We should just pass a new law called "The right to scrub your public image", which allows you to control how the public perceives you or your company online. If someone says something unflattering about you, you can force them to delete it.
That's basically what all these European "privacy" laws are amounting to.
The EU's privacy laws are much broader than the "right to be forgotten" (which do not apply to public figures anyway, as Google has shown in the past).
When a disgruntled ex publishes a page saying you have a bunch of STDs[1], or a company crawls your social media info and starts using it to market some product without your conscent, and these are the first things your cutomers (and/or friends) see when they google you... you're happy takedown requests are a thing and there are laws to protect you.
How does a legal action involving a public business have anything to do with privacy? This isn't someone trying to take down embarrassing vacation photos from a FB page, this is a business trying to hide their misdeeds that were significant enough to be reported on in the first place.
I've always kind of thought a better system would be one that lets you assume a new identity. This is a war that laws won't win. Data will get out, and once it's out, it's near impossible to get back. And people do make mistakes that shouldn't haunt them for the rest of their lives. A better system is one that lets you disassociate with that data.
This is a very good point. This is more of a distant idea that I've had, rather than a fully fledged out one, so I'm sure there are plenty of pitfalls that I haven't thought of.
Couldn't identity fraud be better handled if we had a system in place for it though? "Oh, my identity was stolen. Time to get a new one!"
A restaurant could do exactly that. If the negative publicity for something they did only a couple of years ago is too much for them, they could change their name in a heartbeat.
Instead, what they want is to selectively groom what the internet "remembers" about them. Remove the bad, keep the good.
There is a local upmarket curry house near me that is quite good and has been around for nearly 5 years winning plenty of local awards for food and service, but on TripAdvisor about 1/5 of the reviews refer to a steak house that was at the same address before this curry house opened. They did not get good reviews and didn't pass health inspections. Even though the curry house changed the owner, name, management, waiting staff, chefs, food sourcing, decor, and menu the reviews are still tied to the address.
Fortunately their newer reviews are so glowing that they still get over 4 stars average and their front window is covered in plaques of their awards and their most recent 5/5 health inspection (in the UK its quite common for restaurants to flaunt their 4/5 or 5/5 health report on their front door as advertising - there is no legal requirement to show it except in the city of Hull where now almost every restaurant now has at least 4/5 rating as a consequence given the death sentence that a something below 3/5 represents).
It'd be pretty hard to get the new identity without revealing that you are in fact changing from identity X to identity Y. Because if that tidbit gets out, an algorithm can easily reassociate all the data of identity X with identity Y.
Didn't consider that. However I would suspect anyone that anyone searching for them would rely on 10 seconds on the internet and they would stomp around to other sources.
"Winston Smith works as a clerk in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents so they match the constantly changing current party line. This involves revising newspaper articles and doctoring photographs—mostly to remove "unpersons," people who have fallen foul of the party. Because of his proximity to the mechanics of rewriting history, Winston Smith nurses doubts about the Party and its monopoly on truth."
Many are also persistently pushing to change what is 'acceptable' vocabulary to change how people think, as Orwell described in the Newspeak appendix.[1]
In 1984 they weren't trying to adjust the vocabulary to be more inclusive and make every feel more comfortable about open discourse in a fully optional way.
They wanted to erase words that could denigrate the party, change the meanings of words that could be used against the party or add new words that could only say good thing about the party.
Things libel laws that stop free speech, how many politicians wiggle through the truth or how people who try to mandate political correct speech like extreme SJWs seem like the problems indicated here.
My only beef is when the law comes down hard on language, as per the Italian courts (or minitrue). People arguing about acceptable language (or, essentially, what is ethical and what isn't) is not a bad thing.
So basically, the world is much more peachy and less vile to read about in Italy after 2.5 years. Any economist or business analyst studying the market in Italy now has even less perfect information. Their studies will be based on an alternate, unrealistically positive data and lead to worse outcomes.
This appears to be an overzealous extension of the right to be forgotten.
The right to be forgotten is a debate worth having as there are individuals that may have historical public records that may be false or no longer in the public interest to be so widely available.
E.g: Man falsely but not maliciously accused of rape or murder in press reports and later being exonerated in court without accompanying press report detailing the exoneration, and now finds it very difficult to get a job or start new relationships. Or a business man who filled for bankruptcy 30 years ago who finds search engines return news reports of his bankruptcy as the first and only return on himself and thus makes finding business partners or credit near impossible.
These seem like people who need protection from a age when its far far too easy to get access to the historical public record, but removing a factually true report that is just two years old seems a bit extreme; without knowing the full context.
What the right to be forgotten should be is some kind of mechanism of adding friction back to the process of getting certain kinds of information when it is in the public interest that this information shouldn't be so easy to get at. It should not be about removing public records altogether. How you do that without inadvertently harming the public interest or allowing abuse seems like a pretty hard or impossible problem.
> removing a factually true report that is just two years old seems a bit extreme
It might also be the case that old articles (say, of 25+ years) should be put back into digital archives. In such a long time the persons involved are no longer affected, but the public interest might exist, for historical archival reasons. So there would be an "invisibility interval" from year 2.5 to year 25.
