Re: do we have a right to be forgotten?

On Apr 15, 2011, at 15:42 , Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:

> * David Singer wrote:
>> I don't think we do have a right to delete public information about us. 
>> I am not sure it's achievable (can you imagine trying to get a server in
>> Zimbabwe cleaned of information?).  I'm not sure it's technically
>> definable or achievable.  And I am not sure it's even desirable for me,
>> let alone for society as a whole -- as I said, if the mechanism exists
>> to make someone's records disappear, who is to say who has their hand on
>> the lever?
> 
> There are two points that you don't address here. One is that the infor-
> mation about you may be untrue or it may be unreasonably invasive. The
> other is that there is a difference between deleting something and put-
> ting something behind barriers. Say a newspaper website publishes some-
> thing about you that is both unreasonably invasive and false; it seems
> quite reasonable for you to demand removal or correction from the web-
> site; it is somewhat less reasonable to ask the Internet Archive to al-
> so remove their copy of their site. As such, I don't think considering
> this from an infrastructure point of view is the right approach, beyond
> pointing out the risks in that infrastructure existing.

I agree that there are lots of issues I don't address.

However, I am not sure that the digital age introduces any new problems with regards to handling false or unduly invasive publishing, over, say, newspapers. We have social and legal mechanisms for dealing with that already, and, as you say, it probably should be a matter of public record that such-and-such newspaper was forced to recant an untrue story that they published about so-and-so, indeed, if someone wants to know, what the nature of the untruth was.

David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Monday, 18 April 2011 17:59:09 UTC