Rosen describes a real case in Germany where two men murder someone, go to trial, get convicted, serve their time, get released, and when they leave jail they look up their famous victim's name on Wikipedia, and there they are, named as his killers. They sue Wikipedia's parent company saying, in effect, "We've been to jail, paid our debt to society, we want this incident forgotten. So remove our names, not just from the German Wikipedia, take us out of all the Wikipedias."
In the words of the Shadow, "Fuck. You. The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Suck it up."
That must have been one wacky spring break!
This episode page at IMDB of Love Street 1994, no longer has a lead actress. I don't care that much, I just find it interesting. I think the episodes are around somewhere, somebody could find out.
I actually am not sure what they are talking about, what kind or level of information can be removed. The picture example sucked, the kind of stuff the professional press thinks critical to their job.
All mention of Romney's dog, or maybe any public reference to Gingrich's second marriage? Is the stuff in a Woodward book the personal property of the President?
I suppose it would be adjudicated or arbitrate, based on a public purpose. Half-naked pictures, or a young woman's acting job...no. Murderers...yes.
Whatever. In practice it will be worked out, with various degrees of heart-rending but globally-trivial injustice. Did we ever find out all the details of Lesser Bush's youth?
I'm inclined to agree with ST, but in practice this will be resolved by trial and error. A great deal of error, and probably a great many trials. It will go on until a modus vivendi is arrived at that nobody can be bothered to challenge: that is, probably beyond our time.
Once in a while I wish we could excise, let's-just-say-as-a-doubtless-common-example, embarrassing, pretentious squabbling we may have done about the merit of various mezzo-sopranos on usenet in 1992 before we knew that the ink was indelible.
If I'm Pretentious on the Internet now, it's informed pretense.
Surely there must be a middle ground here.
This could pretty much be the last sentence of every NPR story ever, no?
Instituting such a right would be a ticket to the Land of Instant Regret. The Kochs would use it to get rid of material inadvertently revealing their activities, etc. Getting rid of youthful photos may be an appropriate thing to have a procedure for, but it would need to be heavily circumscribed.
I think you should have the right to control over data that you yourself contribute. This is one of the fundamental principles behind things like the Data Protection Act.
If I buy something online from Tweety, I have to give him my address. But he doesn't have the right to sell that address on if I don't give him (explicit or implicit) permission. If I put a photo on my own website, other people shouldn't be able to use it without permission. And so on.
""If an individual no longer wants his personal data to be processed or stored by a data controller, and if there is no legitimate reason for keeping it, the data should be removed from their system." - this sounds like a good idea.
But! it is definitely ludicrous to argue that I have the right to demand that anyone who posts any photo I don't like should take it down. And I would dearly like to see Rosen linking to a judge or government official (not a lawyer) actually arguing this.
The issue of spent convictions is different again and it's dishonest of Rosen to try to conflate them all together. The UK's had rehabilitation laws for almost four decades now and they're a great idea. Rolling them together with a bunch of undecided and largely frivolous lawsuits in Argentina, of all places, is just wrong.
"The Spanish Data Protection authority, for example, has sued Google to force it to delete links to embarrassing newspaper articles that are legal under Spanish law.[12] "
A link to the case would be good. A link to a blog which asserts this without proof - not so good.
A link to the case would be good. A link to a blog which asserts this without proof - not so good.
Maybe the links were all taken down, in order to be in compliance with the law.
I don't think it's a practically enforceable right. Stuff that's out on the Internet is going to be practically very very difficult to eradicate if it's at all interesting -- there are just too.
There's also no bright line I can see at all between your facebook picture of your drunken night at a party and a newspaper article about Mardi Gras illustrated with the same picture. There's never been a right to wipe your past from the public record, and I'm not sure where one should come from.
A regulation I might want is for social media sites to be required to offer a procedure to help you clean up your history, but working out the details would be complicated.
I don't think it's a practically enforceable right.
Yup.
There's also no bright line I can see at all between your facebook picture of your drunken night at a party and a newspaper article about Mardi Gras illustrated with the same picture.
If the Facebook picture is yours then you should retain control. The newspaper article picture was taken by someone else while you were in a public place with no expectation of privacy.
It's not about embarrassment, it's about ownership.
That's nicely consistent, ajay, & exactly opposite to the problem that leapt to my mind - other people exerting social control by salting the web with biased information about someone. Gossip that we can't get away from by moving across the country.
14 is right. I think a newspaper can technically demand that other sites take down pictures owned by the newspaper (that's what "image reprinted with permission" means, right?). Obviously there are still issues of practical enforceability.
14: By 'yours' you mean copyrighted? Sure. It is now, and I'd support strengthening enforcement for non-commercial personal copyrighted material (I have no idea what the available enforcement is now, but I'd expect not much), and a right as against social media not to lose your copyright by putting stuff up on the net.
