On 20 May 2014 07:22, Tony Bowden <[email protected]> wrote: >> 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.
Applying hard and fast "it's public so it's public forever" rules sound great until you start looking at the fuzzy edges ;-). Things like the rehabilitation laws are a very good example of this - certainly in the UK, it boils down to "yes, it's still technically public, and you can tell people about it, but you can't force them to disclose it and you can't make a big fuss about it if you're motivated by malice". Lots of nuance there without ever saying "it's secret now". But, of course, it relies on an analogue age when you wouldn't know about this without actively going out and looking for it. Privacy through inertia and obscurity. Our concepts of privacy have been built up around this idea of things that are "public" but only in the proverbial dusty filing cabinet, and we're still having to get used to the idea that things which were previously obscure are obscure no longer, without ever having technically changed the way in which they're "public". This is simply the most recent manifestation of it. On which note... I've just seen a set of notes on this ruling from the UK Information Commissioner's Office, the body responsible for (inter alia) overseeing data protection & the security of personal information, and will be one of the people to who challenged cases get referred: http://iconewsblog.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/four-things-weve-learned-from-the-eu-google-judgment/ A key note to bear in mind: "There are some who are seeking to draw out much wider implications of the judgment for freedom of expression in general. It is important to keep the implications in proportion and recognise that there is no absolute right to have links removed. Also, the original publication and the search engine are considered separately: the public record of a newspaper may not be deleted even if the link to it from a search website is removed." -- - Andrew Gray [email protected] _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss Unsubscribe: https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/okfn-discuss