I think the "right to be forgotten" should be replaced with the "right to not have old information considered", which is a much better compromise between the public interest and privacy. In your example, a person false accused of a crime wouldn't have the record expunged, but the record would be heavily tagged with notices that it was a false accusation, and it would be illegal to use that information in considering him for a job and it would be a severe breach of social norms to use that information turn him down for a relationship.
That's interesting and would help a bit, but its probably not going to help the man falsely accused of murder very much.
In the relationship case its basically pretty much impossible to legislate norms of behaviour in any reasonable period of time (it would be multi-generational if possible at all). For the job applications we all know hiring managers discriminate even when its against the law due to either their explicit or implicit biases. They can find very reasonable and legal explanations for rejection that they probably even sincerely believe themselves.
I'm taking the long view of things, so I'm less interested in one particular man falsely accused of murder than falsely accused people in general. Multiple generations is indeed a reasonable period of time. Sure, social norms might change slowly, but that slow change is often the only way to fix the problem without breaking something else to an unacceptable extent.
That being said, there is role for legislation--for example, there is a lot of research into implicit and explicit biases in human minds, and there could be more public funding on how to reverse these biases, and implement them as a standard part of the curriculum in public schools.
Considering old information, whether it's relevant or not, is something human psychology does automatically and inexorably. So when you talk about a "right to not have old information considered", you might as well speak of your right to jump off a cliff and soar through the air instead of hitting the ground. These European laws are doing their best to account for the unfair tendencies of human nature, while your counter-proposal isn't really an improvement over the situation we had before.
> "... but the record would be heavily tagged with notices that it was a false accusation ..."
There's been some literature lately about people trusting their doctors/lawyers/etc. more when that person reveals that they have a conflict of interest. A similar backfire effect could well occur here.
> " ... it would be a severe breach of social norms to use that information turn him down for a relationship ..."
Oh good. Approximately when can we expect the social norms to change? And are you accounting for the fact that it may happen never?
/Noticing/ old information is automatic, but assigning valence to it and having it influence a decision to a significant extent isn't. I might not be able to notice that a person is left-handed, but that doesn't mean I will favor or disfavor them because of it.
> There's been some literature lately about people trusting their doctors/lawyers/etc. more when that person reveals that they have a conflict of interest. A similar backfire effect could well occur here.
A file stating that an accusation was false isn't admitting doubts or uncertainty, though, and it's that admission that leads people to trust advisors more when they reveal conflicts of interest. That file is flatly and loudly stating that the accusation was false.
> Oh good. Approximately when can we expect the social norms to change? And are you accounting for the fact that it may happen never?
Oh good. Approximately when can we expect law to change? And are you accounting for the fact that it may happen never?
Totally agree - there should be some friction. I'd say this should put more pressure on search engines, but not on the content archives, so that potentially damaging information could be found only by precise search of the events in the specific period and location regarding the person of interest, not just by name. However, direct search in archive must remain unrestricted.
Probably, there should be a legal mechanism similar to US FoIA regarding the personal information collected by non-governmental entities, in accordance to which it could be possible to request the dossier collected by a company on you and use it as a protection from discrimination (as in your first example).
It could be something as simple as you need to pay a fee for a search query in order to get hold of filtered results, but with no indication that there will be any extra results to find.
eg: Search 'John Smith Liverpool UK Murder' and you get nothing interesting and no indication that anything has been filtered. However there is an option that is always available no matter the query to buy this search query for say $1-$50. If you pay up you get the filtered results, which may happen to show that John Smith was once accused of murder many years ago. If you are an investigator, researcher, or journalist then there should be a flat single fee or free access to filtered results.
>E.g: Man falsely but not maliciously accused of rape or murder in press reports and later being exonerated in court without accompanying press report detailing the exoneration, and now finds it very difficult to get a job or start new relationships. Or a business man who filled for bankruptcy 30 years ago who finds search engines return news reports of his bankruptcy as the first and only return on himself and thus makes finding business partners or credit near impossible.
I'm not trying to blame the victims here, but if you're in these unenviable situations, wouldn't it be possible to avoid these problems by changing your name? If Google searches for "John Doe" (obviously, a more unique name than that) return press reports about you being tried for rape, changing your name to "Jim Smith" is going to eliminate that problem handily. A potential dating partner would have to do a significant background search on you to find out you changed your name, and then look up that one.
I mean, it sucks that you'd have to go to the trouble of dealing with the courts to change your name, and also have to lose your name which you might have an emotional attachment to for understandable reasons, but for infrequent cases like this, this seems like a much easier thing to do than to try to get data warehouses around the world to stop reporting past stuff about you in response to queries.
Hilarious, coming from a country where you can't dig a hole without meticulous verification that you aren't going to damage unbeknownst Ancient Greek/Roman/Renaissance artifacts.
They should consider going through and cleaning out the libraries every three years since those tend to accumulate a great deal of historical information.
Old newspapers don't (generally) disappear completely, they just get scarcer and harder to access. I would expect major newspapers to have complete microfilm/microfiche archives of their entire 20th century runs. I would think major libraries would, too. So getting access to a particular newspaper for an arbitrary date generally involves, worst case, a special trip to the offices of the newspaper or a library in the same city as it.
