Cleveland.com’s ‘right to be forgotten’ removes names from some crime stories • Hacker News Board

Re: Cleveland.com’s ‘right to be forgotten’ removes names from some crime stories

#81

Post by justin66 » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 7:49 PM UTC

danso wrote: post #75

justin66 wrote: post #34

This is not the strangest self-censorship cleveland.com has engaged in. The strangest I'm aware of is publishing otherwise full physical descriptions of wanted criminal suspects while omitting their race.

Do you have examples? Many media outlets have a policy of not including race unless there are n (usually 5-7) other physical descriptors.

> Do you have examples?

I do not possess any examples. The policy is described in a rather facile way here, however:

https://www.cleveland.com/readers/index.ssf/2014/07/the_comp...

Possibly the policy has changed recently, I don't read cleveland.com much anymore. (I don't think much of the author of that article or the paper's senior editorial staff, for a lot of mostly unrelated reasons)

> Many media outlets have a policy of not including race unless there are n (usually 5-7) other physical descriptors.

That sounds about right, I guess. In addition to skin color I'd expect an eyewitness with a decent view of a crime to describe - although not necessarily to recall correctly! - build, height, gender, hair color, and clothing. Some of the other common identifying factors (voice, eye color, gait, scars and tattoos, etc.) seem like they might be a bit of stretch.

Re: Cleveland.com’s ‘right to be forgotten’ removes names from some crime stories

#82

Post by rwcarlsen » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 7:50 PM UTC

cribbles wrote: post #77

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Paranoid response: if such a versioning ledger were to exist, how could you trust it? Blockchain to the rescue (for real this time, I think, I'm not an expert or a blockchain fanboy). A publicly ledger that anyone can verify hasn't been tampered with is the whole point.

Why not just provide a hash for each version of the document?

But that just changes the problem to one of archiving the hashes immutably.

Re: Cleveland.com’s ‘right to be forgotten’ removes names from some crime stories

#83

Post by reubenmorais » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 7:50 PM UTC

cribbles wrote: post #77

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Paranoid response: if such a versioning ledger were to exist, how could you trust it? Blockchain to the rescue (for real this time, I think, I'm not an expert or a blockchain fanboy). A publicly ledger that anyone can verify hasn't been tampered with is the whole point.

Why not just provide a hash for each version of the document?

That's essentially what a blockchain is, except you also include the previous hash in the version you're hashing, so that changing one record invalidates all future hashes.

Re: Cleveland.com’s ‘right to be forgotten’ removes names from some crime stories

#84

Post by rwcarlsen » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 7:57 PM UTC

piker wrote: post #59

ddmd1 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US courts have not always agreed with that interpretation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Hearst_Corporation

Noted and agreed. See the comment below. The original response should have been phrased as aspirational. Clearly there's no right to be forgotten in the law today. However, query whether it's possible for the law to truly "forgive" a crime after a sentence is served without some efforts being taken to "forget".

I don't think the process of repentence+forgiveness can or should include things returning to a state as if nothing had happened. Scars will always remain and they are an important part of the human experience and help society remember and improve.

Re: Cleveland.com’s ‘right to be forgotten’ removes names from some crime stories

#85

Post by ksdale » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 8:07 PM UTC

notafraudster wrote: post #23

hirundo wrote: post #10

The ‘right to be forgotten’ is backwards. Much better would be a 'right to remember'. The right to be forgotten is a positive right, in that it requires other people to take action (e.g. delist a story from Google) to fulfill it. A right to remember would be a negative right. Like a freedom of the press doesn't require the government to subsidize a printing press or equivalent, a right to remember would just mean tha…

Positive rights and negative rights often clash, as the tension you correctly describe shows, but the implicit premise of your post is that all negative rights supersede all positive rights. I do not agree. The very conceptualization of negative rights was in response to a feeling that the positive rights guaranteed by earlier liberal thought were insufficient to secure a just and free society. It is far from obvious…

I think this is an excellent point.

I have no idea what the right answer is, but I think that the role of technology is really underappreciated.

On the one hand, people are probably correct to say that it's an infringement on their rights to not be able to talk about something that happened to them.

On the other hand, what it means to "talk about something" has changed radically. One hundred years ago, your reach would have been limited to the people in your social circle. If you were really determined to let people know what happened to you, you could take out an ad in the newspaper, but that would probably be seen as fairly weird if it was about something that happened years ago where the perpetrator has already been released from prison.

What about if the perpetrator decided to go live somewhere else, and the victim personally took it upon themselves to take out an ad in every city that the perpetrator moved to, telling everyone what happened. I daresay that person would be looked at as vindictive and possibly a little crazy.

