Re: do we have a right to be forgotten?

* 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.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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Received on Friday, 15 April 2011 22:42:57 UTC