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by axanoeychron 4407 days ago
This is a strawman argument.

It's blatantly obvious that a historically significant event such as a dictator needs to be kept as part of the history books because of the impact it had on many different people.

At the end - the argument that anything that is published and is true as a reason why we should not allow people to delete things about themselves is deeply disturbing and sets a dangerous precedent. Just because something is true does not mean it should be broadcast for everyone to hear and see. If you go to the toilet and leave a big dump - not everyone needs to know this, when you did it, its mass.

Lossless public record is something that people do not understand the full implications. I am predicting a collision course with the precedence from this case with anonymous gossip sharing applications like Secret. No good comes from allowing people to publish things about others with the intention to harm and no recourse for victims.

What the forgetting laws is for is to help a young person delete embarrassing content from the modern day equivalent of Geocities or Bebo. People are screened for employment online - why should a child whose transgressions in a previous generation would have been transient be stored for eternity? What utility does that provide?

EDIT: If you disagree - use the reply button.

5 comments

It's blatantly obvious to you. It may not be blatantly obvious to a nationalistic charismatic leader who thinks Franco wasn't too bad and actually needs only a bit of better PR and some long tongues silenced, and it would be for the best of public interest to do this. Look at what's going on in Russia. You think it can't happen in Spain or Germany? It already happened before and very well can happen again. Anytime and anywhere. The layer protecting the rights of people from oppression - including popular and widely supported oppression - is very thin. EU rule made it even thinner. Now anybody can memory-hole any information they don't like - and this would especially true for powerful and connected people who want to suppress information about their wrongdoings. You worry about teenage shenanigans - but this can - and will - be used to hide very adult shenanigans with very important consequences too. And you will have no say in if it's "public interest" or not.
Did you read the entire article? The author uses Spain's legal treatment of those accused of torture in the Spanish civil war to make a very cogent argument that laws mandating we censor the past can have effects as broad as lossless public record. To say this is a strawman argument you would have to provide some evidence the author is ignoring/hiding the fact that the EU has clear criteria for scrubbing search.
> People are screened for employment online

The solution here is to regulate hiring practices, not access to information.

For example, in the US, it is not legal to base a hiring decision on whether an applicant is married. Anybody can search newspaper archives for marriage announcements, but we don't ban newspapers.

You can't regulate this. How do you know why I didn't really hire you?
My point still stands. How do you know that I didn't hire you because I hate gays but I tell everyone I didn't hire you because of that one Java question you got wrong. It's very very hard to prove and can be expensive to take to take to court.

People like you with your rosy view of the world make it hard for people with real problems to get by.

My main problem is how completely vague this ruling is. Yes this article takes the point to an extreme that no one who supports the ruling agrees with. But that's because no one has given any concrete outline of how the rule is supposed to work, so the media is going to run with their wildest imaginings.

If Europe wants to have a right to forget they need to create a specific legal framework that tells companies what they need to do. They can't just say "People have the right to be forgotten, lol you deal with it google et. al." Is Google and every other indexing website now meant to either comply or face a legal battle for every single request they get? That's ludicrous.

Vagueness is power. Power to decide which information can and can not be published. It is a vast power - with one wave of a hand and saying "public interest" you can completely disappear one piece of knowledge (e.g. that government official X did illegally wiretaps and practiced torture) and retain another (e.g. that vocal opposition activist is accused by X in some heinous deeds - while simultaneously wiping the information that X himself is a liar and a criminal that can not be trusted). Of course whoever is engineering this system would not want to give up this enormous power by strictly defining the bounds - why would they give up power voluntarily?

Yes, that means that European courts can come to any company and demand any information to be deleted as soon as "public interest" requires so. That's not the flaw - that's the whole point of it. That's control.

I agree with your conclusions. However, you make the argument that what was possible in previous generations not possible today is a bad thing. This is not a good argument. Actions should be judged to be good or bad irrespective of historical precendent/non-precedent.