But that doesn't solve the problem at all -- if you're in the picture, you probably weren't holding the camera.
A regulation I might want is for social media sites to be required to offer a procedure to help you clean up your history, but working out the details would be complicated.
I don't see why. If I posted it on FB, I should be able to take it down. That's why the mandatory "Timeline" is so obnoxious (though it doesn't seem to have actually become mandatory).
What complicated details do you have in mind?
If you have a reputation to defend in Britain and someone is posting details of your spent conviction on the internet, then they are at least potentially libelling you (this is why the defence is called "justification" rather than "truth"). Doesn't apply to the case in #1 though, as murder convictions (and any other offences which carry a 2 year custodial sentence) can never be spent.
Chris y is right, as usual, and I think the solutions are going to be wholly market based: ajay can prevent Tweety from selling his address only if there's an enforceable agreement to that effect. People will take data privacy rights into account in deciding who to do business with.
Although, since that's what we're doing right now, and the evidence is that tens (at least) of millions don't care enough about their data privacy to avoid places that don't respect it, one can expect that the eventual regime will be pretty leaky.
But that doesn't solve the problem at all -- if you're in the picture, you probably weren't holding the camera.
But it's quite possible your friend was, and if you could say to your friend "I'd really like that picture off the internet" and they had an easy way to say "sure", and have that decision be legally enforceable, that would at least help.
Although, since that's what we're doing right now, and the evidence is that tens (at least) of millions don't care enough about their data privacy to avoid places that don't respect it,
I hate this formulation. The places that these people are frequenting offer a huge, real, benefit and pleasure to the people that choose to go there. Yes, they're trading off their data privacy. But there would also be a cost associated with skipping those sites.
17.2: sorry, I'm a bit uncertain of the scenario here. So this is a hypothetical picture posted on Facebook by you but taken by someone else which is embarrassing to you?
In that case, you can take it down yourself, but if it's posted elsewhere too then you're out of luck, I would say.
15: OK, that's rather a different issue. Because this hasn't really got anything to do with the right to be forgotten; this is more like the right to have people not write misleading things about you online. Which is really more into libel-law territory. If someone writes "clew is a massive pothead whose clothes smell of rodent pee" online, then the problem isn't that this will still be accessible five years later; the problem is that she wrote it in the first place.
Wouldn't it just be easier if we all agreed that things like drunken antics posted to Facebook or appearances on mid 90s cable softcore shows aren't something we should hold against someone?
The arguments always seem to take the same form.
Person A: Shouldn't you have the right to hide [embarrassing thing that isn't really wrong.]
Person B: Yeah, but then people will use it to hide [shameful thing that is very wrong and we all have a right to know about.]
The issue isn't the forgetting. It is just that we are embarrassed by things that aren't' really shameful.
18: Requiring that social media services make it possible to delete things from your own account is the easy bit, and I'd agree that such a regulation would be a good one. The problem that's complicated is cleaning up information about you that's not on your own account.
21: "Doesn't solve the problem at all" is an overstatement, I suppose, but 'doesn't solve it anything like completely' is fair.
Chris Brown Steals Fan's iPhone: Police ReportChris Brown faces new potential troubles with the law after allegedly snatching a woman's iPhone as she tried to snap his picture outside a Miami Beach nightclub.
"B----, you ain't going to put that on no website," the singer, 22, angrily told the fan as he reached through his Bentley window around 4 a.m. Sunday and took the phone from her hands, according to a police report.
I think that there are generational differences with respect to privacy-- kids don't care about it much, apparently. The thing that I can't figure out about this: one of the reasons for privacy is self-defence during conflict-- divorce or bankruptcy most commonly. But I doubt that more divorces are amicable, or collection agencies gentler or less competent than in the past, so either kids don't see this or this must be a mistaken viewpoint.
Honestly, an indifference to privacy seems to me like incredibly privileged behavior, on a par with not looking at a bill before paying.
Regarding the boundary of control over information freely given out: once people begin caring, they'll stop giving information away. Less facebookery, more concern about search history or whatever. The most sensitive information, credit and medical histories, are already very poorly regulated in the US, to widespread indifference.
Chris Brown is one of the younger generation and he seems to care about his privacy quite a lot be a twat.
24: I think this is probably how things are going to shake out. The generation that's very very likely to have a mildly embarrassing internet history isn't any older than their early thirties now, just getting into the range where they're likely to be embarrassed by their misspent youths. I figure mores are just going to change that a ten-year-old picture of you mooning the camera will soon no longer be a reason not to be hired as general counsel of Coca-Cola.
People will take data privacy rights into account in deciding who to do business with.
Good thing we have equal negotiating power with social network services!
What about edge caching services? Can they be sued for not rapidly enough tracking downstream content deletion? What about archive.org? Will they still be able to do their work?
