Europe's 'Right To Be Forgotten' Threatens Online Free Speech 410
An anonymous reader writes "Jeffrey Rosen, Legal Affairs Editor for The New Republic, explains why the E.U.'s proposed data protection regulation known as the right to be forgotten is actually 'the biggest threat to free speech on the Internet in the coming decade.' In the Stanford Law Review Online (there's a shorter version in TNR), he writes: 'The right to be forgotten could make Facebook and Google, for example, liable for up to two percent of their global income if they fail to remove photos that people post about themselves and later regret, even if the photos have been widely distributed already. Unless the right is defined more precisely when it is promulgated over the next year or so, it could precipitate a dramatic clash between European and American conceptions of the proper balance between privacy and free speech, leading to a far less open Internet.' According to Rosen, the 'right' goes farther than previously thought, treating 'takedown requests for truthful information posted by others identically to takedown requests for photos I've posted myself that have then been copied by others: both are included in the definition of personal data as "any information relating" to me, regardless of its source.' Examples of previous attempts this might bolster include 'efforts by two Germans convicted of murdering a famous actor to remove their criminal history from the actor's Wikipedia page' and an 'Argentine pop star [who] had posed for racy pictures when she was young, but recently sued Google and Yahoo to take them down.'"
Uh huh. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Uh huh. (Score:5, Funny)
Wish I could forget about Natalie Portman, petrified, and covered in hot grits...
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...
quick - send in the army (Score:3, Funny)
and try to take over europe as well, how dare these europeans do something we don't like?
please erase (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Uh huh. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Link to racy pictures of Argentine pop star ple (Score:3, Funny)
No, I'm not joking. And stop calling me Shirley.
Re:Here's an idea (Score:4, Funny)
Why doesn't Europe set up it's own version of Facebook?
We did. It's called netlog [netlog.com]. And then the event horizon of Facebook's socio-gravitational pull engulfed the whole planet and surrounding satellites.
If you can't remove info, dilute it. (Score:3, Funny)
I wonder though, if you find you just can't remove all of the info about yourself that's out there on the net. Perhaps you could just dilute with nonsense. Prospective employers looking for you years from now will find that you kidnapped the Lindbergh baby, were the inventor of Slinky football, were a U.S. Congressman in 1979 who successfully passed legislation outlawing cat juggling, and you were the original drummer for the Banana Splits, before you became an astronaut on Apollo 22.