What would be needed to do something comparable for online papers? Keep them online, but de-list them from search engines? Take them offline, but keep them in offline storage at newspaper offices and libraries?
I suffer from the "privilege" of uniqueness. I'm the only person in the world with my first/last combination. There are 12 living people with my last name, none of us share a first name. A few pages into a google search of me returns high school newspaper clippings from 15-20 years ago. An employer doing a background check on me gets my high jump results from 1999 within 5 minutes. Who's privileged, the 100 people who share the same name, myself, or the person trying to find information about one of those 101 people?
I would hope you wouldn't need a golden key to try to track down information, but it would be nice to have my history equally (in)accessible as someone else's.
Current historians understand the past by, among many other things, reading old preserved documents including old news. Future historians are going to be real irritated if we get in the habit of purging "expired" news. Well maybe not, maybe if we purge it completely enough we won't even have historians in the future :-)
Counter View. I don't expect this to sit well with HN. Is everything to be a sentence for life? I, and the law in many places, don't think that's fair.
Whilst I don't think 2.5 yrs is the right balance, I do think much reporting should expire to an archive. If a restaurant did something wrong 10 years ago, but clean since (that's in the context of the UK with regular, visible, standards checks), who cares about the old offence? If they're still doing wrong they would probably have other, non-expired, offences in the last 10 years.
Here in Europe we have the concept of rehabilitation of offenders. Whilst the UK has a poor reputation for reform (we go for a more US lock 'em up approach), and Gove leaving Justice looks to have put paid to reform for another decade, we have the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act since early 70s. After a varying period past record is considered spent - 2 yrs prison or more is never spent, the rest expire after a period depending on sentence. Fines expire after 7 years I think.
So the stupidity your child gets into at 18, whilst out drinking, doesn't pop up in searches when 30 and applying for jobs. Legally you don't need to mention it again apart from some exceptions like applying to be a judge or joining police.
The internet is starting to make a mockery of that reasonable intent. The law thinks you can become clean, you have been legally for 15 years, but your potential employer finds a BBC page from 1998, and decides to not extend the offer. That's not reasonable either.
Perhaps news should archive in step with laws such as that. Trivia and public order offences expire quickly, 10 year sentences never. Somehow make it a bit less available behind a paywall, or some credentials. I'm talking of intent not practicality. I realise a mirror elsewhere would render that void.
In the 80s and 90s it was only the exceptional who got background searches. Manually by searching through archives. Reporters would dig into some suspect politician only when it was something major. That's also the wrong balance and meant many things that should have been known in the public interest didn't come to light simply because it was difficult to check.
We definitely need to find a balance between a record of accounts and what accounts can be acted upon.
The difficulty here is the mismatch between what people are normally capable of maintaining in their consciousness either individually or local community and what we get from information systems who can record minutiae indefinitely.
Before when records were not accessible across jurisdictions for example, there are now reconstructed records of someone being chased out of town for some misdeed and goes and invents a new life for themselves. This is not possible in today's world, unless you're willing to move to third tier countries.
Now, there is good and bad in that. But there is also good and bad in everyone's history pertinent or not being available to everyone curious enough to execute a search.
People are not machines and I believe should have the right to have some kinds of information about them remain unavailable to other regular people for whom that information has no legal consequence to them.
If we want something to be forgotten in X years we are better off blocking it being published. For example, I would argue that zero pre-conviction 'news' should be published about a defendant. It's directly counter to the idea of innocent until proven guilty.
ED: One option might be to automatically use a different name. If I stop using "Retric" all my HN posts are divorced from my name. Abstractly, hearing about a 9/11 survivor by name adds nothing vs some made up name. A random picture of someone drinking will be forgotten if it's not linked to your name. Companies often change names to get away from bad publicity.
My wife has the issue that she was the victim of a crime, and the news reported her in detail as the perp was underage and they couldn't publish his name.
The result, my wife has had work colleagues ask about it, and one implied that she may have done something wrong to invite trouble.
The victims and innocent in an incident can be affected by reportage too.
We're European, and she tried to exercise the Right to be Forgotten, but Google haven't responded and it remains there when her name is searched. Her career may be being impacted, by having been a victim of a crime. This occurred 5 years ago, and is still mentioned from time to time.
This makes me so angry. Your poor wife! We have laws to protect the identity of victims in many cases in the USA for this very reason.
We really need to draw a firm line about this "blame the victim" behavior. I haven't experienced it in any grave crime, but I had my bicycle stolen and instantly had to deal with a litany of people saying I shouldn't have locked it with a cable lock (I wasn't even using a cable lock), I shouldn't have put it where thieves could see it, etc. We all know it's 1000x worse for other crimes, like sex crimes.
Victim blaming is comforting because it saves the blamers from the knowledge that life deals random blows and it could happen to anyone, including them. They'd much rather think that they are smart and safe, and that the victim did something wrong.
So why are we looking at Google to scrub the record of factual information, and not looking at shitty employers who think that this level of research on their employees or potential hires is appropriate?