Once something is on the Internet, copies proliferate broadly and automatically. What about browser caches? What about tape backups of browser caches?
Soeone's got to take the other side here. What about a libellous statement? Would the world be so much worse if, after a Court ruled that a particular statement was false and caused injury (e.g. false accusing that someone is a rapist), Google and Facebook would be forced to remove all posts that mention it? They already do this to enforce copyright.
Some images would be removed also, e.g. an image that appears to show a crime in progress but doesn't. E.g. a photo of you apparently leering at a child porn image, when actually you were picking up a scrap of paper on the floor and didn't notice the image.
I'm also now really curious as to who was in that 1994 episode of Love Street.
Honestly, an indifference to privacy seems to me like incredibly privileged behavior, on a par with not looking at a bill before paying.
This seems both underjustified and inflammatory, tantamount to saying "I think that the only reason for you to disagree with me about this is that you don't understand the problems poor people face." It could be right, but before I'd treat a claim like that with any respect I'd want it to be specific enough that I understood it, rather than vaguely about 'privacy'. What problems do drunken pictures on FB pose for the working class that the middle class just doesn't appreciate?
I figure mores are just going to change that a ten-year-old picture of you mooning the camera account of you being a hopelessly stupid coke-addled drunk will soon no longer be a reason not to be hired as general counsel of Coca-Cola President.
22 -- Right. What I'm saying is that people who won't pay the price of avoiding Google and Facebook aren't going to support the kind of intrusive legal regime necessary to protect themselves from the downsides.
I office share with a divorce lawyer. Facebook is fertile ground for evidence of various things. One can tell clients whatever one wants about avoiding evidence production, and some might even follow such advice for a limited time.
Kraab, if you send a letter to the editor of your local paper, or send a photo from your next soiree to the society page columnist, you don't get to change your mind after it's published, and have them destroy all extant copies of the paper.
20.2 is right, I think.
This very site, full of pseudonyms, is a counterexample, suggesting that the costs mentioned in 22 are actually very low.
24, 17. The issue is not the community of like-minded people, but adversaries. So far, adversarial relations are infrequent and personal. But there are already services that offer to sell aggregated court records. If it's possible to buy a file of say email/telephone contact lists as an expanded background check,is that OK? Next, if it becomes just an accepted routine that it's prudent to check these cheap files before dealing personally with people who are foreign or poor or in some other way suspicious, is that OK too?
Figuring that social mores will just take care of the new information is optimistic, I think.
Come to think, how do letters to the editor work, copyright-wise? There's a doctrine that writing to the editor of a publication implicitly transfers the copyright to the publication? Must be something like that -- I know with personal letters, the copyright stays with the writer, the recipient only owns the physical copy, but obviously that can't work for letters meant for publication.
If it's possible to buy a file of say email/telephone contact lists as an expanded background check,is that OK?
Spell this out? What's in the file other than a list of email addresses and phone numbers, which wouldn't tell you anything interesting?
23 & 24 together: it might be nice to have one consistent view of what's acceptable, but _Laws of Peoples_, we won't. Worse, inconsistent beliefs & application enforce hierarchy. It's the outsider who has the really unflattering photo posted by someone else, & reposted to stop a promotion.
Great in Victorian or Southern novels, bitter to live in. AWB?
28 -- Sadly, I think there will be a long lag time during which only the truly repressed will qualify for elite employment.
(Imagine, if you will, the gapes that tales of my own [really rather tame] misspent youth elicited from my biglaw partners . . .)
40: I'm not offering this as a total solution to all privacy problems, but for drunken/sexy pictures, I think you're wrong (at least for men. Less confident for women.) The demographic that's guaranteed the elite jobs: Ivy undergrad, Ivy professional school, is probably the most heavily Facebooked demographic out there. There are going to be too many pictures of Chip Chipster IV and Bunny Bunnister Jr. vomiting off the deck of the club for it to keep all of them out of the white shoe firms.
What problems do drunken pictures on FB pose for the working class that the middle class just doesn't appreciate?
Different standards of automated shit-scraping will be applied to employment applications for exempt and non-exempt positions. This happens already-- I've never had to take a urine test for drugs for a salaried job.
The telephone contact file would include information about which numbers were psychiatrists or MDs specializing in treatment of the HIV-positive, which numbers were prison telephones, which were collection agencies. Should potential landlords be allowed to browse this for $5?
40 is overstated and so all in 41 is therefore justified. Reality, though, will be more along the lines of 39. Lots of Ivy kids, and even some Chipsters, are going to get left behind, if their other juice isn't powerful enough. Which does make it a privilege issue, I guess.
28.last:or it's survivable for a man & not a woman. We can enforce a lot of bias with a series of weak filters. Add : if you're shy/cautious as a young manager, you don't get contacts because you aren't collegial.
