"Nothing fades away anymore."

September 22, 2014 9:47 AM

The Solace of Oblivion by Jeffrey Toobin [The New Yorker] "In Europe, the right to be forgotten trumps the Internet."
posted by Fizz (22 comments total)

Excellent piece, and it does a good job of showing why the "right to be forgotten" is not censorship.

It's interesting and telling that EPIC supports the concept.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:07 AM on September 22, 2014

goodbye, yelp. here comes the right to be forgotten.
posted by gorestainedrunes at 10:09 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

Well, no, it's censorship; it is the forcible redaction of communication by a government. The question is whether it is *justified* censorship.
posted by tavella at 10:19 AM on September 22, 2014 [9 favorites]

Considering that Yelp just got the Ninth to grant them to right to legalized extortion, "good riddance" is more appropriate.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:19 AM on September 22, 2014

It's odd that this article leads with the example of photographs which never should have been made public in the first place. There doesn't need to be a new principle as hosting them on the internet is already unlawful without permission. The same goes for photos and film stolen from online storage. Indeed, anything posted online without the creator's permission.
posted by Thing at 10:30 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger believes that the European Court has taken an important first step. “It’s a pragmatic solution,” he said. “The underlying data are not deleted, but the Court has created, in effect, a speed bump.” In Germany, he explained, “if you quickly search on Google.de, you’ll not find the links that have been removed. But if you spend the extra ten seconds to go to Google.com you find them. You are not finding them accidentally, and that’s as it should be. This speed-bump approach gives people a chance to grow and get beyond these incidents in their pasts.”

Mayer-Schoenberger Principle: "Lazy people are not entitled to their rights."
posted by Thing at 10:35 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

It'd be more apalled if it didn't work about as well as you'd expect.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 10:37 AM on September 22, 2014

Well, no, it's censorship; it is the forcible redaction of communication by a government. The question is whether it is *justified* censorship.

Personally, I think they make a rather good argument as for why it is. As was pointed out, our various rights are in tension with each other and broadening one can diminish others. It's telling that the people opposed to the "right to be forgotten" really have no response to the actual injuries that people suffer from this data being indexed and easily searchable. And I find the fact that many of them are the ones complaining about government surveillance to be more than a tad hypocritical.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:57 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]

The "right to be forgotten" is such passive-voice bullshit; it ought to be called compulsory forgetting. There might be a case to be made for having a process by which institutions might be made to dispose of old data, but it probably requires a much more sophisticated articulation of privacy rights generally, not this weird thing that limits what are basically cross-references but not storage itself. The process—censoring hyperlinks—just seems like a manifestation of future shock, affixing paper's discoverability limitations (like decaying paper and card catalogs) onto hypertext.
posted by ddbeck at 10:57 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]

As noted by Kevin Drum, this is already being used to conceal corporate malfeasance.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 11:08 AM on September 22, 2014 [5 favorites]

It's telling that the people opposed to the "right to be forgotten" really have no response to the actual injuries that people suffer from this data being indexed and easily searchable.

The injury caused is not that of the information being available, but only the difference between it being available right now or after a ten second search. All it takes is one person to find that information for the harm to be caused, while you've screwed over the hundreds of people whose right to find that information was frustrated by the "speed bump". Basically you've added nothing to privacy but chipped away a little freedom of speech.
posted by Thing at 11:09 AM on September 22, 2014

But if you spend the extra ten seconds to go to Google.com you find them. You are not finding them accidentally, and that’s as it should be.

People will soon figure out that only google.com can be trusted.

I expect we'll then see that added to the blocklists that are increasingly popular in Europe.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:14 AM on September 22, 2014

Privacy versus freedom of speech. What about spent convictions? Under UK law we have the right to not to have to disclose convictions after a given length of time has passed dependant on the severity of the offence under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. Once that conviction is spent an indivdual no longer has to declare that conviction on job applications, for example.

What use is that if you can google that someone was convicted of x ten years ago?
posted by fatfrank at 11:14 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]

I think the basic premise is "who owns the data? the subject or the observer?" and the EU's perspective is that the subject owns complete rights to their data.
posted by Annika Cicada at 11:14 AM on September 22, 2014

As noted by Kevin Drum, this is already being used to conceal corporate malfeasance.

