European Court Backs Your Right to Disappear Online

by
in legal on (#3KV)
story imageGood news for European Internet users: Europe's highest court stunned the U.S. tech industry Tuesday by recognizing an expansive right to privacy that allows citizens to demand that Google delete links to embarrassing personal information - even if it's true.

It's going to change not only the legal climate on the 'Net but the economics, too, as cumbersome and expensive processes will be necessarily implemented in order to comply. Per the article:
The ruling has potentially wide-ranging consequences for an industry that reaps billions of dollars in profit by collecting, sorting and redistributing data touching on the lives of people worldwide. That includes more than 500 million people in the European Union who now could unleash a flood of deletion requests that Google would have little choice but to fulfill, no matter how cumbersome.
As for you people who have never used the Internet (can you hear me?), no worries - you are safe.
Reply 2 comments

different jurisdictions moving in opposite directions (Score: 2, Interesting)

by rocks@pipedot.org on 2014-05-16 12:36 (#1NH)

I wonder what it will mean for "global" websites and web services when different jurisdictions support different internet models, e.g., neutral versus differential pipes, privacy versus retained information, and so on. I do hope geographic borders don't become reflected too greatly in the functioning of the internet...

Delete vs Pseudonym (Score: 1)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-05-16 23:40 (#1P8)

I'd rather more effort on allowing people to use Pseudonyms. Post all the silly stuff you want as "SomeDude" and keep it seperate from your "real name" identity. This, however, conflicts with current Facebook and Google+ policies.

Being able to delete large swaths of posts makes for annoying holes in conversations. For example, I was unaware of a rather infamous reddit troll named "violentacrez", but since he has deleted all his thousands of posts, trying to go back and read anything on the topic is rather difficult. Of course, the information is still out there on sites like thewayback machine, so it fails to delete everything.