[jamiemchale]

At what point are you remarkable enough to lose the right to be forgotten? What counts as being in the public eye? Do you have to desire to be in the public eye?

How do you manage the case of an unremarkable person removing something, then becoming remarkable enough to lose that right?

[nhaehnle]

Such questions are messy and fuzzy, which means that technical people often get terribly hung up about them. The important thing to remember is that those questions aren't new. Laws about libel and slander, about insults, about a person's right to their image, and much more have existed for a long time. When there are disputes, court cases happen. As a result, our understanding of what is accepted and what isn't gets refined over time. It goes so far that as society changes, the interpretation of laws changes along with it.

In the end, these things mostly work, and that's good enough. Most importantly, most people feel that it is better than refusing to have such rules just because they may be fuzzy.

[minot]

Is the woman (who I shall keep unnamed) who tweeted about the people in front of her making jokes remarkable? Are the people she tweeted about remarkable? Could the woman ask to take down all articles surrounding the issue? Could the people she tweeted pictures of get the tweet taken down (assuming she hasn't already done so)? Could the people have every single website that has presumably scrape or screenshot twitter delete their archives?

To me, the simplest way to fix this is to throw out the right to be forgotten. Nobody has a right to be forgotten. The simplest implementation may not be the best but at least this is achievable.

[ominous]

There is no right to be forgotten in the real world. If anything, damnatio memoriae[0] was a punishment, not a privilege. Just as well, you can't ask for world population to forget a nursery rhyme, or me to forget I saw you riding a Segway. The internet is part of the real world. Everything happens in the real world, 'IRL' has been deprecated.

People (and the sub class 'legislators') should accept that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae

[icebraining]

Just because it's called the Right to be Forgotten, doesn't mean it actually entails burning memories off people's heads. You're arguing against a strawman.

[ominous]

Thank you, and I understand. But I'm arguing that the internet is part of the collective memory of Man.

[marrs]

This is why we have courts, to answer these sorts of questions on a case by case basis.

[jamiemchale]

I agree with the other commenters here - it can be a bit 'fuzzy', which is disagreeable to people who like definite answers. Case by case is probably a good way of tackling it. The cases, however, do need to be held in reference to the law, and those laws need to be appropriate for the scope and scale of our communication technology.

If we are arguing that someone needs to be 'remarkable' then I'd be interested in what people think counts as remarkable. You may be remarkable in a certain community, job or geography, but not in others.

[qznc]

Exactly. It is similar to "what is 'fair use' of copyrighted material?"