I think "The right to be forgotten" is a ridiculous "right". You don't have the right to dictate what other people know and talk about. Perhaps make laws that prohibit employers from using news stories older than 5 years old against you during the hiring process, with exceptions for certain things. For example, a bank should be able to refuse to hire someone who was convicted of financial fraud 10 years ago, but perhaps shouldn't be able to refuse to hire someone because they got a DUI 10 years ago...
The difference would be if someone intentionally keeps republishing dirt about you with the intent to harass, in which case libel/slander torts could be used to address non-factual information, and harassment torts could be used address irrelevant/dated factual information.
Scrubbing the internet of factual information to protect people's feelings is a very concerning form of censorship. It's obviously abusable and actively being abused, so companies like Google aren't even going to try to comply.
It's a tough thing in some cases. When I was in college, it was very normal to print the names of students in the police blotter (e.g. "John Smith, sophomore in engineering, was booked on charges of public nudity on Friday"). The internet existed but Googling things was not a mainstream habit. Nowadays, I think many college blotters anonymize the names, and that feels right to me. We have a right to know what's on campus, but fucking up as a drunk college student shouldn't affect your post-college life.
But an expiry date, if I'm reading this right, of a few years? Many trial processes don't finish up by then. In my journalism class, I force the students to go on Lexis Nexis and find 10-20 articles in the past decade or older that have been written about whatever they're writing about. Primarily to make them realize that whatever they think is new is not new, and to challenge them to pursue a story that looks at the big picture.
Making it harder to find stories in the past only adds to the dumbification and self-absorption of society.
The legal expiry timer starts at date of sentence.
A John Smith might end up locally famous for a while, regret those Tequila shots leading to nude in the town square, damaging a statue, and a £500 fine. Some years after the magistrate passes sentence it ceases to exist and he's not obliged to tell. If you get three years for something more serious it never expires. If you're John Smith you're in luck having a common name, but if you have a rare name...
In former years the reporting is in some dusty library or newspaper microfiche archive forgotten until he runs for Prime Minister perhaps.
There's lots of cases where an innocent accused, or sometimes even the victim, can suffer significant reputational damage from a widely reported case. The adversarial system, and occasional trials by media, seems to encourage that.
I don't think having older, expired, reports of more minor offences moved to archive that charges to search, or requires you to have journalism ID or something leads to dumbification of anything. It shouldn't cease to exist, just become far less trivial to get at. More an attempt to restore balance, regardless of practicality.
A bad debt, even a lot of bad debt, expires in 5 or 6 years from your credit report, but a minor offence 20 years ago doesn't?
For some practical context: I'm the only person in the world with my name. If you google me, page 1 is my professional details, page 2 starts showing ARCHIVED forum posts from a decade ago, page 3 has high school newspaper clippings from 15 years ago. In 5 minutes, you've run through my life. I'm thankful I never had any legal trouble.
It's much more difficult problem, because reputation damage happens not only as a result of court decision. A politician could say very dumb and offensive things when he was young - should it really affect his political career?
Hasn't hurt Trump and he says "very dumb and offensive things" now.
People generally don't care what you did in the ancient past. The only time it matters is when it is a big deal. Like that Republican in the primaries who fabricated an incident involving a knife. Without a public record we wouldn't know.
We need an uncensored public record so we can verify what people say and guide our future decisions.
I think people are downvoting me because they don't like the idea that Trump and Hillary are neck and neck in the polls.
I am fairly certain his saying "dumb and offensive things" is a huge part of his success. Where I am Trump has about 60% of the voters. When I talk to people they say they like the idea of the wall or that they do want muslims banned. These are each dumb and offensive and as far as I can tell the reason people in my area support Trump.
Whether or not you support Trump, if you understand what he is saying, they are objectively (or at least not much room for subjectivity) dumb and offensive.
"X happened" is a historical fact. You cannot change the fact. You can wish it were not a fact because then the world would be a more fair just and beautiful place. But your wishes don't matter, the fact still stands. Like millions of dinosaurs wishing the asteroid hadn't hit because it would make their world better, it doesn't matter, the fact still stands.
The information won't actually disappear. That is just not how information and markets work.
The information will still be kept by legitimate archivists. If it can be kept by them it can be kept by governments. It can be kept by blackmailers It can be kept by accidents in old backups. There will be someone selling this information.
This just hides the issue while creating a massive tool for future censorship and new black market.
Any reasonable person will look back 10 years and see that the person posting stupid stuff on Facebook while drunk has cleaned up their act. Forcing the information to be hidden doesn't help, it just hides that you might be dealing with unreasonable people even if you would rather not.
These are non-issues, broadly. The hypothetical restaurant that had bad press / reviews / etc. long ago will be critically evaluated by the public, who are not incapable of coming to the conclusion you suggest, that 10 years of no (or good) news outweighs the old blot on their record. If employers of the future use data mining to expose every trivial misstep of candidates for hire and then turn away all those who aren't perfect, they won't have any employees. In fact, it reminds more than a little of the difference between having a credit history, however bad, vs. having no credit history at all - typically lenders are much more wary of no history, rather than a bad one (within reason).
Spoken like someone who hasn't been turned away from a job due to something trivial showing up on a background check from over 10 years ago (this has happened to me, ordinance violation from a college town where my tenants destroyed the front yard when I was just starting to learn what being a landlord meant in my early 20s), as well as being denied credit due to a black mark 6 years ago (also has happened, even though the financial situation that caused the black mark has been resolved long ago; have to wait the full 7.5 years, and even then, you must apply to have the old negative credit line record removed).
