I like this approach:
All 90 people wanted information deleted from the Web.
Among them was a victim of domestic violence who discovered that her address could easily be found through Google. Another, well into middle age now, thought it was unfair that a few computer key strokes could unearth an account of her arrest in her college days.
They might not have received much of a hearing in the United States, where Google is based. But here, as elsewhere in Europe, an idea has taken hold —individuals should have a “right to be forgotten” on the Web.
Spain’s government is now championing this cause. It has ordered Google to stop indexing information about 90 citizens who filed formal complaints with its Data Protection Agency. The case is now in court and being watched closely across Europe for how it might affect the control citizens will have over information they posted, or which was posted about them, on the Web.
Whatever the ruling in the Spanish case, the European Union is also expected to weigh in with new “right to be forgotten” regulations this fall. Viviane Reding, the European Union’s justice commissioner, has offered few details of what she has in mind. But she has made clear she is determined to give privacy watchdogs greater power.
“I cannot accept that individuals have no say over their data once it has been launched into cyberspace,” she said last month. She said she had heard the argument that more control was impossible, and that Europeans should “get over it.”
But, Ms. Reding said, “I don’t agree.”
Contrast that to the policies we are pursuing here.
Culture of Truth
Sen. McConnell will name Senators Jon Kyl, Pat Toomey and Rob Portman to the SuperCongress.
I for one welcome out nutjob overlords.
someguy
So what if Andy Sullivan sued you, to force you to remove all mentions of him from your blog, and archived comments?
LittlePig
Man, it must be great to live in a sane country. As an American I wouldn’t know.
Good to see you survived the night, John (although I thought Tunch looked immensely pleased with himself, wet fur and all).
elliott.gorelick
I don’t like this approach. I do not believe access to this option will be equally available to all nor that it will be equally applied. Although I understand the idea, the cure is likely to be worse than the disease. It’s why we, in this country, allow “hate speech” that would get you arrested in Europe.
Culture of Truth
There’s a difference between requiring an ISP to keep your information for a year, in case law enforcement wants it, and deleting what is accessible to anyone on the Internet; but there may be clash of cultures with regard to expectations about what information ought to be public, or controlled by corps or governments.
Ash Can
I have mixed feelings about this. I’m very much in favor of private citizens having the right and the ability to have information about them deleted, especially in cases where it could put them in danger. On the other hand, I don’t want to see the door opened to nefarious politicians, corporate execs, and other miscreants obscuring information that could inform voters, tip off investigators, or otherwise result in justice being served. It’s a complicated and tricky issue, and it’ll be interesting to see how it’s handled in Europe.
Brachiator
Good luck with that.
This is nonsensical. But it gets to the heart of some of the problems over intellectual property rights. The key problem is that once anything is on the Web, it can be copied. And so even if you demand, dictate, require that it be deleted, and even if you hold Internet service providers “responsible,” someone somewhere will be able to restore that copy to the InterTubes.
Really? This is stupid. The policies that the Europeans are pursuing (with Americans not far behind) would impose draconian punishments on people who violate the rules, banning them from the Internet for life. And ultimately all to benefit major corporations who want to extend copyright and trademark into infinity and beyond.
The supposed “right to be forgotten” is clashing with the other deeply held (and deeply flawed) principle that “information wants to be free.”
I find this to be a fascinating debate. But I don’t see a chance in hell that some law will provide an definitive answer. If you don’t believe me, ask your buddy who downloaded an episode of “Torchwood” because he wouldn’t wait for it to be transmitted according to the timetable of the corporate suits.
PhoenixRising
Thanks for your support, Mr. [common first name] [common last name].
I just discovered I’m in a category: People with unique real names. This site lists a number of kinds of people who are affected by the lack of any privacy online–I’m quite familiar with my own problem (there isn’t any other of me, thanks to my unusual first name plus my dad being the only son of a only son of an only son) and it was interesting to learn about some of the others.
The question that needs a bit more discussion: Why do we want the network to be the place where everything you’ve ever said can be collated with your address, SSN and W-2s? I get why marketers and the companies that sell them data want that.
me
That’s a huge can of worms that I would be very wary of opening.
cmorenc
Before getting too caught up in the attractiveness of the idea of recognizing some sort of “right of removal” of information to protect privacy interests….
Better consider the many ways this concept can easily be perverted to frustrate the ability to access information in which the public should have legitimate interest…such as where issues of health, safety, or financial malfeasance are involved. This is definitely a two-edged sword you’re playing with here, and it’s going to be immensely more difficult to successfully sheath the unwanted edge than you might think.
