Forget any 'Right to Be Forgotten' Don't count on government to censor
information about you online.
The stakes keep rising in the debate over online privacy. Last week,
the Obama administration floated the idea of a privacy czar to
regulate the Internet, and the European Union even concocted a new
"right to be forgotten" online.
The proposed European legislation would give people the right, any
time, to have all of their personal information deleted online.
Regulators say that in an era of Facebook and Google, "People should
have the 'right to be forgotten' when their data is no longer needed
or they want their data to be deleted." The proposal, which did not
explain how this could be done in practice, includes potential
criminal sanctions.
Privacy viewed in isolation looks more like a right than it does when
seen in context. Any regulation to keep personal information
confidential quickly runs up against other rights, such as free
speech, and many privileges, from free Web search to free email.
There are real trade-offs between privacy and speech. Consider the
case of German murderer Wolfgang Werle, who does not think his name
should be used. In 1990, he and his half brother killed German actor
Walter Sedlmayr. They spent 15 years in jail. German law protects
criminals who have served their time, including from references to
their crimes.
Last year, Werle's lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to
Wikipedia, citing German law, demanding the online encyclopedia remove
the names of the murderers. They even asked for compensation for
emotional harm, saying, "His rehabilitation and his future life
outside the prison system is severely impacted by your unwillingness
to anonymize any articles dealing with the murder of Mr. Sedlmayr with
regard to our client's involvement."
.Censorship requires government limits on speech, at odds with the
open ethos of the Web. It's also not clear how a right to be forgotten
could be enforced. If someone writes facts about himself on Facebook
that he later regrets, do we really want the government punishing
those who use the information?
UCLA law Prof. Eugene Volokh has explained why speech and privacy are
often at odds. "The difficulty is that the right to information
privacy—the right to control other people's communication of
personally identifiable information about you—is a right to have the
government stop people from speaking about you," he wrote in a law
review article in 2000.
Indeed, there's a good argument that "a 'right to be forgotten' is not
really a 'privacy' right in the first place," says Adam Thierer,
president of the Progress and Freedom Foundation. "A privacy right
should only concern information that is actually private. What a
'right to be forgotten' does is try to take information that is, by
default, public information, and pretend that it's private."
There are also concerns about how information is collected for
advertising. A Wall Street Journal series, "What They Know," has shown
that many online companies don't even know how much tracking software
they use. Better disclosure would require better monitoring by
websites. When used correctly, these systems benignly aggregate
information about behavior online so that advertisers can target the
right people with the right products.
Many people seem happy to make the trade-off in favor of sharing more
about themselves in exchange for services and convenience. On Friday,
when news broke of potential new regulations in the U.S., the Journal
conducted an online poll asking, "Should the Obama administration
appoint a watchdog for online privacy?" Some 85% of respondents said
no.
As Brussels and Washington were busily proposing new regulations last
week, two of the biggest companies were duking it out over consumer
privacy, a new battlefield for competition. Google tried to stop
Facebook from letting users automatically import their address and
other contact details from their Gmail accounts, arguing that the
social-networking site didn't have a way for users to get the data out
again.
When users tried to import their contacts to Facebook, a message from
Gmail popped up saying, "Hold on a second. Are you super sure you want
to import your contact information for your friends into a service
that won't let you get it out?" The warning adds, "We think this is an
important thing for you to know before you import your data there.
Although we strongly disagree with this data protectionism, the choice
is yours. Because, after all, you should have control over your data."
One of the virtues of competitive markets is that companies vie for
customers over everything from services to privacy protections.
Regulators have no reason to dictate one right answer to these
balancing acts among interests that consumers are fully capable of
making for themselves.
--
Urvashi Sharma
RTI Helpmail( Web Based )
aishwaryaj2010@gmail.com
Mobile Rti Helpline
8081898081 ( 8 A.M. to 10 P.M. )
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