| > and illegal theft of your data People are free to hide information or to take steps to obscure it, but I do not believe that anyone can own a fact. Even if we were broadly in agreement that Right to Be Forgotten was a good idea, you still would not be able to own a fact. We sometimes create exceptions to people's right to share data and grant individuals/companies temporary monopolies over certain kinds of information -- the best example of this is IP law. However, even someone who owns a copyright can't morally claim that they literally own the information. The state has given them a temporary monopoly in the interest of promoting public good, but there is no intrinsic moral right to IP that they can claim they have. Laws of this nature are a restriction of rights that we tolerate because of potential social benefits. The system you are proposing goes far beyond the current Right to Be Forgotten. > How would you like it if people sold information about you based on what they saw and heard you do in public? People can already do that. They can go post on blogs or Twitter that they saw you do something. We already have a mechanism for indexing, searching, and dumping the contents of brains: fingers and a computer keyboard. Right to Be Forgotten is controversial, but what you propose is much stricter. If Right to Be Forgotten tried to essentially make knowledge forbidden -- to make it illegal to write down your memories or post them online -- it wouldn't just be controversial; practically no one would support it. |