Jonas
I had heard that it’s impossible to travel faster than the speed of light.
But I don’t agree.
Therefore it’s possible?!?!?!?!?!?!
PhoenixRising
This is why the key solution is to give individuals, not corporations, the right to control what information the search engines display about us. Since they’re all copying off Google, it would be simple enough for Google to create an interface allowing people to have anything they want removed from results. Would it always work? No, but at the moment Google is conspiring with Spokeo and the SEO companies to profit from a problem they refuse to address.
Ron
I’m not sure I agree with this. Public information (like an arrest) should not be removable.
Martin
@Culture of Truth:
Well, I hope DOD wasn’t counting on that money, because McConnell pretty much guaranteed there will be no deal.
And OT: The problem Spain is trying to solve is, quite literally, impossible to solve. You might as well mandate that people have a right to have their fingerprints removed from everywhere they’ve been. It simply can’t be done, even if we wish it could.
someguy
@Brachiator:
Gee, I dunno. I kinda like the idea of being able to silence, forever, people I disagree with on the internet. It’s the ultimate troll, if you think about it. Take into account cache sites and blog comments, and it’d be possible to silence places like RedState, or at a minimum drive them out of business with litigation and site cleanup costs.
Of course it’s a two-way sword, but I’m sure that it’d never get used on anybody whose opinions I actually like….
Paul W.
I’m in favor of the idea of Spain’s Data Protection Agency, it’s too bad we can’t even protect consumers here much less our own data.
However, I think to a certain extent some of these things should be public record, though maybe not immediately visible on a Google search (having been arrested once myself).
MikeJ
@PhoenixRising: So no more “miserable failure” google bombs?
Worked2Death
I’m very lucky all my past youthful mistakes weren’t tied to my SSN. Plus my real name is John Q. Public… sorta.
My son (1.0), on the other hand, has no such leeway in his life. If already schooled him on not talking to the media, not talking to the police, avoiding social media, and how to build a new identity. He also jumps out of the closet from time to time and karate chops me on the neck.
Good times. Good times.
4tehlulz
The only way this is going to happen is to remove public records and the media from the Internet.
So, no.
Brachiator
@PhoenixRising: RE: The key problem is that once anything is on the Web, it can be copied. And so even if you demand, dictate, require that it be deleted, and even if you hold Internet service providers “responsible,” someone somewhere will be able to restore that copy to the InterTubes.
Interesting. Let me think about this for a second. Nope. Won’t work. Someone will re-post it with a new name and a easy to figure out cross-reference. Hackers will rise who will do nothing but re-post supposedly forbidden stuff. You don’t like Wikileaks? Just wait.
Still, the idea of “un-search” is interesting.
Andrew Beck
What they’re asking for is not really possible. Google would have to hard code in the names, and if someone else has the same name, they might be filtered out erroneously. Plus, someone could just slightly change the spelling and it would be indexed again. The only way to have Google not index the data is to remove the data from the internet, and that’s basically impossible.
Alwhite
I work in IT security and this actually stands a chance in Europe. Here in the US we have much weaker privacy laws with very little concern being given to some very important issues.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
I’m sure Right Wing polititians would LOOOOVE to pass such a law here. If the time period to qualify for removal was a 24 hours or less. They could call it the No More Maccaca Moments Act.
Brachiator
@someguy:
This is interesting. You have already cross the line to protecting or restricting your own information to restricting the dissemination of someone else’s information. This defeats the entire purpose of the InterTubes.
So, imagine a President Bachmann directing that all references to everything related to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment be removed from the Internet. You could still read about it in the two or three books that escaped the burning, but you could not go on line.
But more seriously, the notion of “personal information” as a special protected class of data and information in general is easy to spell out in a law, but meaningless in the realm of bits of data, that have no inherent classification.
Pococurante
@Ron: Assume that when I was 18 I was arrested for possession of beer in a state park by two East Texas cops who took my cooler home with them.
What public good is realized by that being public three decades later?
Culture of Truth
Of course an arrest is and should be public information, but it’s unfortunate that in too many people’s minds an arrest equals ‘guilt’, not arrest means ‘some police officer somewhere made a snap decision.’
Mike Goetz
@Martin:
Kyl, Toomey, and Portman. I can vaguely see Portman signing on to a consensus deal.
ETA: Boehner also wants a deal, so he may see his selections as a way to get that, assuming he asserts the right to make that call without a Tea Party veto.
