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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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".

"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.

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.

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