[okfn-discuss] Right to be forgotten ruling

Tue May 20 06:22:32 UTC 2014

On 20 May 2014 02:06, Anna Daniel <a.daniel at griffith.edu.au> wrote:
>  My position is that a fact is a fact and should remain so.

Most facts don't fall into the "universally true for all time"
category. This isn't just pedantry — a lot of the discussion in this
area comes down to this sort of framing. We naturally treat some facts
as having an obvious time component, but generally aren't as good at
doing so with classes of information with a longer half life.

> If it's been released into the public sphere it should stay there.

Many countries already have laws that recognise a value in allowing
information to decay — e.g. expunged records or spent convictions
under Rehabilitation of Offenders laws. There are certainly
interesting technical challenges to achieving things like this in
practice, but that doesn't mean that the underlying goal isn't a
worthwhile one.

> Secondly, putting the
> liability onto intermediaries rather than content owner (person/entity who
> made the decision to make the data public) is a dangerous precedent

Anyone republishing information — even just in a passing reference to
it — is already open to lots of legal challenges in most jurisdictions
anyway (e.g. libel). I don't believe anyone is claiming that the
intermediaries must proactively decide what they can and can't publish
— simply that (as with lots of other areas), once their attention is
drawn to problematic material, they have to remove it.

Tony