Its easy to say "these are non-issues" when they're not happening to you.
Now I'm that guy who has scrubbed his Twitter feed, locked down his Facebook privacy settings, does everything possible not to leak personal information online, removes every item I can from my credit reports (good, bad, addresses, employers, whatever; as long as its old enough to be removed, I have it removed), and has paid to have citations as trivial as traffic tickets expunged from my record from years back.
I will do everything I can to leave no trace, as you never know what will be used against you in the future.
You use a similar handle on another very popular discussion website, and you have recently spoken of doing something across state lines which is likely illegal.
We have never had the chance to genetically deal with or lived in societies where people don't forget.
And worse, now can in seconds find about your worst. Do you think in 50 years of life you won't make a mistake (Then 30+ years of people knowing about it)
Your small business can be your entire life.
We might not be currently solving this issue properly. But it is still an issue we are going to have to deal with.
Complete freedom of communication harms some individuals, but the harms of "right to be forgotten" laws are far greater. No matter how they're tweaked, they must by their very nature punish people for:
1. …conveying public information…
2. …that is true…
3. …to someone who requested it.
Any law of that sort is inimical to free expression and ripe for abuse.
Overall I have some different views about this, and I'm not sure how to react to some of the cognitive dissonance I notice.
On one hand people claim that privacy is paramount, on the other hand they seem to not question what and how becomes a public record, how it is kept and how easily it is accessible.
Overall the tone here seems to be that the "right to know" is as important or even more important than privacy which is a huge cognitive dissonance in my book.
What's worse is that this seem to be a case where privilege prevails, if you are wealthy you can expunge your record the old fashion way - PR and control the news cycle.
If you are not then you are screwed because the 15min of fame are the only thing that the "internet" as a collective seem to care about.
I don't know what happened at the restaurant nor do I know if it was important at the time or if it is still now but relevance can be assigned an expiration date.
The problem is that you can't "update" the internet, a newspaper isn't going to report that everything is nominal and that nothing happens, news by definition are a record of an abnormal event.
I can understand not wanting to have the top result of your restaurant being "4 puppies and a cat found dead, drugs and sign of sexual activity were discovered at the scene" being the top result in Google simply because there has been no "worse" news for the past 2-3 years about the same place.
For the most part I can agree with the concept of having to reevaluate the worth of information at a given time and evaluate does it deem the information "newsworthy" and within the public's right to know, anything else is a matter of historic record and gossip and it can still have effect on you today since no one is looking at the date.
What happens if some one else buys the restaurant? If the case was due to the misconduct of the previous owner should they be forced to change the name? Should the original owner be forced to rebrand just because something shitty happened at the place outside of their control that has no relevance to the performance of the restaurant or the safety of it's patrons today?
Not everything is an important record, saying "you don't know what is important to history" is silly, we can all agree that a war, a presidential election, a huge economic event, a scientific discovery etc. are more important to history than a random local crime or some other misconduct, we can also agree that not having everything available for immediate public access does not equate rewriting history.
Overall the 1984 comments are a bit silly, and are a false equivalency no one is claiming that historic public record should be rewritten, no one is claiming that some information should always be accessible, but claiming that information should be accessible regardless of how much damage vs benefit it does at any given time, and stripping all agency from the individual to control how information is published does not bode well for privacy.
Maybe Facebook should make everything accessible including things you delete, and if you say well Facebook isn't a newspaper then that argument holds less water every day since Facebook is now aggregating and generating news, and if you claim that you as an individual are not a public figure well how famous do you need to be to count as one? own a business? be a mayor? a celebrity? a government official? rich enough?
This is an argument that we desperately need to have and is is a very good sign that this case has been brought up (not necessarily the outcome) because we do need new rules.
Being able to effectively "dox" anyone at a push of a button is going to be a big problem, and if you can about privacy and the real definition of it not the current confusion of privacy and secrecy; which is the agency you have to control what and whom you share information with you should care about this, as much if not mor...
Instead of being delusional about people forgetting our past mistakes, why dont we become a more open society that is less judgemental about past mistakes but conscious in this reality.
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[ 8.4 ms ] story [ 33.6 ms ] threadThat's basically what all these European "privacy" laws are amounting to.
When a disgruntled ex publishes a page saying you have a bunch of STDs[1], or a company crawls your social media info and starts using it to market some product without your conscent, and these are the first things your cutomers (and/or friends) see when they google you... you're happy takedown requests are a thing and there are laws to protect you.
Couldn't identity fraud be better handled if we had a system in place for it though? "Oh, my identity was stolen. Time to get a new one!"
Instead, what they want is to selectively groom what the internet "remembers" about them. Remove the bad, keep the good.
Fortunately their newer reviews are so glowing that they still get over 4 stars average and their front window is covered in plaques of their awards and their most recent 5/5 health inspection (in the UK its quite common for restaurants to flaunt their 4/5 or 5/5 health report on their front door as advertising - there is no legal requirement to show it except in the city of Hull where now almost every restaurant now has at least 4/5 rating as a consequence given the death sentence that a something below 3/5 represents).