A lot depends on who the House people are.
susan
Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum will definitely support this.
dr. bloor
@someguy:
I’m guessing you’re not familiar with the dichotomy between private citizen/public figure as it applies to a number of laws already in existence.
someguy
@Brachiator:
Well, my thought is to get 40 or 50 people who have been mentioned on RedState together, and then bring an action to get all mentions removed, and then ask RedState to be held accountable for failure to remove records from cache sites, Wayback machine, etc. Seems like it would be a pretty effective tool to silence a lot of the haters, a SLAPP suit for the blogosphere. My somewhat snarky point is that if an individual has an enforceable right to un-ring a bell they may have rung themselves, it may be quite destructive of free speech.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
A semi-serious question: Why should the right to be forgotten be restricted to the internet? If the concern is privacy you could argue that any type of publicly available record violates that right.
Worked2Death
Actually, some of this can be alleviated by getting the large public and private database holders to increase security and purge old data.
For example: A company that would turn down someone for a job because their name appeared in a government-controlled database of misdemeanor convictions from 1982 might not be so willing to do the same thing if the same information came from “Joe-Bob’s Blog of People I Hated in the Year 1982”.
Yeah, yeah, I now this approach has holes all over it. I’m just trying to think it through.
Culture of Truth
@Mike Goetz: Boehner has named Camp, Upton & Hensarling. Pelosi is waiting to name her choices last.
Jordan
Terrible, terrible idea. One, it isn’t going to work in an age where data & indexes get mirrored all over the globe. Two, it’s going to make search engines unreliable, since any search you do is going to have results heavily filtered & influenced by third parties who want to control what information you have ready access to.
Three, assuming this could be made to work, the potential abuses far outweigh any gains in privacy for some individuals.
*Your new neighbor is a violent sociopath with a criminal record in another state, but you can’t find that out online
*Your favorite Applebee’s location somehow manages to pass health inspection reports despite dozens of sick customers…links to whose testimonials the restaurant has removed from search indices
*Your city councilwoman’s brother-in-law was indicted on racketeering charges 5 years ago, but Google News no longer indexes local newspaper reports to his name
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I understand where they are coming from, but you could never get rid of the stuff once its there. If someone gets a copy, you would never be able to destroy it. The only feasable way is to try to regulate what people do with the information, and I’m thinking more along the lines of the domestic violence victim’s spouse being in extra trouble for doing that search. Beyond that, I would love to find ways to protect these people, but it isn’t technically possible.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): I wanted to edit the last sentence to end “to do what they are asking here.” but I have no edit.
khead
I’ll bet these folks would like to be forgotten.
superluminar
Really, I could live with this. Quite happily actually, especially if it involved all of Sully’s writings everywhere being removed permanently.
aimai
@Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen:
Actually, for certain people, you do have a right to privacy even from public records. I don’t remember the details exactly because it was presented to me only as a hypothetical but when I clerked the last national election we were told by the commissioner of the elections that there were several people who were registered to vote essentially anonymously because they were domestic violence victims whose names/addresses were being kept secret from their stalkers. If you had one of these people in your ward and they came in to vote there was a special procedure because they were lawfully registered at a certain address but their names/addresses did not appear on our publicly published lists (so you couldn’t check them in and out on the street registry).
aimai
someguy
@dr. bloor:
I’m familiar with it, I’m also aware that it’s a fuzzy notion when it comes to people who post a comment on the internet. I know also that public figure is a libel law creation, not a constitutional thing; a subsequent law creating a right to disappear could effectively eliminate that distinction.
Culture of Truth
One way to look at this is to compare it to the sealing of juvenile criminal records, only on a larger scale. Or expunged adult records, which can be done, but is not always successful.
Someone, somewhere, remembers.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
I was very happy to discover that there was someone else in this country with my name and just about the same age. I have very little web presence and the few things that are accurate are just some high school baseball news stories and a research paper I had worked on (I did the charts and figures) with scientists from the company I used to work for. I have no problem letting him be the only public version on the internet.
300baud
People seem to be talking as if “my information” is the same thing as “information about me”. That’s dangerously wrong. The former is things I know and say; the former is things other people know about me. Attempting to directly control what other people know and say about you is a fool’s game.
This is an attempt by people who didn’t grow up with the internet to put the genie back in the bottle. It won’t work. The most it will do is give the rich and powerful more tools to hide their activities from public view.