And as the piece in the OP noted, that actually wasn't the case (it was a commentor who sent the request, not the subject of the piece.)

The injury caused is not that of the information being available, but only the difference between it being available right now or after a ten second search. All it takes is one person to find that information for the harm to be caused, while you've screwed over the hundreds of people whose right to find that information was frustrated by the "speed bump". Basically you've added nothing to privacy but chipped away a little freedom of speech.

How was nothing added to privacy? This seems to be a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:17 AM on September 22, 2014

This actually seems pretty misleading to me. Like the example of the Nazis using Dutch governmental records: whatever equivalent of the Nazis might appear in the future, they aren't going to be limited to public Google results. They'd have direct access to Google's index, the indexes produced by many other search engines and crawlers, and whatever's being stored in the NSA's datacenter or something like it.

And unless increases in storage capacity reach a ceiling, at some point we'll have thumb drives that can contain a copy of the entire internet from some historical date; and hence things like a copy of a search engine's index will be directly available to average people unfiltered. Google is still very much the card catalog, not the library itself as the article claims, and what's more there are many other catalogs of the same material. So even if European countries' restrictions were extended to google.com, the filtering of search results approach would still be a superficial solution of temporary value.
posted by XMLicious at 11:35 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

This actually seems pretty misleading to me. Like the example of the Nazis using Dutch governmental records: whatever equivalent of the Nazis might appear in the future, they aren't going to be limited to public Google results.

It does seem like a weird thing to bring up. The "right to be forgotten" is primarily about public reputation, and the fact that everyone's reputation is a lot more public in the age of Google and social media. The collection, retention, and aggregation of reams of personal data about pretty much everybody, by public and private institutions alike, is a separate (and much bigger) problem.

I thought this was a great point that's easily overlooked:

But for the Court to outsource to Google complicated case-specific decisions about whether to publish or suppress something is wrong.

There are plenty of cases where it serves no public interest to have certain information easily retrievable, e.g. embarrassing photos someone took of you at a party when you were 16. There are plenty of other cases where there is a public interest that outweighs any harm done to an individual's reputation, e.g. bad behavior by public officials. I'm not sure it's a great idea for Google to be making those calls without oversight or right of appeal. (Granted, the court systems we have today aren't necessarily much better.)
posted by twirlip at 12:01 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

I don't think it's all that weird, considering the selective bias we seem to have in discussing data capture and analysis - we're horrified when the government does it, but seem to have no issues with data being the currency of the internet. Look at the EFF's "Who Has Your Back" campaign - they look in detail at how companies handle your data regarding the government, but none of the categories deals with how they handle the data internally. And we're already seeing this data collection being wielded against the underclass - as was mentioned, it's much harder for someone who has a conviction to find employment now than it was 30 years ago.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:21 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

we're horrified when the government does it, but seem to have no issues with data being the currency of the internet.

Nobody has a problem with the government collecting *public records*. This is kind of the opposite of that.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 1:18 PM on September 22, 2014

I have some theoretical sympathy with the *idea* of a right to be forgotten, those companies that try to blackmail people with old booking photos are horrible as an example. But my cynical suspicion is that the way this is going to work out is that the kind of people who can afford lawyers will carefully erase their offenses from the public record, leaving them free to prey on the weak again, while the vulnerable and poor will continue to have their history available.

In other words, it will destroy even the idea of 'sousveillance', while keeping the panopticon firmly in place.
posted by tavella at 1:41 PM on September 22, 2014 [6 favorites]

In other words, it will destroy even the idea of 'sousveillance', while keeping the panopticon firmly in place.

In other words, like it is right now?

Sousveillance was always a Bad Idea. It's predicated on the "death of privacy", which has always struck me as being a very unhealthy place to start.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:17 PM on September 22, 2014

I'd like the right to forget Jeffrey Toobin. Not as much as I'd like the right to forget Tom Friedman, which I think should be enforced as a fundamental human right.
posted by grounded at 4:17 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]