42: Wait, you're envisioning the phone company releasing a list of every phone number you've called ever and whose number it was? That would suck, but I'm fairly certain it's prohibited by law now, and I'm not sure what process you're envisioning that would make that information public.
Flashing is innocuous middle-class behavior already, a mistake to focus on it, I think. The article linked in the OP was lazily written by someone who lacked imagination, putting up a sexy photo of a model for traffic.
What about autotagged photos of you and your brother's friend the felon?
42: wait, we're on to telephone contact details now? Where did that come from?
Doesn't 41 answer 33? It isn't likely (in the near term) that the white shoe hiring partners are literally going to be looking through a file full of photos of a topless Chad vomiting on his friends and think "looks like our kind of guy!"; instead what's true is that white shoe firms hiring out of Ivy league schools simply won't be running the sort of intensive online background checks that HR firms will run as a matter of course for people beign hired to work in the warehouse, etc.
37: There was a letter to the editor in the print NY Times magazine last (?) week that was attributed as
Someone's Name, thenation.com
which seemed odd. Perhaps the person also posted it at nytimes.com, but then why attribute to The Nation's site? I can't imagine the NYT has the right to publish something as a letter to the editor if it wasn't submitted as such. It certainly isn't ethical.
I would interpret 49 as meaning the author of the letter was affiliated with thenation.com. That's not right?
the sort of intensive online background checks that HR firms will run as a matter of course for people beign hired to work in the warehouse, etc.
Thing is, for topless vomiting pictures, I just don't think a warehouse is likely to give a damn, given the percentage of such checks that are likely to produce some kind of embarrassing picture.
What I worry about is more Big Data: not the sort of embarrassing information that you might make public and later regret, but the aggregation of lots individually innocuous bits of public data into some kind of reliability index like a credit rating, that you wouldn't be able to fix. But I think of that as an issue that should really be separated from 'privacy' in the sense of embarrassing pictures, and I don't think there's an easy solution.
37. In Britain a letter (anonymous) to an editor can be cited as part of the Constitution (p.20). Under such circumstances the paper might have problems enforcing copyright.
Absent technical details of how to implement this "right" this discussion is sort of charmingly quaint. Once it gets to technical details, and they involve completely breaking the internet, then I will probably find it frustrating. Sympathetic though I am to concern over the erosion of privacy rights.
Anyhow: use a pseudonym! And if you don't, remember that everything you do on the internet is essnetially public! And for chrissakes don't take pictures of people on drugs at parties!
My PSA for today.
45, 47.
Telephone company employees sell these lists now, and the information can be generated automatically easily for cell phones (by installing software on the target's phone). It's technically straightforward to implement; both governments and cell-phone carriers have the information.
The threat of legal problems won't mean much to a fly-by-night cell phone carrier whose management decides for easy profit today.
The most public example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_spying_scandal
Basically, I am saying that focusing on what's new and salacious is a mistake. The problems come from large volumes of data that are now very cheap and dispersed but which used to be expensive and concentrated. The issue with photos will not be how many clothes, but who else is in the photo.
the aggregation of lots individually innocuous bits of public data into some kind of reliability index like a credit rating, that you wouldn't be able to fix
I think that this is a succinct definition of privacy in the 21st century. Boobs are already acceptable, a fun but pointless distraction in setting rules and mores.
55: Telephone company employees sell these lists now,
This is a really screwy thing to lead with when you mean that there have been occasions when information like that has been sold in violation of the law. There's no regulation that's going to keep people from breaking the law: all the HIPAA in the world won't keep your doctor from spraypainting your HIV status across the hood of your car if she's that way inclined.
If you have secret information in the control of third parties, sometimes it'll get released whatever the regulatory regime. This should be punished, but it's strange to talk about it as an inevitable first step toward there being no secrets.
I think that this is a succinct definition of privacy in the 21st century.
I think it isn't. I'm being a grammatical little bitch here, but this is a really hard conversation to have without some level of precision.
I think it's a serious problem. But it's not 'privacy'.
55: but that's illegal, though, which is kind of a big difference.
Pwned by 58, because she was reading my mind.
54: It's not a letter; it's an excerpt from a blog post.
61: Which is a serious violation of your privacy.
The threat of legal problems won't mean much to a fly-by-night cell phone carrier whose management decides for easy profit today.
This is the point where you link to the case of a cellphone company whose management sold all its customers' call lists.
63: only if there's anything in there that doesn't relate to boobs, as far as I understand this conversation.
58.
If you say so. It's the information which is cheapest to generate privately, especially with smartphones, and which has the highest market value now.
I don't see that domestic laws are the right way to think about this, as both the laws and their enforcement are pretty malleable. Maybe we differ on this point.
Here's an example, is this OK? It looks like it was legal. http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2012/02/app-privacy-whos-uploading-your-contact-list/
Perhaps credit records are a clearer example-- both content and access are poorly regulated in the US, to widespread apathy.