Culture of Truth
State and Federal FOIA laws have all kinds of such exemptions. In July Illinois enacted a law exempting gun permit information from public disclosure.
Suffern ACE
@someguy:
I’m guessing he loses. What’s he going to argue – that by publsihing his opinions with his name on them in major media outlets that he didn’t actually want for those opinions to be discussed and disseminated widely?
Culture of Truth
This quote is striking:
“The main concern is making sure the names of law-abiding gun owners don’t fall into the hands of criminals and wrongdoers,” Senator Forby said. “I worry that if this list was made public, we would be creating a situation that singles out certain groups of citizens and their families for criminals to target.”
I thought guns made you safer?
Brachiator
@someguy:
Yeah, but I am just looking at the reality that such an individual right is unenforceable. But yeah, if it could be enforceable, it would be destructive of free speech.
But riding along side this crazy idea is the notion that governments have a right to regulate the Internets in order to protect people, and that they can restrict or prohibit the access of people and information. This is about as destructive of free speech as it gets.
Jewish Steel
Those 90 people should join my band.
Guaranteed anonymity for life.
(Come see us at the Merna Tap Tuesday night with special guest, Master Fister!)
Worked2Death
True story: When I had a bleg I posted a pic of some guy I’d never met who was doing something very stupid. The post was up for about five years when the guy got in touch with me.
He told me how that pic had followed him around for most of his adult life and how it was inevitably passed around the office at every job he’d held. Eventually the pic disappeared from Google except for my bleg post. He begged me to remove it.
I erased the post down immediately. I also re-evaluated what I considered funny.
Brachiator
@Worked2Death:
Let me introduce you to my friend WikiCopy, cousin of WikiLeaks. You purge, they republish. It’s all just bits.
@300baud:
Yep. Good point, and interesting distinctions.
Matthew B.
Sounds like a bad idea to me. We’d probably see a lot more of this kind of thing.
Brachiator
@Worked2Death:
What you did was commendable.
How would you feel about a law that would fine you or imprison you if you did not remove the post?
What if the guy was not doing something stupid, but something illegal or reprehensible, and then begged or demanded that you remove the post?
What if the post were entirely innocent and the person simply said, “I just don’t want to be on the Web. Remove the post.”
Luthe
Four points:
1. The Spaniards better have some damn good firewalls, because Anonymous is going to be all over them for this.
2. Public records are tricky things. They are, by definition, public. But they also lose relevancy over time. Perhaps a statute of limitations on how long governments keep information on servers should apply? It won’t stop the Wayback Machine or Google Cache, but it would help.
3. You can’t escape the Wayback Machine, Google Cache, or screencaps, as many a politician, blogger, and wanker have found out to their dismay. Once information is on the Web, it’s there forever.
4. Pseudonyms are vital. That’s one of the reasons Google+ has been facing such a backlash for deleting the accounts of people not using “real names.” Keeping one’s public and private self apart on the Internet is a necessity, because judgments on one bleed so easily into another. I don’t need my future bosses knowing about my slashy fanfic habit, just like I don’t need all my fandom friends knowing my real name. Putting everything out there under one’s real name is never a good idea.
Paul in KY
@susan: Boy oh boy, wouldn’t he :-)
If that law was ever passed (which it wouldn’t here), they could call it the ‘Satanum Law’ & then people could google why they called it that. Good times, good times.
Martin
@Mike Goetz:
Portman, yeah, but Kyl and Toomey are effectively teatards when it comes to the budget (Toomey literally being the face of the anti-tax movement), and Kyl is beholden to the yell-at-the-clouds voter base in AZ. And the Senate was supposed to provide the reasonable folks. Just imagine what Boehner is going to offer up.
Worked2Death
@Brachiator: To answer honestly:
How would you feel about a law that would fine you or imprison you if you did not remove the post? I’d fight it. (I’m assuming we’re talking laws that go above and beyond libel.)
What if the guy was not doing something stupid, but something illegal or reprehensible, and then begged or demanded that you remove the post? I don’t know.
What if the post were entirely innocent and the person simply said, “I just don’t want to be on the Web. Remove the post.” I don’t know. Maybe I’d remove it.
I’m also in the middle of a major fail because I imagined that a company would only choose to fire/not hire someone because of info from trusted sources. JFC, I know better than that.
The cogs in my head are turning but I’m getting poor mileage.
Brachiator? A sloth???
Amir Khalid
Removing from the Net information that you need to keep private is just about impossible; once it has been posted, it’s already too late to do anything about it. So if you’re a grownup, maybe that’s your privacy written off (or your job prospects, or your chance of not being discriminated against, or your liberty).