The internet allows basically the last scenario, with very little effort on behalf of the victim, and none of the cost of publishing in a newspaper. It possibly even comes without the social cost of looking vindictive. Because it's so much easier to publish things online, no one considers the emotion that would be required to generate the post, as opposed to the strength of feeling required to get something published in a newspaper in a different city.

It seems to me that a discussion of rights without a discussion of technology will not accomplish much, as much as we'd like to believe that what is right is not dependent on something as arbitrary as the current level of tech.

Re: Cleveland.com’s ‘right to be forgotten’ removes names from some crime stories

#86

Post by salmonellaeater » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 8:10 PM UTC

piker wrote: post #37

cortesoft wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is always my argument against this sort of thing. Enforcing one person's right to be forgotten is infringing on someone else's right to remember. Say, for example, I get beat up by someone. They are convicted and go to jail, but then in 10 years time they get their record expunged. Am I no longer allowed to tell people about what happened? I should be allowed to tell my story. I should be allowed to tell pe…

It's not your right to dispense such justice--that in fact belongs to the state in a civilized society. I think this example proves the exact opposite of what you desire. Someone who has spent time in jail and had their record expunged 10 years later has been deemed by the state to have satisfied the burden of their offense, and, yes, their right to have their actions forgiven and forgotten should be at its zenith. […

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I can offer a third purpose for jail that I think is the most important: it keeps people who are likely to harm others from doing so.

This idea is in concordance with the idea of rehabilitation (both separation and rehabilitation can happen at once), and it accommodates cases where the convicted is mentally ill.

Re: Cleveland.com’s ‘right to be forgotten’ removes names from some crime stories

#87

Post by DenisM » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 8:18 PM UTC

Hupriene wrote: post #60

piker wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not your right to dispense such justice--that in fact belongs to the state in a civilized society. I think this example proves the exact opposite of what you desire. Someone who has spent time in jail and had their record expunged 10 years later has been deemed by the state to have satisfied the burden of their offense, and, yes, their right to have their actions forgiven and forgotten should be at its zenith. […

This isn't about dispensing justice. This is about my personal right to own my experience of my life and those I interact with. Saying that my anger over having been abused by someone is no longer justified just because the courts have seen fit to expunge their records of the crime is deeply intrusive. The criminal court's job is to rectify the individual's relationship with the government. It does nothing to rectify…

Holding the grudge is helping no one, lest of all the victim. One could argue it's not an essential liberty, one we could dispense with for other gains in society. Maybe a better course of action for the victim is to have the traumatic memory zapped [1] and go back to normal life.

[1] http://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/

Re: Cleveland.com’s ‘right to be forgotten’ removes names from some crime stories

#88

Post by fuzzybeard » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 8:23 PM UTC

rwcarlsen wrote: post #82

cribbles wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just provide a hash for each version of the document?

But that just changes the problem to one of archiving the hashes immutably.

Which is what blockchain does. We're experimenting with using it to create audit logs of data, which can't be tampered with.

Re: Cleveland.com’s ‘right to be forgotten’ removes names from some crime stories

#89

Post by slededit » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 8:24 PM UTC

jawns wrote: post #53

Former news editor here. Perhaps the biggest danger in this and other similar policies is not how it is applied today -- removing the names of people accused of minor crimes that have had their records expunged seems like a compassionate policy, given the effects it can have on things like employment prospects -- but in how it may be applied in the future. The idea that a newspaper archive is a collection of living d…

I think there needs to be some balance to the ease of research. Like if you want the original unmodified version you have to actually go to the newspaper archives.

In the past you could always do this research. But it was expensive so you wouldn’t just to check up on your new neighbor.

Re: Cleveland.com’s ‘right to be forgotten’ removes names from some crime stories

#90

Post by LanceH » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 8:29 PM UTC

DenisM wrote: post #87

Hupriene wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't about dispensing justice. This is about my personal right to own my experience of my life and those I interact with. Saying that my anger over having been abused by someone is no longer justified just because the courts have seen fit to expunge their records of the crime is deeply intrusive. The criminal court's job is to rectify the individual's relationship with the government. It does nothing to rectify…

Holding the grudge is helping no one, lest of all the victim. One could argue it's not an essential liberty, one we could dispense with for other gains in society. Maybe a better course of action for the victim is to have the traumatic memory zapped [1] and go back to normal life. [1] http://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/

Your right to have an opinion of someone, speak facts freely and associate with who you wish are all fundamental rights which would be compromised by a "right to be forgotten."