... wait aren't online archives identical to hardcopy archives.... Silly me, they are totally different.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Smith
Many are also persistently pushing to change what is 'acceptable' vocabulary to change how people think, as Orwell described in the Newspeak appendix.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#The_Newsp...
They wanted to erase words that could denigrate the party, change the meanings of words that could be used against the party or add new words that could only say good thing about the party.
Things libel laws that stop free speech, how many politicians wiggle through the truth or how people who try to mandate political correct speech like extreme SJWs seem like the problems indicated here.
The right to be forgotten is a debate worth having as there are individuals that may have historical public records that may be false or no longer in the public interest to be so widely available.
E.g: Man falsely but not maliciously accused of rape or murder in press reports and later being exonerated in court without accompanying press report detailing the exoneration, and now finds it very difficult to get a job or start new relationships. Or a business man who filled for bankruptcy 30 years ago who finds search engines return news reports of his bankruptcy as the first and only return on himself and thus makes finding business partners or credit near impossible.
These seem like people who need protection from a age when its far far too easy to get access to the historical public record, but removing a factually true report that is just two years old seems a bit extreme; without knowing the full context.
What the right to be forgotten should be is some kind of mechanism of adding friction back to the process of getting certain kinds of information when it is in the public interest that this information shouldn't be so easy to get at. It should not be about removing public records altogether. How you do that without inadvertently harming the public interest or allowing abuse seems like a pretty hard or impossible problem.
It might also be the case that old articles (say, of 25+ years) should be put back into digital archives. In such a long time the persons involved are no longer affected, but the public interest might exist, for historical archival reasons. So there would be an "invisibility interval" from year 2.5 to year 25.
In the relationship case its basically pretty much impossible to legislate norms of behaviour in any reasonable period of time (it would be multi-generational if possible at all). For the job applications we all know hiring managers discriminate even when its against the law due to either their explicit or implicit biases. They can find very reasonable and legal explanations for rejection that they probably even sincerely believe themselves.
That being said, there is role for legislation--for example, there is a lot of research into implicit and explicit biases in human minds, and there could be more public funding on how to reverse these biases, and implement them as a standard part of the curriculum in public schools.
> "... but the record would be heavily tagged with notices that it was a false accusation ..."
There's been some literature lately about people trusting their doctors/lawyers/etc. more when that person reveals that they have a conflict of interest. A similar backfire effect could well occur here.
> " ... it would be a severe breach of social norms to use that information turn him down for a relationship ..."
Oh good. Approximately when can we expect the social norms to change? And are you accounting for the fact that it may happen never?
> There's been some literature lately about people trusting their doctors/lawyers/etc. more when that person reveals that they have a conflict of interest. A similar backfire effect could well occur here.
A file stating that an accusation was false isn't admitting doubts or uncertainty, though, and it's that admission that leads people to trust advisors more when they reveal conflicts of interest. That file is flatly and loudly stating that the accusation was false.
> Oh good. Approximately when can we expect the social norms to change? And are you accounting for the fact that it may happen never?
Oh good. Approximately when can we expect law to change? And are you accounting for the fact that it may happen never?
Probably, there should be a legal mechanism similar to US FoIA regarding the personal information collected by non-governmental entities, in accordance to which it could be possible to request the dossier collected by a company on you and use it as a protection from discrimination (as in your first example).
eg: Search 'John Smith Liverpool UK Murder' and you get nothing interesting and no indication that anything has been filtered. However there is an option that is always available no matter the query to buy this search query for say $1-$50. If you pay up you get the filtered results, which may happen to show that John Smith was once accused of murder many years ago. If you are an investigator, researcher, or journalist then there should be a flat single fee or free access to filtered results.
I'm not trying to blame the victims here, but if you're in these unenviable situations, wouldn't it be possible to avoid these problems by changing your name? If Google searches for "John Doe" (obviously, a more unique name than that) return press reports about you being tried for rape, changing your name to "Jim Smith" is going to eliminate that problem handily. A potential dating partner would have to do a significant background search on you to find out you changed your name, and then look up that one.
I mean, it sucks that you'd have to go to the trouble of dealing with the courts to change your name, and also have to lose your name which you might have an emotional attachment to for understandable reasons, but for infrequent cases like this, this seems like a much easier thing to do than to try to get data warehouses around the world to stop reporting past stuff about you in response to queries.
What would be needed to do something comparable for online papers? Keep them online, but de-list them from search engines? Take them offline, but keep them in offline storage at newspaper offices and libraries?
I would hope you wouldn't need a golden key to try to track down information, but it would be nice to have my history equally (in)accessible as someone else's.
Whilst I don't think 2.5 yrs is the right balance, I do think much reporting should expire to an archive. If a restaurant did something wrong 10 years ago, but clean since (that's in the context of the UK with regular, visible, standards checks), who cares about the old offence? If they're still doing wrong they would probably have other, non-expired, offences in the last 10 years.
Here in Europe we have the concept of rehabilitation of offenders. Whilst the UK has a poor reputation for reform (we go for a more US lock 'em up approach), and Gove leaving Justice looks to have put paid to reform for another decade, we have the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act since early 70s. After a varying period past record is considered spent - 2 yrs prison or more is never spent, the rest expire after a period depending on sentence. Fines expire after 7 years I think.