However, that’s no argument against protecting young people who haven’t yet had their private information uploaded. If it can be done for them, it should be.
But it is going to be hard, for technical reasons listed by other commenters here, and it won’t be enough by itself. Privacy itself is being devalued in these info gadget-crazy times. Young people today (and some not so young, like one or two American politicians I could name) live in a global culture that encourages them to tweet every passing thought, indulge every impulse to show off, share every little personal detail with the whole world, on social media. All in the name of being connected. Or they’ll be left out (and we all know how much we don’t want to be left out). And who is encouraging this? Powerful commercial interests — we’re talking Facebook and Google and Apple and Microsoft big. Billions in potential profits riding on getting people to shun privacy as though it were a bad habit.
So along with with legislating for protecting for the protection of personal information, you’ve got to go against that flow. You’ve got to teach people to value, and be vigilant about, their own privacy. Otherwise, a generation from now, people will be mystified by that quaint notion. They will accept government and corporate intrusions into their lives simply because they no longer know enough to expect any better.
Brachiator
@Luthe:
Very, very true. And yet you have a number of techies insisting that privacy is outdated, outmoded, unnecessary.
There is an interesting clash of cultures here. You have people like the Scobleizer who will not only post information about himself, but also his location.
And then there are those who think that recent developments in facial recognition software is “cool,” especially if it can help you identify people you don’t know but think are interesting.
Worked2Death
I can never remember the name of the supermodel de jour.
Shinobi
You can totally find my home address via google. I asked several agencies to remove it but since my purchase of a once foreclosed home is a matter of public record they are apparently free to post my name and full address wherever they see fit. Ridiculous. I want this.
Stefan
@Ron:
I’m not sure I agree with this. Public information (like an arrest) should not be removable.
Why?
Seriously, why should it not be removable? I’m not arguing for its removability in every case, but let’s consider what’s changed in the last 15 years. Before then, if you were arrested it was known to your immediate community, more if the crime had a certain notoriety. But once the case was dismissed/you get out of jail, etc., it generally didn’t follow you the rest of your life. You could move to a new town, start over, without your arrest record being nailed to every tree and wall in your neighborhood for your neighbors and co-workers to gawk at. You paid your debt to society and that was it.
These days, however, we’ve almost added a new punishment on top of arrest and/or imprisonment — permanent public shaming — that will never, ever go away. You can never pay that debt to society, and quite often the punishment and its negative consequences to your life will far outweigh the initial offense.
Stefan
@Jordan:
*Your new neighbor is a violent sociopath with a criminal record in another state, but you can’t find that out online
I can see why you’d like to have the inforation, but I can’t quite see why you think you have a right to it, especially if it’s from another state. Basically you’re saying you want the ability to conduct criminal background checks on everyone you come in contact with.
Tommy D
Boy, is this ever close to the worst idea I’ve heard. A, it won’t work. B, it will be used mostly to hide skullduggery. C., in this country corporations have the rights of a person. D. it flies against almost everything we are supposed to believe about increasing transparency and openness. E., it ignores how the internet actually works. F., it holds the messenger responsible for the message.
Perhaps many of us wish we still lived a simpler age, but I’m an old guy and I did live then. It really wasn’t better.
PS. A bunch of sad anecdotes is a terrible basis for making public policy.
Brachiator
@Worked2Death:
By the way, this is an area that really interests me, and I really appreciate your responses. But I want to make it clear, as a matter of courtesy, that I did not mean in any way to demand that you provide an immediate answer to every question.
In a way, these are thinking exercises on a what I think is a very important public policy issue.
Great point. On the InterTubes there is not always a distinction between information and gossip, or a distinction that recognizes that people grow up and mature and should not be held accountable for everything that gets seen on the Web.
Brachiator
@Worked2Death:
Basic form of locomotion, especially among some primates.
It’s a love of evolution thing.
I guess that Tarzan could also be considered to be a brachiator. But he cheats by using those vines.
Thoughtcrime
It’s too late John. No amount of scrubbing will ever erase this:
https://balloon-juice.com/2009/05/18/pens-v-hurricanes-open-thread/#comment-1237620
Ohio Mom
About destroying public records: I used to have a job in which I gave workshops to cities, villages and townships on public records retention. This was before there was much of an internet (I’m older than I like to think).
State law was (I assume still is) very detailed on how long each various type of paper public record had to be kept before it was destroyed.
