[governance] Social Media Surveillance OK'd by DHS 'Privacy Office'

Dr. Alejandro Pisanty Baruch apisan at unam.mx
Mon Nov 19 02:33:55 EST 2012


Hi,

the "right to be forgotten" can be traced very much to Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger's book "Delete". 

It does start with a good introduction and interesting thoughts about how after millennia of humankind working to build up and facilitate memory it is now much harder to "Forget" (delete a memory) than to "remember" (keep it) and consequences thereof. 

Unfortunately in the last sections the author proposes an absolutely unreachable technological standard which would give memories in files a finite lifetime after which they would self-delete. This was picked up among others in this list by Wolfgang Kleinwächter in the Sharm el Sheikh IGF. I brought it down by reminding him that it's Layer 8 that kills - that even if you could have that standard and your pictures drinking at the beach would self-erase, someone could have made a photo of the screen with them displayed and keep them forever (as happens with many other damaging pieces of information long before the invention of computers and the Internet.) 

The "right to be forgotten" also has some creepy implications for freedom of speech (person A may get an article about him/her deleted on its grounds, thus quashing person B's legitimate (i.e. non-slanderous) right to have written it), and may amount to rewriting history. 

The present balance is a strenghtened version of the so-called ARCO rights (in Spanish at least) which allows for some data-protection authority orders to delete damaging materials in some countries. 

Next chapter... (I can't wait to see what the next chapter of "educating Riaz" or "Riaz's personal textbook on Internet governance for free") is going to be about ;-).) Happy to provide. 

Yours,


Alejandro Pisanty

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________________________________________
Desde: governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org [governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] en nombre de Suresh Ramasubramanian [suresh at hserus.net]
Enviado el: lunes, 19 de noviembre de 2012 01:10
Hasta: Riaz K Tayob
CC: governance at lists.igcaucus.org
Asunto: Re: [governance] Social Media Surveillance OK'd by DHS 'Privacy Office'

The right to be forgotten is as utopian a right as it gets. I understand
the historical context, but just because we had one adolf hitler in the
past who used state census data to target "non aryan races" doesn't mean
various other checks and balances don't exist now.

You do have various "privacy activist" types circulating boilerplate
letters demanding that their ISP not log anything at all about their online
activity except for billing purposes .. and then they (and various others)
get infected with a virus, which ddoses some poor guy in, say, a pacific
island where connectivity is expensive and via satellite.

If he complains to the ISP they're then glad to give him boilerplate that
says "we don't track what our users do, because of european privacy laws.
please have your national law enforcement contact our police, and our
police will contact us, and we'll then start looking for where the problem
is".

By that time, the poor guy's network is probably long forced off the
internet, it being that or he winds up paying an astronomical bill for
bandwidth, ddos mitigation gear, higher server capacity etc etc.

Anyway, the point they are making might - or might not - be valid. It
certainly does not assume goodwill, and seems to suffer from a siege
mentality of sorts.

        srs

Riaz K Tayob [19/11/12 07:37 +0200]:
>Except for the hullabaloo that follows developing countries
>'censorship' and 'abuse of the internet', I would be inclined to
>unequivocally agree with you...
>
>And it is rather trite to argue that 'stoking fears' is sufficient to
>dismiss the point of the article. The point is how are public
>resources used in the 'marketplace of ideas' (to use Justice Black's
>parlance), in the face of rising use of foodstamps, fiscal cliffs,
>unemployment etc... makes the European idea of the 'right to be
>forgotten' look rather appealing methinks...
>
>
>On 2012/11/19 04:01 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
>>I love the rhetoric (predictable) and the (over)use of 1984 imagery
>>
>>Anyway, have you considered that "search" is enough to find public
>>posts on
>>social media, without "friending and following"?
>>
>>"stoking fears that" is precisely what this article sets out to do,
>>unfortunately
>>
>>Which might be a useful goal elsewhere, but not, definitly not, when a
>>forum has even some pretensions towards being multistakeholder in nature.
>>
>


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