Re: do we have a right to be forgotten?

David, 

the right to be forgotten is just a functional statement for a thing that 
leads to a goal: To be forgiven. Humans make mistakes. Imagine how cruel a 
society would be that would measure everyone of us like high profile 
politicians. As soon as a persons gets some profile, we are guaranteed to see 
some nasty things from the past appear (mud throwing). 

It was Brandeis in Boston (late judge at the US Supreme court) who wrote 
against those new portable cameras that allowed photographers from the Boston 
Inquirer (I think was the newspaper) to take a picture of his partner Warren 
and a woman who wasn't his wife walking and in hand in a park. 

After some years, the dust had settled and Warren could restart to practice. 

How would that be today? Marco described it very efficiently: Warren would 
never ever be able to restart to practice law as somebody would just google 
his name and the old story would come up endlessly. 

If this is at the fingertips of everybody, on the long run, it will create 
pressure to be conform to society; not to have different opinions. Not having 
different opinions is not really good for democracy.

So two central values are at stake: The protection of democracy and the right 
to be forgiven. And they are related (and have some relation to Privacy)

And yes, I know that Tim forgot the delete button on the web. We are at the 
beginning of a discussion where we have to ask ourselves in which Society we 
want to live in. The things we discuss here are - I think- very fundamental.

Best, 

Rigo

On Monday 18 April 2011 20:14:28 David Singer wrote:
> > Physical disembodiment of information
> 
> That is new, for sure.  I was talking about the publication of libels,
>  slanders, or invasive material. We've had to deal with handling these
>  issues, as a society, for centuries, and we have mechanisms for handling
>  them.
>

Received on Monday, 18 April 2011 22:21:28 UTC