No one expected every scrap of paper to be kept for eternity, and little governments were very happy to know they didn’t have stay buried under dusty bankers boxes. So no, public records aren’t necessarily forever.
Skepticat
I have always had an unlisted phone number (not only because I’m single and live out in the woods but also because I’m antisocial), and recently I went to as many sites as I could find with information about me and deleted wherever possible. There were few sites that allowed it, but those I cleared. Haven’t checked to see if anything has reappeared however. Interestingly, almost all the information was incorrect in large or small ways.
donr
The Chinese government does a pretty good job at “disappearing” unwanted information from the internet.
Just sayin’.
AA+ Bonds
This won’t work and the American alternative won’t work either. We’re headed for a world of shit, probably about as bad as the previous one.
PhoenixRising
@Worked2Death:
This is where that public figure exception would come in handy.
The story you told involved you doing the right thing. But what if you didn’t agree with some random guy’s ‘good enough reason’ to stop shaming him? What would come in handy is a neutral tool, one that makes a distinction between whether the person being shamed is, say, a House member who flashes his lil’ member vs. some dude who was drunk once. That gives some guy the right to hold the people who are shaming him accountable, without giving the Congressman the right to shut down anyone who tells.
The distinction between govt action forbidding speech (criminal penalties) and a rational system to hold the speaker accountable for the actual effects of his actions (civil) is a pretty important one.
Google has enough information about everyone who uses Google, and most everyone else, plus enough money, that they could easily run a privacy office. An ombudsman service, that most global citizens would never need to use, would allow those of us who are unique or one of a pair (what if you were the non-wife-beating Jedathan Bankwhistle, of two?) or have any other reason to want to limit what is published about us online, to end harassment or any other problem arising from past actions real or imagined.
The consequences of criminal convictions would stay the same; the wife-beating Jedathan Bankwhistle would be discoverable as such through the methods that people with a legitimate interest have always used. But the other guy would be able to get a job again. What’s the downside to making other people’s pasts available only to dedicated, persistent and nosy people?
This is a completely separate issue from the internet-comments-haunting-you examples–at the moment, you’re still free to participate in the internet pseudonymously.
300baud
@Stefan:
I think that shaming is an artifact of the temporary age of privacy. It will pass.
Before urbanization, people generally knew about one another’s business. For a while, transportation tech got ahead of information tech. That meant that a lot of people lived in the midst of effective strangers.
On the one hand, that got you something akin to privacy; on the other, it raised risks, because you never knew what kind of people were around you. That encouraged snap judgments, because it was hard to know the whole story and the normal consequences of being overly judgmental were reduced.
Once everybody’s life histories become well known again, I think we’ll go back to not freaking out over small, stale details because everybody will have them. And because it can be judged against a much richer set of information about the person.
BruinKid
Sounds nice when it comes to victims of abuse or stalking. But then that second person in the article said there was an arrest from her college days.
Sure, that’s embarrassing. But where do we draw the line at people who want to hide, well, their criminal record?
PhoenixRising
@300baud:
You’re glossing over complex and important questions. Is my ‘life history’ the tracks I’ve left, intentionally and not, across the ‘net? Is that digital picture rich information about me? How do you know?
Jarod Lanier, who was one of the architects of usenet, wrote a powerful little book about these questions. It’s called ‘You are not a gadget’, and if you have thought about these questions at all you will find it interesting.
If your glib, surface response to anyone questioning the borg collating all of your data, real or imagined, is, ‘but I have a right to know, for free and instantly, everything about everyone whose surname I can spell’, no promises about any particular text.
I’m wary of any logic that says you are entitled to a certain kind of respect from the network if you’re a victim, and otherwise, take your lumps in the trenches. This glosses over where the trenches were dug, what they protect and what they reveal, etc.
jetan
Terrible idea. Your First Amendment rights trump my so-called privacy rights.
Neil Morse
I actually don’t want this to happen. I have the same name as one of the 100 richest people in the U.S., and so I don’t even appear in the first 10 Google search pages. When the pitchforks and torches come out, I want the mob going after him, not me.
William Hurley
Truly awesome series of events. I’m delighted that Spain is acting, and is the lead actor in this first of what – I hope – may be multitude of actions intended to reclaim the gifts of the Enlightenment from modern day Monarchs and Medicis.
It also proves that Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!
William Hurley
@jetan: Neither I nor any other citizen nor google are government entities and therefore are not entangled in the speech/privacy conflict you suggest is in play.