I don't see that domestic laws are the right way to think about this, as both the laws and their enforcement are pretty malleable. Maybe we differ on this point.
As a hammer, I think everything is a nail, but how else are we going to think about it other than through a legal framework? I mean, if laws are the wrong way to think about it, what else is there other than going off grid and socializing exclusively with wolverines?
As far as I know, management hasn't sold server records to the highest bidder, no.
But: http://news.cnet.com/Spy-program-snoops-on-cell-phones/2100-1029_3-6055760.html
and: http://news.cnet.com/ATT-sued-over-NSA-spy-program/2100-1028_3-6033501.html
Again, it's technically possible now, maybe has happened quietly. If credit records are clearere, fine, the politics are identical.
Here's an example, is this OK? It looks like it was legal. http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2012/02/app-privacy-whos-uploading-your-contact-list/
I'd call this sort of thing something that cries out for regulation making it illegal for any program to suck information out of your devices without telling you or to resell it. It's a newish issue, and insufficiently regulated yet, but not conceptually difficult.
I'm broadly in agreement with the no-right-to-forgetting arguments, but it makes me very grumpy. I deleted my FB acct, and will probably never reinstate it, in part because I stubbornly didn't want other people to post and tag photos of me. Only one of them was embarrassing -- I am 100% certain that I will pay for emailing it to my sister years ago, somewhere, somehow -- the rest were just ugly. Google+ is so low-traffic by comparison that I'm less worried about my google accounts: no one posts anything there, least of all photos of me.
But that's trivial; the more annoying thing is that persistence of data seems to be inversely proportional to the value of the data. The drunken picture, or the drunken usenet posts, will last forever, but how many files and messages have you lost for good and always because you didn't obsessively back everything up in three places? I doubt that I'm the only person who has failed to back things up. I could just write all my (hypothetical) poetry on people's FB walls, I suppose.
There's also the received idea these days that your google/FB/linkedin search results "are your resume," so presumably people are penalized for having no presence in those venues. I have absolutely no idea whether this is at all true or not.
In conclusion, I will henceforth handwrite my comments and OCR them if I deem them worthy of posting here.
68: What's the common factor, from your point of view, between an iPhone app uploading your contacts list and AT&T giving your phone records to the NSA? I mean, I get that they're both privacy related, but I don't see any tight relationship between the kind of ill effects I'd expect from each of them, and I don't see any common solution.
I'm losing track of what point you're arguing, other than that privacy is important and there are many leaks of personal data that we are insufficiently outraged about.
53: Absent good faith, Sifu's comments on this thread are sort of charmingly obtuse. It really, truly, is possible to have some intermediate steps. Requiring FB to allow a user to delete anything she herself has posted to her own account on a server that FB itself controls isn't going to break the internet. It won't remove all traces of the post, it may be re-posted somewhere on FB or elsewhere, but it's better than nothing.
Anyhow: use a pseudonym! And if you don't, remember that everything you do on the internet is essnetially public! And for chrissakes don't take pictures of people on drugs at parties! people are stupid and inexperienced! Kids who post something on their own FB page don't necessarily understand what that could mean 30 years later! Drunk people don't always make the best choices!
FB being a stand-in for other companies, of course.
72: I'm mostly on the Sifu side of that one, although I believe without fully understanding the breaking the internet bit. I don't think anyone would disagree with you that it would be a good idea for social media sites to be required to make people's own accounts fully editable/deletable; it's just that while that's something, it's pretty far from a complete solution, and it's not something that can be well conceptualized as a right to clear the information off the internet as a whole.
72.last: I'm not claiming it as a social solution. It's just, on a personal level, my advice.
In the words of the Shadow, "Fuck. You. The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Suck it up."
Speaking as someone with a past 'spent conviction' on a nonviolent but embarassing no-jail-time misdeameanor that actually comes up constantly in job interviews, etc. every time I am googled, I think there are excellent reasons to be able to take convictions out of the public record. There are actually sentences that are supposed to blank your criminal record once they are done but if there has been any searchable coverage or mention of it on the internet then that protection becomes useless.
Submitting a letter to the editor implicitly grants a license to publish it. If the paper wants to publish a modified version, they come back to the author for permission. Copyright remains with the author.
Some websites have language in their privacy policy that says that posting material to the site grants a nonexclusive license to the site owner to publish it. Where there is such language, then the site need not take down pictures (or other material) that have been posted to it. Copyright remains with the creator, but the site is in the same position as a newspaper over letters to the editor: the copyright-holder has licensed publication and can't now withdraw that license.
it's not something that can be well conceptualized as a right to clear the information off the internet as a whole.
