As the amount of information we share online grows along with the data that gets collected -- with or without our permission -- there is a growing call for more online privacy protection, both in the US and Europe.
What this boils down to is that you can erase your Internet tracks forever. While such a notion might sound attractive on some level, the implications of erasing the historical record could have serious unintended consequences.
It's a complex idea that you might either accept or reject immediately, depending on your take. Peter Fleischer, who happens to be Google's Privacy Counsel in Europe, wrote a fascinating post about this the other day (making it clear he was not representing Google in this instance). For Fleischer, anyone who has considered codifying such a right into law hasn't thought through the implications. He writes: "Privacy is far more elastic [than defamation claims, which require proof that statements are not true], because privacy claims can be made on speech that is true."
To be honest, as a journalist, that's a notion I find chilling.
Imagine that Richard Nixon’s heirs decided he had a right to remove all references to his role in Watergate from the Internet because Nixon had a right to be forgotten. Imagine that people who had committed war crimes decided this. Where do you draw the line -- at pedophiles? Murderers?
In fact, France has introduced legislation called "un chartier sur le droit a l'oubli" (a charter on the right to be forgotten -- note this post is in French). What's more, in a case in Spain last year, a Spanish court asked Google to remove specific data on a person, effectively altering the record on this individual's actions.
Yet there are instances where you wonder if a person should have certain information be forgotten. How many of us want our youthful indiscretions held against us for all time? Consider a teen arrested for a petty crime like shoplifting. Should that appear in Google forever, long after the individual paid whatever debt was required by law? Should every drunken college party come back to haunt every one of us forever?
Let's say for the sake of argument, however, that you agree that some data should be erased. It's not that simple to remove data on the Internet once it's out there.
If you've ever tried to remove something, you know what I'm talking about. Last year, a friend wrote a post on her blog criticizing actress Angelina Jolie. It seemed innocuous enough, but she was soon under attack from rabid Jolie fans who felt the need to defend Jolie by verbally assaulting the writer. My friend grew so upset by the tone of the comments that she made the decision to remove the post from her blog.
She soon discovered that it was next to impossible to delete all traces of it, however, because it showed up in Google's cache in spite of not appearing anymore on her blog. It's also entirely possible that people copied the contents and emailed it to one another, or that a Jolie fan posted large chunks of the post (or even the entire thing) on a fan blog.
Eventually, my friend relented and put the post back up and just ignored the comments.
But it's an object lesson in just how difficult it is to really delete anything on the Internet. People with or without permission copy your content to other sites. There's really no way to remove every trace of anyone on the Internet, even if there were a law in place requiring it.
But whether you can delete the content is not really the point. The real question is: Should you? And if you do, does this amount to censorship?
I tend to come down on the side of letting the record stand (unless that record is actually wrong).
There are no easy answers, but simply saying that a person has a right to be removed from databases strikes me as a naïve notion at best, and given the implications for historical accuracy and free speech in general, I'm inclined to let the Internet be, warts and all.
— Ron Miller is a freelance technology journalist, blogger, FierceContentManagement editor, and contributing editor at EContent magazine.
Came across this article this morning in the New York Times and I thought you might it interesting in the context of our recent discussion on the right to be forgotten on the Internet.
"Go out, get drunk, post on your ex-boyfriend's wall with typo-ridden declarations of love, then tweet humiliating picture of self making the OK sign while dancing topless on a bar.
If any of this evokes some remembered dread of social networking gone embarrassingly inebriated, you might need Last Night Never Happened, an iPhone app that helps you delete incriminating digital evidence from an unfortunate evening."
kq4ym, good point you bring out!... I've read several articles on how future generations are going to open .doc files (when MSFT is lone gone, etc). Maintaining standarization is good, but eventually a new one will come and people will start to forget.
Having info "on the internet" might be a good way, until HTML and others go away.
Thanks, Ron, this is a really informative article.
You know what was the first thing that came to my mind when I was reading it? Witness protection program. I believe there might be some information posted on the Internet that might help in identifying a person even after he/she changes the name and looks. And removing such information would contribute to this person's safety. I wonder if this is done actually.
thanks for the detailed look at this. I'm not sure which is scarier: the notion that everything can be forgotten, or the notion that nothing can. Certainly there are things that we all posted to the Internet back in the day that we never realized people would be able to look up twenty years later, and I wonder sometimes, when I see some of the things that people post on Facebook, how they're going to feel in twenty years when someone digs it up. We know that people have lost their jobs over pictures they've posted on Facebook.
On the other hand, I think the ability to erase data is almost more detrimental for us as a society.
I'd like to think that at some point, in the same way that youthful minor drug use isn't that much of an issue with politicians now, we'll accept that everyone has some stupid Facebook picture of a cup in their hands or wearing nothing but Mardi Gras beads, and it will no longer be such a big deal.
I picture what you mean in terms what could happen to the information storage aspect if the right to be forgotten became enforceable. here's an interesting extract from an article on The Techmium:
The fastest increasing quantity on this planet is the amount of information we are generating. It is (and has been) expanding faster than anything else we create or can measure over the scale of decades. That means that at the very edge of change, where change changes the most, information is leading. Information is accumulating faster than any material or artifact in this world, faster than any by-product of our activities. The rate of growth in information may even be faster than any biological growth at the same scale.
I believe this is the most amazing thing about the world we live in today. But this could be affected greatly in the privacy idea got to the point of deleting true information about any issue out there as long as the people involved complained.
In truth though, i don't see it as even practical unless one was to censor the whole internet. By the time you come to delete the information it is probably already circulating in several private chains even if it is removed from search engines.
Of course, you use a pseudonym here, so I'm guessing you must be very careful about your online identity.
But your point is well taken, and one that I was trying to express in the post. There is something to be said for a matter of historical record, even if it's in the sense you wrote about.
Although I get a bit nervous when thinking that stuff I posted on the internet may be in someone's file infinitely, I see a need for it, even if it's for the sake of history.
I've spent many hours in geneaology research, trying to track down ancestors a hundred years ago. It would be nice if at the push of a button I could find great grandfather Browne's biographical info.
I suspect in a hundred years, some descendant of mine will be able to find out where and what I was doing on 9/11. Is that really important? Probably not much in the larger look at the world, but to someone wanting the information, it will be invaluable.
The real question may be at what cost to privacy and cost of storage should someone retain personal information, even if the subject of the information elected to "delete" it.
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The call (or, should I say, the Twitter DM) finally arrived. My Google Glass is ready. All I need to do is travel to Manhattan and fork over $1,500, and this piece of cutting-edge technology will be all mine.
When a new technology comes along, the standard reaction seems to focus on the most negative aspect of the device at the cost of all positive possibilities.
Recently, the Obama administration has been of two minds where privacy rights are concerned. On one hand, you have an administration that vowed to veto CISPA and mandated open data for government websites. On the other hand, you have an increasingly out-of-control Department of Justice on a fishing expedition at AP and demanding legislation to let the FBI wiretap private, encrypted communications and levy fines if a company fails to comply.
These days, even some usually techno-friendly people have their hackles up about the potential of Google Glass to surreptitiously record video or take pictures. I've heard more than one tech savvy friend bring up "the creep factor," the ability of a weird guy to secretly record you.
The United States' taxpayer-funded technology delegation to Russia turns into a mortifying embarrassment for anyone even remotely proud to be American.
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The plan for unmanned police drones to patrol traffic and other city conditions in Seattle has sparked a new set of legal concerns about privacy. Law traditionally lags technology, but we can expect now to see a new round of activity in the courts as legal definitions begin to emerge on what "next-gen privacy" will look like.
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Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
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