We all know that the rapid expansion of social media over the past decade or so has caused many, many problems for both individuals and society as a whole.
Arguably, it’s been even worse for kids and teenagers, many of whom tend to swim in this stuff far more than the rest of us, and are huge targets for the propaganda and data collection that have made these companies wealthy.
In May 2014, the high court of the European Union declared that EU citizens had a “right to be forgotten” online, derived from the Union’s stringent personal privacy laws. The information is actually forgotten, of course, just removed from our collective memories, also known as Google.
The “right to be forgotten” in the European Union originated from a court ruling demanding Google and search engines remove links to a story that embarrassed a Spanish man because it detailed a previous home repossession. The story was not factually inaccurate. He insisted it was no longer relevant and that it embarrassed him, and the court agreed he had the right to have the information censored from search engines.
Recently courts in the EU have found exceptions to that absolute right, but here in the US many lawmakers and pundits have speculated as to whether we should have the same right and the Europeans.
This week, two members of the New York legislature decided the answer is yes, and have introduced their own interpretation that actually goes beyond the rights granted to European citizens. Because if anything is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.
Their bill would require the removal of “content about such individual, and links or indexes to any of the same, that is ‘inaccurate’, ‘irrelevant’, ‘inadequate’ or ‘excessive’”, from both search engines and the original website, within 30 days of a request.
Basically, with some exceptions for information about certain crimes and matters of “significant current public interest”, the law requires anything posted on the web that someone claims is “no longer material to current public debate or discourse” must be forgotten. Under penalty of some heavy fines.
What could possibly go wrong with a poorly defined (at what point does content become “excessive”?) law like that?
So, under this bill, newspapers, scholarly works, copies of books on Google Books and Amazon, online encyclopedias (Wikipedia and others) — all would have to be censored whenever a judge and jury found (or the author expected them to find) that the speech was “no longer material to current public debate or discourse” (except when it was “related to convicted felonies” or “legal matters relating to violence” in which the subject played a “central and substantial” role). And of course the bill contains no exception even for material of genuine historical interest; after all, such speech would have to be removed if it was “no longer material to current public debate.” Nor is there an exception for autobiographic material, whether in a book, on a blog or anywhere else. Nor is there an exception for political figures, prominent businesspeople and others.
I’m not a Constitutional expert, but even I realize a law like this would never survive a many First Amendment challenge.
But beyond the legal issues there is a far more concerning 800-pound gorilla. Right now we have far too many “leaders” who lust for tools that would allow the government to review and censor the online discussions of it’s citizens.
We don’t need a right to be forgotten in the US as much as we do a right to be left alone.
Two years ago this month, the highest court in the European Union declared all of their citizens had a “right to be forgotten”. Specifically, the justices said anyone could request that Google (and other search engines) remove from their results links to information about themselves that was out of date or in other ways irrelevant.
In the time since, the ruling has raised many questions about the concept, and created many more problems than it has solved.
Starting with the fact the court handed Google a great deal of power in determining what information should be “forgotten”. This at the same time the European Union is very concerned about the amount of data being collected by many large, multi-national corporations like Google, as well as where it’s being kept.
Then there’s the confusion over the requests themselves and what happens to the information. Completing the online form doesn’t automatically lead to removing a link. According to a recent report “Google refuses roughly 70 percent to 75 percent of requests”, with the top two reasons being the information concerns the professional activity of the requester or the fact that they “are at the origin of this content”. They also get a lot of compaints from people outside the EU who don’t understand why they can’t play in this game.
Plus, the information “removed” is still stored somewhere on the web. Deleting articles from search results has pissed off European news organizations, some of which now maintain lists of their forgotten links. Is Google now obligated to remove results that bring up those pages? Or to stories about links that have been removed? TechDirt, a Silicon Valley news site that deals in technology and government policy, has been playing with these questions and more by regularly posting on the right to be forgotten with links to “disappeared” stories included, to observe how quickly they are removed.
As amusing as some of the stories related to “right to be forgotten” are, there is a really scary aspect to all this. This is all part of a concerted, sometimes aggressive effort by governments all over the world to control the flow of information.
And not just in their countries. France, for example, has told Google they must “respect French “right to be forgotten” rulings worldwide”. The company is pushing back (for now) but the world is full of disreputable government officials who would like the power to disappear more than just embarrassing information.
Anyway, this issue of censoring digital information is just getting started. In terms of all of recorded history, the internet is a very new communications medium, and very much unlike other undemocratic, more easily controlled channels. It will be interesting to watch just how badly governments and large corporations can screw up the web and the creative new ways of circumventing the blocks people will develop.
For now, happy second anniversary to the “right to be forgotten”, although I’m not sure anyone interested in an open web should be celebrating.
You may have recently heard on the news about the conflict between the FBI and Apple. It’s one of those geek stories that leaks out into the mainstream media, which then completely drains the issues of all context and creates a simple, easy to tell, two-sided narrative.
Big brother demanding new spy tools vs. company trying to defend the privacy of it’s customers. Or noble law enforcement tracking down terrorists vs. evil company trying to defend their profits.
It ain’t that simple, as explained by a digital security expert in the Washington Post (ironically, about as mainstream media as you get).
What the FBI wants to do would make us less secure, even though it’s in the name of keeping us safe from harm. Powerful governments, democratic and totalitarian alike, want access to user data for both law enforcement and social control. We cannot build a backdoor that only works for a particular type of government, or only in the presence of a particular court order.
Either everyone gets security or no one does. Either everyone gets access or no one does.
There is much more to this story beyond one particular phone, including mistakes made by investigators and lots of uninformed, headline-grabbing rhetoric from politicians and others who should know better. Start with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s summary of the facts and the implications this controversy could have for everyone’s privacy.
Sadly I suspect the outcome will leave everyone’s devices – and the personal information they contain – just a little more open to both the “bad” guys and the “good” guys.
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Image: Sticker available from EFF Shop.
If you’re a teacher, you need to understand the basics of copyright and fair use. Actually, that’s probably true of any adult in the US but especially teachers since we are responsible for helping our students understand the concepts, the law, and their rights under it. Or at least we should be responible.
This idea comes to mind because last week the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other organizations celebrated Copyright Week with a series of interesting posts about the need for intellectual property policies and laws that promote creativity and innovation. Rather than heavy handed attempts to restrict access to and use of information.
Such as the ongoing attempts by industry associations to use copyright law to “interfere with transparency and open access to the law itself”, by claiming ownership of “laws that began as private standards but are later incorporated into federal and state regulations”. Six of these associations are suing Public Resource, a small non-profit organization that has been posting the regulations online for anyone to use, free of charge.
And even the business of education is involved.
In 2014, three more SDOs [standards development organizations] sued Public Resource over a standard for designing tests. That standard is part of the U.S. Department of Education’s rules for handing out billions of dollars in financial aid for students, yet the groups that published it make it hard to find and buy, in order to boost sales of a new edition. It’s not available online anywhere right now, so finding out what the law is means tracking down an increasingly rare used copy.
Reminds me a little of that classic work of educational obfuscation, Double Secret Probation. :-)