I certainly agree that this is neither possible nor, speaking quite broadly, desirable. Again, though, there may be intermediate steps. We can require -- or demand (there are plenty of things that aren't/shouldn't be legally enforceable but which could be part of a code of conduct that companies are pressured by consumers and policy groups to adopt) -- more disclosure, less data collection in the first place, ToS that aren't impenetrable, more opt-ins instead of opt-outs.
Copyright remains with the creator, but the site is in the same position as a newspaper over letters to the editor: the copyright-holder has licensed publication and can't now withdraw that license.
That, I'd like to see regulation barring social-media sites from doing.
77: nonviolent but embarassing no-jail-time misdeameanor
I suppose you don't want to say, but you are anonymous. Anything entertaining?
Currently many entities believe that they need such a license in order to display the user's material at all. This seems like the issue is just whether the agreement allows (or is required to allow) revocation.
77 is a tough situation. My sympathies.
There's a missing high-level concept I want and don't have a word for, that's close to 'rights' but not quite there. "Right" annoys me where it's aspirational, or poorly defined, or unenforceable. But I want a word for an agreed upon societal goal or value that it is expected will be enforced by specific laws and regulations. Like, I want Congress to pass a statement of intent that "It is the sense of Congress that, where practical and reasonable, all people should retain control over information that they made public or provided to third parties. Specific laws and regulations will be passed in accordance with this principle." Or something.
81, 84: Kraab is a better person than I am. I do actually sympathize as well, just didn't think to say it.
85. You used "goal", "value" and "principle" in that contribution. Any of them would do, depending on how you want to slant your concept, but none of them has a legal or moral force analogous to "rights". Should they? Should it be a question of context? If I craft a brief aspirational statement to cover your requirement, how do I ensure that it has the moral force of the Sermon on the Mount or the Declaration of Independence, rather than some jerk commenting on a boutique blog?
Anyhow: use a pseudonym! And if you don't, remember that everything you do on the internet is essnetially public! And for chrissakes don't take pictures of people on drugs at parties!
This very site, full of pseudonyms, is a counterexample, suggesting that the costs mentioned in 22 are actually very low.
But people want to interact online with people they know in real life! At that point, your pseudonym is just a nickname.
100,000,000 worker general strike today in India! Roll the union on!
All of that is the problem -- it's why the concept I want is kind of missing. I want it to be sort of a statement of identity: "As a society, we care about issues of privacy and control over personal data, and will take reasonable regulatory action to protect it. Regulations and laws that don't serve this goal are wrong and should be changed.)
Speaking as someone with a past 'spent conviction' on a nonviolent but embarassing no-jail-time misdeameanor that actually comes up constantly in job interviews, etc. every time I am googled, I think there are excellent reasons to be able to take convictions out of the public record.
This is exactly the reason that the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (1974) exists.
#smugknifecrime
OT: So I just got papers from opposing counsel that arrived in the mail about four days after I'd expect them to have based on when he says they were mailed. And there's no human-readable postmark, just a stuck-on piece of paper with a bar code. Anyone know how to turn the bar code into a postmark date?
(Come to think, it looks like something from some kind of postage meter, so I suppose whatever date it says, he could have actually dropped it in the mail days after printing the label. So no way to tell.)
92: Not bad, but what's a manifesto that's been adopted by a government?
93 followup: On googling, the bar codes are an address, not a postmark. The envelopes don't have a postmark: the stamps aren't cancelled. I'd suspect skullduggery, but I can't figure out how he would have gotten the envelopes into our mailroom without, you know, mailing them. So maybe I'm just being paranoid: I can't think of the last time I saw an envelope that was stamped rather than postage-metered, and possibly the USPS just doesn't postmark them anymore.
Anyway, it's not enough of a time issue to make a fuss over. I'm still suspicious, but too lazy to investigate further.
I agree with 28, in that mores are going to have to change as people with drunken pictures of themselves in their twenties on Facebook move into management positions. But I don't think that entails that there won't be a problem with more data feeding into social biases. (E.g., everyone knows that drunken photos on Facebook are part of the past, but it proves that the liked guy is a gung-ho team player, and the outsider has no self-control, and the woman is just a bubblehead, etc., etc.)
And there is a related problem with boundaries. My students really expect to be Facebook friends, but I don't think my teaching them means they should have the ability to see pictures from ten years ago posted by other people. And I don't have really any embarrassing pictures, but I don't like that my options are "be the antisocial prof with the weird hangup about friending students" or "have students looking at my wedding pictures."
99. Any chance it was stamped and addressed but then overlooked by the person who was supposed to mail it, so that when they noticed they thought "Oh shit" and ran it round by hand?
We just need to start adopting pseudonyms for the workplace.
If that happened, I'll never know, because the mailroom won't be able to tell me how the envelope came in. But that's serious fraud: this was something that was required to have been mailed Monday last week, and to file it they're going to have to include an affirmation swearing it was mailed on time. (If they'd screwed up, it'd be easy to arrange forgiveness after the fact, but just covering it up without clearing it with me and the court is not okay.)