So the stupidity your child gets into at 18, whilst out drinking, doesn't pop up in searches when 30 and applying for jobs. Legally you don't need to mention it again apart from some exceptions like applying to be a judge or joining police.
The internet is starting to make a mockery of that reasonable intent. The law thinks you can become clean, you have been legally for 15 years, but your potential employer finds a BBC page from 1998, and decides to not extend the offer. That's not reasonable either.
Perhaps news should archive in step with laws such as that. Trivia and public order offences expire quickly, 10 year sentences never. Somehow make it a bit less available behind a paywall, or some credentials. I'm talking of intent not practicality. I realise a mirror elsewhere would render that void.
In the 80s and 90s it was only the exceptional who got background searches. Manually by searching through archives. Reporters would dig into some suspect politician only when it was something major. That's also the wrong balance and meant many things that should have been known in the public interest didn't come to light simply because it was difficult to check.
The difficulty here is the mismatch between what people are normally capable of maintaining in their consciousness either individually or local community and what we get from information systems who can record minutiae indefinitely.
Before when records were not accessible across jurisdictions for example, there are now reconstructed records of someone being chased out of town for some misdeed and goes and invents a new life for themselves. This is not possible in today's world, unless you're willing to move to third tier countries.
Now, there is good and bad in that. But there is also good and bad in everyone's history pertinent or not being available to everyone curious enough to execute a search.
People are not machines and I believe should have the right to have some kinds of information about them remain unavailable to other regular people for whom that information has no legal consequence to them.
ED: One option might be to automatically use a different name. If I stop using "Retric" all my HN posts are divorced from my name. Abstractly, hearing about a 9/11 survivor by name adds nothing vs some made up name. A random picture of someone drinking will be forgotten if it's not linked to your name. Companies often change names to get away from bad publicity.
The result, my wife has had work colleagues ask about it, and one implied that she may have done something wrong to invite trouble.
The victims and innocent in an incident can be affected by reportage too.
We're European, and she tried to exercise the Right to be Forgotten, but Google haven't responded and it remains there when her name is searched. Her career may be being impacted, by having been a victim of a crime. This occurred 5 years ago, and is still mentioned from time to time.
We really need to draw a firm line about this "blame the victim" behavior. I haven't experienced it in any grave crime, but I had my bicycle stolen and instantly had to deal with a litany of people saying I shouldn't have locked it with a cable lock (I wasn't even using a cable lock), I shouldn't have put it where thieves could see it, etc. We all know it's 1000x worse for other crimes, like sex crimes.
Victim blaming is comforting because it saves the blamers from the knowledge that life deals random blows and it could happen to anyone, including them. They'd much rather think that they are smart and safe, and that the victim did something wrong.
I think "The right to be forgotten" is a ridiculous "right". You don't have the right to dictate what other people know and talk about. Perhaps make laws that prohibit employers from using news stories older than 5 years old against you during the hiring process, with exceptions for certain things. For example, a bank should be able to refuse to hire someone who was convicted of financial fraud 10 years ago, but perhaps shouldn't be able to refuse to hire someone because they got a DUI 10 years ago...
The difference would be if someone intentionally keeps republishing dirt about you with the intent to harass, in which case libel/slander torts could be used to address non-factual information, and harassment torts could be used address irrelevant/dated factual information.
Scrubbing the internet of factual information to protect people's feelings is a very concerning form of censorship. It's obviously abusable and actively being abused, so companies like Google aren't even going to try to comply.
Libel and slander would like to have a word with your opinion.
> Scrubbing the internet of factual information to protect people's feelings is a very concerning form of censorship.
No, its not. People have rights.
Europe likes to try and bully Google; it makes them feel better about their distinct lack of web tech
But an expiry date, if I'm reading this right, of a few years? Many trial processes don't finish up by then. In my journalism class, I force the students to go on Lexis Nexis and find 10-20 articles in the past decade or older that have been written about whatever they're writing about. Primarily to make them realize that whatever they think is new is not new, and to challenge them to pursue a story that looks at the big picture.
Making it harder to find stories in the past only adds to the dumbification and self-absorption of society.
In this particular case the trial that was being reported on has not yet finished.
A John Smith might end up locally famous for a while, regret those Tequila shots leading to nude in the town square, damaging a statue, and a £500 fine. Some years after the magistrate passes sentence it ceases to exist and he's not obliged to tell. If you get three years for something more serious it never expires. If you're John Smith you're in luck having a common name, but if you have a rare name...
In former years the reporting is in some dusty library or newspaper microfiche archive forgotten until he runs for Prime Minister perhaps.
There's lots of cases where an innocent accused, or sometimes even the victim, can suffer significant reputational damage from a widely reported case. The adversarial system, and occasional trials by media, seems to encourage that.
I don't think having older, expired, reports of more minor offences moved to archive that charges to search, or requires you to have journalism ID or something leads to dumbification of anything. It shouldn't cease to exist, just become far less trivial to get at. More an attempt to restore balance, regardless of practicality.
