EU Commission Says People Have a 'Right To Be Forgotten' Online 200
nk497 writes "The European Commission wants to strengthen data protection rules to give more power to consumers — including the right to be forgotten online. Legislation it's looking to push through next year will let consumers know when and how their data is being used, and force companies to delete it when asked. 'People should be able to give their informed consent to the processing of their personal data,' the commission said in a statement. 'They should have the "right to be forgotten" when their data is no longer needed or they want their data to be deleted.'"
What about other people's data about me? (Score:3, Interesting)
I can delete my Facebook account but I can't delete the photos someone else took with me in them.
Amazing, and ironic (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this the same European Commission that decided some time ago to force data and voice service providers to keep phone and email records for years?
Will these data be subject to the "right to be forgotten", or government-retained stuff will be magically excepted?
Consistency, thy name is Europe.
Re:What about other people's data about me? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can delete my Facebook account but I can't delete the photos someone else took with me in them.
All data on Facebook is property of Facebook, not of the people who put it there... so you should be able to ask Facebook to remove it... (according to the text, "companies (i.e. Facebook) will be forced to delete it when asked").
Re:As opposed to... what? (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, given the choice between my retained personal information being used to (a) sell me pizza or (b) imprison me for expressing an unpopular political viewpoint, I think (b) is a way bigger deal than (a). And given Europe's track record on (b) (hint: 1936-1945 in one bit, and 1917-1991 in another), I'm going to have to say that the Eurofascists scare me a lot more than social media does.
Info tech tools could give us MORE privacy (Score:4, Interesting)
Another poster compared privacy today and in the pre-Internet world, which got me to thinking: Until now, innovations in information technology have generally reduced privacy by making it easier, by many orders of magnitude, to copy, distribute, and find information. Any info about you that's on the Web, for example, can be immediately distributed across the world, copied by whoever wants it, and found via Google.
But information technology could also be used to improve our privacy over the pre-Internet world: Encryption, of course, but also anonymization, DRM (for your personal info, such as copy restrictions and expiration dates), and using search engines to automatically find other data, including the pattern recognition engines that can find photos. Some of these could be regulatory requirements (businesses must anonymize personal info as much as possible, must use DRM with copy restrictions and an expiration date, encrypted it, and the business is responsible for monitoring the web for errant copies). Businesses already use these tools to protect their data and online identity; there's no reason private citizens can't use them too.
In some ways, private citizens could have more control, not less, of their privacy and identity if they use the tools in their favor.
Common names (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What about other people's data about me? (Score:4, Interesting)
P.S.
One way for a lawyer to demonstrate to ignorant juries is to take their photo, add bits-and-pieces to make the jury appear to be smoking dope, and then show the "before" and "after" photos the next day. That would demonstrate "reasonable doubt" that the employee is not guilty, but a victim of a modified image.