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Comment by RexRollman | Hacker News Reader

"The right to be forgotten" is one of the most asinine things I have ever of. It really should be called "The right to supress history".

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That it can and will be abused does not mean that it does not have excellent use cases.

It's broken implementations and guidelines that are the problem, not the basic idea.

My Canadian lawyer once told me an interesting story. He had gone to research his 'roots' on the assumption that he'd find that he descended from English or French nobility, and wouldn't it be nice to have a coat of arms.

Instead, he ended up finding out that his great-great-grandfather had been given the choice of the gallows or the boat.

Of course that was many years ago, but somehow his great-great-grandfather had found a way to start afresh without his past misdeeds following him in too visible a way. And he had done very well for himself. In todays world that man would not have stood a chance of starting over, no matter how far he went from the place of his birth because Google will happily follow you anywhere short of changing your name.

Especially for convicted criminals being google-able can take away their chance to starting again with a clean slate.

Now, you could argue that this is right and that's how it is supposed to work, screw the criminals they should think before they commit their deeds and so on. But there is an element of permanence here that stops those that are capable of changing themselves for the better from being able to outrun their own shadow and in that specific example that is a net-loss to society.

Not that there aren't scenarios where the 'right to be forgotten' isn't a net loss to society, it's just that it is not as clear cut and simple as you make it.

Also there is the issue of recidivism; permanently branding someone drastically reduces the chances of rehabilitation. For many crimes a life sentence of shame is not appropriate; criminals should be given the chance to change for the better, especially as no one is perfect.

And not to forget that people get branded for things they didn't do or were misinterpreted or for one-time mistakes. Should these people have to live with that forever?

In situations like that, much like in real life, it's prudent to have evidence (comments, emails, server logs, whatever) to protect your reputation and show the facts, but that isn't necessarily the same as having these things aired publicly.

I find it a bit odd that this view is as prevalent as it seems on HN.

"The right to be forgotten" is nothing more or less than the right to have some control over your identity, and over the ability of third parties to leverage that identity for their own ends. To argue that governments and companies should be forced or obligated to maintain long-term, fine grained surveillance for the sake of "history" is kind of absurd.

In any other context, HN would be up in arms over the same, with many going out of their way to exercise exactly that "right" through the use of anonymizing tools or proxies.

The people objecting to "right to be forgotten" are not saying that companies should be forced or obligated to maintain long term surveillance. That's quite the non sequitar.

Many do seem to be insisting that search results and online information be preserved as a record of 'truthfulness' in case they need to be used against someone legally or in the court of public opinion (like a politician or a celebrity who wants a scandal 'erased' or who wants to redact some statement or opinion of theirs.)

By definition, this assumes the ability to correlate this data with real life identities (otherwise the whole argument is pointless) for as long as it's relevant.

That seems to me like an implied obligation to maintain a surveillance system (or state) in all but name.

Imagine that there's a middle ground between "forced to delete" and "forced to preserve". Let's call it "not forced to do anything".

One of the plus sides to all the NSA/GCHQ surveillance is that it should end up being an excellent resource for historians, centuries in the future.

That is, assuming that they have access to the data, and novel methods of interpreting it in bulk. It'll be like a more honest, raw version of the Twitter archives.

GCHQ will never make this data available to researchers. Partly this is because of the way it's stored, a big FIFO cache not permanent stores; and partly because of (weirdly enough) English data protection law; and partly because they just keep stuff secret.

It took them seventy years to release a couple of Turing papers. http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17771962

It is unrealistic to expect the kind of control over your public image that allows you to delete or rewrite the past to better suit the present.

And it is dangerous to take this dangling carrot and then keep quiet about judicial abuses like the british super-injuction orders that protect the rich from having their affairs exposed to the public.

It's much more sane to reject the "right to be forgotten" concept in its totality and start thinking seriously about the persistence of data in the digital age.

"The right to be forgotten" is nothing more or less than the right to have some control over your identity, and over the ability of third parties to leverage that identity for their own ends.

It's the power to dictate what others can't say about you. Regardless of whether what's being said is true.

"The right to be forgotten" has no effect on what others can or cannot say about you as it in no way forces people to take down the sites targeted.

It's sometimes used to supress an incorrect version of history being aggressively pushed by a single person with a fixation.

Protection from stalkers is a good thing and that part of RTBF needs to be upheld.

And let's not forget that Google isn't doing this for "history". They'll happily ruin someone's chances of getting a new job, just for a few dollars of ad revenue.

Nonsense. Not even that long ago a person could get a fresh start by moving to another town, or even just by waiting a few years for the memory of whatever thing they did that they regret, to fade in most peoples minds. Now it can follow you forever. How is that right? We expunge criminal records even - but not anymore if it shows up top hit on Google.

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