(That is, it didn't come in through the Managing Clerk's Office, which is how hand deliveries are supposed to come in. If he got it into the mailroom somehow, there's no record. I will stop obsessing now.)
So, let me ask a related question, which I've been thinking about for the last couple of weeks: as a private individual what are the aspects of privacy that I should be most careful about online.
A bit of background, first, at the point at which I first started using the web I was given the impression that it was just good horse sense to make sure, as ST is saying, that online information wasn't easily traceable to your real life identity. This sense of caution has, as it's turned out, mostly kept me from using social media, and so I wonder whether it's excess caution -- and everybody else is correct to think that the risks of having a moderately identifiable online presence which you don't have control over are actually relatively small, or if that common sense is still common sense.
The things that I have been able to think of so far are (approximately running from most closely resembling "personal" privacy to least personal):
1) Don't reveal anything online which would have a negative affect my employment or dating prospects in such a way that it can be connected back to my actual person (e.g, presidential pseudonyms might be sufficient protection for this category of information).
2) Don't do anything which would excess vitriol to online accounts that I care about (I'm thinking hear about the various stories about feminist bloggers being harassed -- most of which include people tracking down the person's real name, but which would be disturbing even if limited to just online attacks).
3) "Don't write anything in an e-mail (or IM) that you wouldn't want to see on the front page of [the Huffington Post]." Remember that personal communications can always be forwarded without your knowledge or permission.
4) Don't reveal financial information or anything which would be particularly juicy information for scammers or con artists (as a contrived example it would probably be better not post comments which included both (a) statements implying personal wealth and (b) mention that you have a relative that you haven't seen in decades but would like to hear from at some point).
5) Beware of the risks of 3rd parties having information stolen from them -- such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, or e-mail addresses.
6) yada yada yada insecure wireless/ plain-text http/e-mail yada yada yada.
Note: obviously part of what makes the "right to be forgotten" important is that people's sense of what falls into category (1) can change over time.
Of that list 5 & 6 seem easily addressable by regulation. 4 is always going to be common sense. 3 is one of those things that's always going to be potentially annoying about e-mail/IM, but most of of the time isn't an issue because social norms discourage people from sharing private communication. (1) and (2) are messy.
So, is that a fair summary, and are there other key areas of online privacy that I'm leaving out?
If I have learned anything from the blogs "Zero Hedge" and "Naked Capitalism", it is that the correct response to this clear but ultimately minor error in the filing process is to totally lose your shit and run around screaming that this marks the collapse of the entire system.
71. I'm losing track of what point you're arguing, other than that privacy is important and there are many leaks of personal data that we are insufficiently outraged about.
That's about it. Control of one's own identity is a benefit that's being eroded through widespread apathy.
The two examples of phone connection data being leaked share technical feasibility-- I'm afraid that whatever is cheap and easy to do will happen if it's slightly profitable, as in both of these.
Less pessimistically, the CFPB seems to be taking an interest in credit histories. Profitability depends on what people want and expect, and those wants can change for the better, even if not yet.
106: You mean my thing? If I were sure the guy had hand-delivered the envelopes late, rather than two envelopes just both having not been postmarked somehow, I wouldn't actually do anything immediate because it'd be hard to prove to the judge, but I'd be spreading the story and warning people about the guy. A lawyer who'd fake a service deadline is in serious violation of professional norms, and should be watched carefully.
I can't think of the last time I saw an envelope that was stamped rather than postage-metered, and possibly the USPS just doesn't postmark them anymore.
I just received one,* and it is indeed postmarked.
*Apparently, the people who send out incoherent conspiracy theory mailings to lawyers at best tenuously connected to the (apparent) subject matter of their delusion** still use stamps.
**As best I can tell here--and I have not read all five single-spaced typewritten pages, but my correspondent helpfully highlighted several dozen no-doubt key phrases in yellow--something to do with the Titanic, Al Qaeda, the Sicilian Mafia, Harry Houdini, Comcast, Tommy Dorsey, and the Illinois Central Railroad. Oh, and Hitler.
105:
(7) The "Big Data" issue: what are corporations doing with giant assemblages of individually innocuous, public, data points about you? I don't know the answer to this one -- I'm paranoid rather than certain there's a problem -- but I worry.
109 further: when I was interning for a federal judge, I wrote a draft opinion dismissing a suit brought against, inter alia, Ted Kennedy, Anthony Kennedy, London, China, and Africa.
The "Big Data" issue: what are corporations doing with giant assemblages of individually innocuous, public, data points about you? I don't know the answer to this one -- I'm paranoid rather than certain there's a problem -- but I worry.
