> If someone feels consequences of an offensive 2007 tweet, just delete it. Platforms should be required to make it easy to delete content.
“Just delete it”.
Except have you ever personally been in the situation that you needed something removed? I have and:
1) You might not even have the password to every random account you created in the past, nor the e-mail addresses that you used when you created those profiles, nor maybe even remember what e-mail address you used for each of them.
2) Turns out that there are a lot of sites out there that copy and preserve a lot of random data from other sites. They do so without regards to the ToS of the site you originally posted to. They do not care about copyright. They do not respond to personal requests for removal of data. They do not respond to DMCA notices. They are outside of the jurisdiction of the country you live in and as are their hosting providers. And even if they are cooperative, there are so many of them that reaching out to all of them and following up on the removal will require much much more time and energy than what you have available.
So then the best you can do is delete what you can and submit the rest for removal from Google.
“Well you shouldn’t have posted it in the first place if you didn’t want it to be public”, right? No, it’s not that simple!
The things you post today can be taken out of context and misinterpreted by someone in the future in ways you would never have imagined today.
We keep posting comments, pictures, videos, creating profiles, liking and sharing posts and information, but most of us rarely delete any of it. As the amount of data increases, so does the room for cherry picking data about you to build up an image of you that while true in the sense that all of it are things you posted, wildly misrepresents what kind of person you are, and on top of this misrepresentation and even more inaccurate image can be painted.
If you had any idea what it feels like to have that happen to you, I think you would want to be able to have some of that information at the very least removed from search results.
Once it’s gone from search, it’s gone from the public eye. And if you are lucky you are able to erase the bits of information that ties the data to you so that even if the data resurfaces in the future it is no longer connected to you, or at least not as directly.
Furthermore, when you are working on having information removed you should first make a list of all of the information, then have it removed from Google ASAP so that 1) it gets harder to find as soon as possible and 2) so that the information is not retained in the publicly available caches of search engines after it’s been deleted from the source sites.
Beyond that, for the information that you could not get deleted but which you were able to have removed from search results, some of it will eventually disappear all together on its own because of bitrot (hardware failures, data management errors, sites going out of business, etc) and some of it will probably stick around forever.
But like I said you want as much of it removed as possible and you want the rest of it to be hard to find and you want as much of it as possible to lose connection to you. And achieving that requires the cooperation of the search engines in removing results.
But Google does cooperate with DMCA. The difference there is that that content deemed in violation of copyright is actually illegal for anyone to distribute; legal responsibility extends all the way to the website owner.
Unless content falling under "right to be forgotten" is ruled privileged and not legal for public distribution, any artificial roadblocks to their discovery will merely present a business opportunity for their circumvention.
It is that simple. Just the same as in real life. If you're "saying, likeing, sharing" things that "don't represent who you are" maybe you should take some time for introspection rather than demand the world to follow your narrative.
Information you, yourself, post publicly to the internet is public. Just the same as if you got up in Times Square and shouted it using a megaphone.
Information that is factually accurate that is posted publically on the internet isn't under your domain to censure. This falls heavily in the camp of "freedom of my speech not freedom of your speech" that seems so common here.
Information that is posted by others that isn't factual is already covered by libel and slander laws so doesn't fall under here.
The internet should be, and for the sake of truth has to be, immutable. The "right to be forgotten" is the right to break any concept of online reputation.
If you want to control your narrative, maybe don't post thoughtlessly and publicly.
> If you want to control your narrative, maybe don't post thoughtlessly and publicly.
I am not posting thoughtlessly. What I am saying is that there is just a million ways that anything can be interpreted in the future that you have no way of foreseeing.
Even a silence can be interpreted in such manner. Should we be able to retrospectively edit the past if it somehow concerns us? Seriously, given how stirred up things are, it's not unrealistic to imagine that someone would want you to "feel guilty" of not posting something in the past.
This is not a tech problem (at all). This is a social problem that had existed since forever, but now uncovered by technology's availability. And if the agreed solution to the "world's gone mad" is to grant one legal ability to alter other's memories, then the world's truly gone mad.
“Just delete it”.
Except have you ever personally been in the situation that you needed something removed? I have and:
1) You might not even have the password to every random account you created in the past, nor the e-mail addresses that you used when you created those profiles, nor maybe even remember what e-mail address you used for each of them.
2) Turns out that there are a lot of sites out there that copy and preserve a lot of random data from other sites. They do so without regards to the ToS of the site you originally posted to. They do not care about copyright. They do not respond to personal requests for removal of data. They do not respond to DMCA notices. They are outside of the jurisdiction of the country you live in and as are their hosting providers. And even if they are cooperative, there are so many of them that reaching out to all of them and following up on the removal will require much much more time and energy than what you have available.
So then the best you can do is delete what you can and submit the rest for removal from Google.
“Well you shouldn’t have posted it in the first place if you didn’t want it to be public”, right? No, it’s not that simple!
The things you post today can be taken out of context and misinterpreted by someone in the future in ways you would never have imagined today.
We keep posting comments, pictures, videos, creating profiles, liking and sharing posts and information, but most of us rarely delete any of it. As the amount of data increases, so does the room for cherry picking data about you to build up an image of you that while true in the sense that all of it are things you posted, wildly misrepresents what kind of person you are, and on top of this misrepresentation and even more inaccurate image can be painted.
If you had any idea what it feels like to have that happen to you, I think you would want to be able to have some of that information at the very least removed from search results.
Once it’s gone from search, it’s gone from the public eye. And if you are lucky you are able to erase the bits of information that ties the data to you so that even if the data resurfaces in the future it is no longer connected to you, or at least not as directly.
Furthermore, when you are working on having information removed you should first make a list of all of the information, then have it removed from Google ASAP so that 1) it gets harder to find as soon as possible and 2) so that the information is not retained in the publicly available caches of search engines after it’s been deleted from the source sites.
Beyond that, for the information that you could not get deleted but which you were able to have removed from search results, some of it will eventually disappear all together on its own because of bitrot (hardware failures, data management errors, sites going out of business, etc) and some of it will probably stick around forever.
But like I said you want as much of it removed as possible and you want the rest of it to be hard to find and you want as much of it as possible to lose connection to you. And achieving that requires the cooperation of the search engines in removing results.