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Europeans have a 'right to be forgotten' online. Should Canadians?

cbc.ca

101–109 of 109 posts

Re: Europeans have a 'right to be forgotten' online. Should Canadians?

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still have that right, stop making up arm chair legalese. Your Search Engine Optimization is supposed to fail within the EU. Telling people in person, telling people in group chats, telling people anywhere you want is fine. According to the top court, the different service indexing all that stuff, within the EU, has to de-reference.

You can call it 'arm chair legalese', but there is a sister comment that has an example of someone being forced to take down an article they wrote. And forcing search engines to remove the content is certainly, in my opinion, infringing on my right to share my story.

Yeah thats my response under that comment too

Re: Europeans have a 'right to be forgotten' online. Should Canadians?

#102
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that seem to violate the idea of freedom of speech? What if someone running for public office requests that I "forget" and not share what I know about some bad things they did in the past?

Perhaps it would, but there are plenty of other restrictions on freedom of speech. And this particular law does not apply to news media etc, as far as I understand - just search engines and similar databases.

This law has been used to disappear search results from newspaper site search engines.

If it can't be found by anyone, isn't that about the same as deleting it?

Re: Europeans have a 'right to be forgotten' online. Should Canadians?

#103

I really hate the 'right to be forgotten'... it infringes on other people's 'right to remember' I should be able to talk about my experience with someone else in a public forum, even if that information is something that person doesn't want others to know.

No EU law is stopping you. But if you write an article about someone, that contain outdated or false information, you can use right to be forgotten, to at least remove it from search indexes. Article is still accessible, you can still link it, on HN or reddit or wikipedia, you just wont find it on google search results.

What makes information 'outdated'?

Re: Europeans have a 'right to be forgotten' online. Should Canadians?

#104
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that seem to violate the idea of freedom of speech? What if someone running for public office requests that I "forget" and not share what I know about some bad things they did in the past?

Perhaps it would, but there are plenty of other restrictions on freedom of speech. And this particular law does not apply to news media etc, as far as I understand - just search engines and similar databases.

Sure, of course there are and should be reasonable restrictions (shouting fire in a crowded theater causing immediate danger, for example). But is this a restriction that society should accept? How could you expect to have a functioning democracy if a politician could make people "forget" to stop them from sharing any inconvenient facts about the politician's past actions?

And perhaps I want to make a list of sources where you can search for information about politicians to hold them accountable. If it's not censorship for them to be able to stop me from linking to true things they don't want people to see about them, then what is?

Re: Europeans have a 'right to be forgotten' online. Should Canadians?

#105
post #96
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet is effectively history. Real history started with the internet. So deleting something from the internet is deleting history.

If you look closely you'll see that your comment doesn't actually contradict or disprove mine. That we as a civilization decided to move the entirety of our cultural output to the house of cards that is the internet is orthogonal to its nature and purpose. You don't get to arbitrarily decide that now everything on the internet has to be immutable and that no one should have the right to ever delete anything from thei…

I'm not saying that it should be illegal to delete anything you want. What I'm saying is that doing so is tantamount to deleting history.

It doesn't matter what was the initial purpose of the internet. What matters is what it has become. The internet is a worldwide (and potentially interplanetary) interconnected public place. You can restrict information all you want but the reality is such that if something went public it's public forever. Every piece of information will be preserved somewhere in the network for as long as the internet exists. It's the reality we leave in.

> What does this even mean?

All of history before the internet is fuzzy. It was easily rewritten by anyone who controlled narrative and sources of information so the actual events or different view points are lost to the history. And as you dig farther into history the fuzzier it becomes. As I said above as long as the internet exists we can obtain different views on events and decide what is most likely happend, what was the reason it happend the way it did, etc. The internet gave us much more different sources of information to preserve history. That's why I said the real history begun with the mass adoption of the internet.

Re: Europeans have a 'right to be forgotten' online. Should Canadians?

#106
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are arguing against an oversimplified slogan. The actual ruling is about the right for your public information to not be indexed and publicized.

You have as much rights over 'your' public info as everyone else. You can't dictate to others what to do with it without violating their rights. Therefore, people should learn to think before they act instead of complaining when their acts become public and try to take it down. Edward Snowden has a nice personal bit on this in his new book.

Well, you can and it is being done? I have no problem with this whatsoever, not everything needs to be online.

Re: Europeans have a 'right to be forgotten' online. Should Canadians?

#107
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If what they say breaks a law yes. For example in the UK the rehabilitation of offenders act means that once a crime is spent it is an offence to discuss publish information about the crime. This is a classic instance where right to be forgotten is used.

Some* crimes anyway.

Any sentence under threshold will become spent. Some crimes will still show on DBS checks.

Re: Europeans have a 'right to be forgotten' online. Should Canadians?

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that seem to violate the idea of freedom of speech? What if someone running for public office requests that I "forget" and not share what I know about some bad things they did in the past?

Europeans don't necessarily have "freedom of speech". Not in the same ways Americans see it.

Europeans overestimate the benevolence of their governing bodies. Things that limit freedoms of people are the same as things that empower government

Re: Europeans have a 'right to be forgotten' online. Should Canadians?

#109
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's already illegal, then I don't see how a right to be forgotten changes anything in that case.

It means the search engines can't stick their fingers in their ears and ignore real people's legitimate needs to put their past mistakes behind them.

That makes no sense. If it was already illegal to publish that information then they already weren't allowed to do that. Maybe this law has harsher penalties but, generally speaking, making something double-illegal isn't meaningful.
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