Such as the recent Target story? I haven't decided how concerned I should be about that. On one hand, creepy, on the other hand I think one Felix Salmon's commenters had it right -- the biggest potential for harm isn't from what [large company] knows, but if they inadvertently reveal it to a 3rd party, as in the google buzz problems or Target supposedly outing the pregnant teen. If that is the major problem that also seems amenable to regulation. But I'm not sure.
109:Tommy Dorsey?
I knew it. Damn that fits!
77: John Adams killed somebody?
I mean, John Quincy Adams: a killing gentleman for sure, and we all know about Henry Adams and the Russian naval attaché's wife, and Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and his band of outlaws cut up rough, literally, a time or two in the Public Garden, but I thought Abigail kept Big John in line.
Seriously, misdemeanors are distinguishable from murder and other violent crimes.
113: Inadvertently or advertently; like, I don't think there's now any bar on Target selling a list of presumed preggos.
The full paranoia is "X-Pert Personnel Analysis: our patented datamining formulae tell you which job applicants are reliable. Give us identifying information, and we'll scrape the internet for data, and tell you on the basis of that data who to hire." Or something like that: price discrimination, whatever.
To the OP: publishers and media outlets are required by law in most countries to get written permission from, say, the subject of a photograph in order to legally be able to use their image and likeness. (I know I'm required to facilitate this by Canadian privacy legislation, for instance, if the organization I work for wants to give a broadcaster the rights to use images of our members.) I would think that anyone who really wants to argue, either morally or legally, against "the right to be forgotten" would have to bring some arguments to the table about why such laws are wrong, since what seems to me to be happening is largely an extension of that principle, parallel to the way that technologies like Facebook have put publishing power in the hands of the ordinary citizen that they did not previously have.
I don't think a "right to be forgotten" is a useful or, indeed, a possible construct. But this is an enormously complicated area in which there is already tons of legislation and different contractual provisions, so it's a little crazy to say that there's an all or nothing requirement for disclosure of private information over the internet; it's an enormously complicated area that will be muddled through by courts and legislators for a long time to come.
This war is probably already lost, but I wonder whether our understanding of likely insoluble and certainly widespread problems is entirely well served by characterizing everything, all the time, as an issue of "right."
119. That one was lost in 1689, at the latest.
OT: The Awl seems to have gotten poor old E/m/ily G/o/uld's player piano roll back from the dry cleaner or wherever such things go to have their Brooklynisms freshened. This is not the way to persuade me to give my precious Dead White Men a break and female writers a chance, Internet.
121: The first few paragraphs should win some kind of prize for Least Interesting Set-Up for A Piece of Literary Criticism Evar. Or something. I mean, I guess if you're a lit geek, it might be more compelling, but it was the written equivalent of the adults talking in a Peanuts special for me.
publishers and media outlets are required by law in most countries to get written permission from, say, the subject of a photograph in order to legally be able to use their image and likeness.
Pretty sure that's not the case for news coverage in the US.
124 -- it's complicated. In the US, there's generally not a requirement for newsworthy pictures taken in public, but there may well be for other photos. Generally speaking it would be a tort for, e.g., someone to photograph you drunkenly mooning them in a private setting, without permission, and then disseminate it to the public.
Permission as to the photograph, not the mooning. Fuck editing.
123: I think you need to check your privilege, racist. It's readers like you who make Brooklyn a borough of people with day jobs instead of a strolling paradise of artisanal cheese connoisseurs.
124: Yeah, the waivers I mention would normally apply to either commercial use (our case with the broadcaster) or use for personal benefit (tangible or intangible, the latter being applicable to the bulk of social media). Canada has exemptions for news purposes and provisions for fair use just as the US does, so a North American "right to be forgotten" would have to be crafted with that in mind.
So, now that this thread is dead, can we have a discussion about this fascinating chart. I never would have guessed that Acura skews Republican, that Ford cars skew slightly more Democratic than Republican, or that Toyota skews slightly Republican.
Repub primary. Everything I am seeing, would indicate that Romney will hang on by a few percent in Michigan, maybe a bit more. I think Sanotrum is going to have trouble staying competitive and relevant through next week--although I think Romney is wounded enough that a brokered saviour has to be on the order of 25% shot now.
Related: Federal appeals court rules people have a Fifth Amendment right not to be forced to decrypt their personal data.
Pretty interesting.
Canada's privacy and access to information laws are pretty well-thought out. Whether they work better than the hodgepodge mess that the US has is another question.
And facebook has had to respond to Canadian law.
I think the "right to be forgotten" is a horrible way to look at privacy. But it's really not difficult to imagine social media companies being subject to the boring, ordinary records retention laws with respect to user data. Are you going to be able to outlaw someone from taking a screenshot of a page that is later changed, and then posting that screenshot? Probably not. But that doesn't make it any harder to require companies to delete form their own servers and backups and whatnots the stuff you think you're deleting from your account.