A bad debt, even a lot of bad debt, expires in 5 or 6 years from your credit report, but a minor offence 20 years ago doesn't?
For some practical context: I'm the only person in the world with my name. If you google me, page 1 is my professional details, page 2 starts showing ARCHIVED forum posts from a decade ago, page 3 has high school newspaper clippings from 15 years ago. In 5 minutes, you've run through my life. I'm thankful I never had any legal trouble.
People generally don't care what you did in the ancient past. The only time it matters is when it is a big deal. Like that Republican in the primaries who fabricated an incident involving a knife. Without a public record we wouldn't know.
We need an uncensored public record so we can verify what people say and guide our future decisions.
I am fairly certain his saying "dumb and offensive things" is a huge part of his success. Where I am Trump has about 60% of the voters. When I talk to people they say they like the idea of the wall or that they do want muslims banned. These are each dumb and offensive and as far as I can tell the reason people in my area support Trump.
Whether or not you support Trump, if you understand what he is saying, they are objectively (or at least not much room for subjectivity) dumb and offensive.
That's what they get for not investing more into a space program.
Our turn may be next.
The information will still be kept by legitimate archivists. If it can be kept by them it can be kept by governments. It can be kept by blackmailers It can be kept by accidents in old backups. There will be someone selling this information.
This just hides the issue while creating a massive tool for future censorship and new black market.
Any reasonable person will look back 10 years and see that the person posting stupid stuff on Facebook while drunk has cleaned up their act. Forcing the information to be hidden doesn't help, it just hides that you might be dealing with unreasonable people even if you would rather not.
Its easy to say "these are non-issues" when they're not happening to you.
Now I'm that guy who has scrubbed his Twitter feed, locked down his Facebook privacy settings, does everything possible not to leak personal information online, removes every item I can from my credit reports (good, bad, addresses, employers, whatever; as long as its old enough to be removed, I have it removed), and has paid to have citations as trivial as traffic tickets expunged from my record from years back.
I will do everything I can to leave no trace, as you never know what will be used against you in the future.
We have never had the chance to genetically deal with or lived in societies where people don't forget.
And worse, now can in seconds find about your worst. Do you think in 50 years of life you won't make a mistake (Then 30+ years of people knowing about it)
Your small business can be your entire life.
We might not be currently solving this issue properly. But it is still an issue we are going to have to deal with.
1. …conveying public information…
2. …that is true…
3. …to someone who requested it.
Any law of that sort is inimical to free expression and ripe for abuse.
Overall I have some different views about this, and I'm not sure how to react to some of the cognitive dissonance I notice.
On one hand people claim that privacy is paramount, on the other hand they seem to not question what and how becomes a public record, how it is kept and how easily it is accessible.
Overall the tone here seems to be that the "right to know" is as important or even more important than privacy which is a huge cognitive dissonance in my book.
What's worse is that this seem to be a case where privilege prevails, if you are wealthy you can expunge your record the old fashion way - PR and control the news cycle.
If you are not then you are screwed because the 15min of fame are the only thing that the "internet" as a collective seem to care about.
I don't know what happened at the restaurant nor do I know if it was important at the time or if it is still now but relevance can be assigned an expiration date.
The problem is that you can't "update" the internet, a newspaper isn't going to report that everything is nominal and that nothing happens, news by definition are a record of an abnormal event.
I can understand not wanting to have the top result of your restaurant being "4 puppies and a cat found dead, drugs and sign of sexual activity were discovered at the scene" being the top result in Google simply because there has been no "worse" news for the past 2-3 years about the same place.
For the most part I can agree with the concept of having to reevaluate the worth of information at a given time and evaluate does it deem the information "newsworthy" and within the public's right to know, anything else is a matter of historic record and gossip and it can still have effect on you today since no one is looking at the date.
What happens if some one else buys the restaurant? If the case was due to the misconduct of the previous owner should they be forced to change the name? Should the original owner be forced to rebrand just because something shitty happened at the place outside of their control that has no relevance to the performance of the restaurant or the safety of it's patrons today?
Not everything is an important record, saying "you don't know what is important to history" is silly, we can all agree that a war, a presidential election, a huge economic event, a scientific discovery etc. are more important to history than a random local crime or some other misconduct, we can also agree that not having everything available for immediate public access does not equate rewriting history.
Overall the 1984 comments are a bit silly, and are a false equivalency no one is claiming that historic public record should be rewritten, no one is claiming that some information should always be accessible, but claiming that information should be accessible regardless of how much damage vs benefit it does at any given time, and stripping all agency from the individual to control how information is published does not bode well for privacy.
Maybe Facebook should make everything accessible including things you delete, and if you say well Facebook isn't a newspaper then that argument holds less water every day since Facebook is now aggregating and generating news, and if you claim that you as an individual are not a public figure well how famous do you need to be to count as one? own a business? be a mayor? a celebrity? a government official? rich enough?
This is an argument that we desperately need to have and is is a very good sign that this case has been brought up (not necessarily the outcome) because we do need new rules. Being able to effectively "dox" anyone at a push of a button is going to be a big problem, and if you can about privacy and the real definition of it not the current confusion of privacy and secrecy; which is the agency you have to control what and whom you share information with you should care about this, as much if not mor...