here, enough to attract the attention of legal powers.
As an example, I rode the history of a girl who discovered through her co-workers that unknown people were spreading violent false accusations against her, in extremely harsh terms, on various sites. They were one of the first links in Google, meaning that a potential employer looking to know more would find that quickly. That someone can anonymously hurt your professional life in a non-reversible fashion is indeed something unacceptable.
As much as I don’t like Google or Facebook practices I have to agree with OSbunny. It’s just another regulation imposed on content or service providers. At some point it will become illegal to run websites like OSnews without dozens of licenses and deep pockets, it’s just a matter of time.
As for your example – no regulations will ever erase these data from the web. That’s just an inherent to information itself. Law may forbid distributing these data but can’t physically eliminate it – just wait for “black market” search engines selling their services to anyone (most of us?) who wants to get uncensored information. It’s simply yet another attempt at using law for changing the way the nature works.
The solution to this problem is not to publish any private information on the web and if someone does it for you (either a bad guy or a careless service provider) – to sue him/it. Irreversibility of such a damage should warrant a fair compensation. Just imagine how would it affect Facebook-wannabes if Facebook had to shell out $1k (let’s be cheap this time) to all people affected by their recent leak.
Why can’t existing slander laws work in the case you cite?
The power of government to force people against their will to delete data on the Internet can be used for evil. They come in with noble sounding goals, of course. “This is to protect you. We are here to help.” – words of tyrants throughout history. Clever people word these sorts of laws in ways that can be exploited in unforeseen ways.
Governments like to rewrite history and silence criticism and what better framework is there when a government doesn’t have authority to force people to delete publicly accessible data than with laws like this?
I second jjmckay and ndrw: the best protection for that is to not put anything out there in the first place.
People want to be famous, or have an insane number of friends and then they rave about their “right to be forgotten”? If the web could speak, who can guarantee that it wouldn’t rave about its “right to remember”?
I’ve managed to never see more of Facebook, Twitter and othe rhip social networking sites that there may be, than their ‘f’ and ‘t’ icons. How smart of me! But I also understand that not everybody is the privacy freak that I am; I’m using secondary addresses and striving to reach a point where nobody (that isn’t family or friends) knows my main email address.
This is not about government controlling your data, this is about you controlling your data. And I think this is a very good thing.
In Portugal, you can make a request to any organization or company so that any of your personal data that they hold be changed or deleted.
This doesn’t mean that those organizations or companies honor that request, but then it’s a legal issue.
That seems false to me. Once people and businesses can be forced (by police action if necessary) to delete data that is in their own storage systems then their data is now under collectivized ownership. That starts the slippery slope of ‘what the authorities will allow you to store.’
The RIAA has found a populist route into deleting USENET and other infringing data. It’s easy, just use terminology that fulfills people’s own selfish and fearful tendencies.
FTA:
Carl Marx would agree.
Slander laws should cover this sort of thing. This political action is waaaay overkill.
People willingly submitted their personal information and Facebook apparently followed the law and people are upset? This nanny-state law is trying to protect people from their own stupid/foolish actions.
People say they want freedom until they stupidly submit their personal information onto Internet websites and then they cry foul when that information spreads on the global network. Absolutely absurd. What happened to common sense?
edit: Outlawing foolish behavior creates more problems than it solves. It services the ruling elite who get to create even more laws later on to prop up the failing ones. It’s a cycle of misery and failure. This can all be avoided by applying the universal rule: don’t do foolish things and don’t expect the government to save you from foolish actions without first enslaving you.
Edited 2010-11-05 11:00 UTC
You’re reading it wrong. It’s your data. It’s the data that you provided to the organization or company. The decision to take it back is your decision. Not RIAA’s, not the authorities. This is not about copyright infringement, this is about your personal data.
This has absolutely nothing to do with slander. This is not about using your data abusively, this is about storing personal information/data.
Why shouldn’t people have the right to take back information that they own?
I agree with you on this. People should know what they’re getting into. And most of the times they do, but choose to ignore it. It’s absurd. It also has nothing to do with the case at hand.
You know nothing about Karl Marx.
This is why I love this site. I thought I knew my outlook on this issue. Reading through comments I’m going back and forth;it’s like a tennis game in my head
A thought: so the net moved from the good old western era (90’s) into the mob era (present)
Oh yeah! Terrorists will just LOVE this. Wipe themselves from any database they want to, and creat new identities. Great!
Criminals and child molesters will also find this to be useful.
Edited 2010-11-06 17:01 UTC