On the Quest for a Digital Renaissance - Tag - Right to be forgotten2023-04-20T13:11:38+02:00Stephan Engbergurn:md5:3dc8aae7a46cb23955503b63709372a1DotclearRight to be forgotten - when you get core principles wrongurn:md5:9c7596698f1ba71e5c9157104e032f5c2014-07-30T08:29:00+02:002014-08-04T09:15:03+02:00SE2425-GANDIRight to be forgottenData RegulationEUGoogleRight to be forgotten<p><strong>The EU and members states need to act timely and augment the "Right
to be forgotten".</strong></p>
<p>The principle of a "Right to be forgotten" is fundamentally human and
critical to maintain society stability in e networked age.</p>
<p>But the European "Right to be forgotten" is perhaps the most obvious example
of legal failure as vital principles are not transformed into operational
solutions.</p>
<p>The principle cannot be implemented as a legal-only structure. To become
operational, it has to be enforceable and by nature of the problem, this
require law to dictate technical design principles from preventive approach as
technology design will otherwise override the legal principle making it void
and "unworkable" - and as such easy to ignore by commercial or shady (read in
reality non-democratic) government institutions.</p>
<p>The main technical design principle has to change so as to enable
non-identification or contextual identity in legitimate society transactions
including eCommerce and public health-care. This is both possible and critical
for markets and democracy - and it is the only way to protect society from the
likes of Google from acquiring destabilizing and self-reinforcing power over
citizens and society processes.</p> <p><strong>1. The Right to be Forgotten address two very different
problems.</strong></p>
<p>a) Citizens own and MUST control their data. This is fundamental for
freedom, security and prosperity (this blog will elaborate).</p>
<p>The legal-only thinking then assume that data are identified and as such
citizens need means to have their data deleted. This would mean that e.g.
Google - on request - has to delete ALL data collected about citizens including
e.g. advertisement profiles and click-data collected through third-party
through e.g. Google Analytics</p>
<p>b) Citizens rights to forgiveness and correctness. An important but much,
much minor issue of right to personal integrity (eliminate errors and lies) and
to - eventually and gradually - re-enter into society even if you, truthfully,
have been involved in events that can later be detrimental for your ability to
function (e.g. a crime in your youth).</p>
<p>The legal-only thinking in it most primitive form is that this amounts to
the right for censorship of certain facts so e.g. Google should be forced and
legitimized to filter out certain facts as part of their critical function as a
search engine even though the sources (e.g. old news articles) are not
corrected, deleted or "forgotten".</p>
<p><strong>2. The principle of Right to be Forgotten require preventive
technology thinking.</strong></p>
<p>If you want an enforceable ability to be "forgotten", it does
require<br /></p>
<p>a) that the data was not made identifiable in the first place as the by far
main design criteria of a digital world or<br /></p>
<p>b) In cases of failure to the main design principle the ability of citizens
to get a completely new identity.</p>
<p>Changing name is an effective way of "deleting the past. E.g. in UK, it was
until recently deliberately legally and socially acceptable for citizens to
relocate and assume a new name without informing anyone - provided it was not
an act of trying to escape accountability of crimes. In Germany, as a
reminiscence from the Nazi regimes thorough registration and tracking of Jews
as the main reason Holocaust was so effective, it is still illegal to create
identity structures across states in the federal structure. Witness relocation
and police undercover involves the creation of entirely new identities in
principle without any linkage to the old as powerful entities will do anything
to locate person assuming the new identity.</p>
<p>However assuming an entirely new identity is a very costly, time-consuming
and socially destructive way of solving security problems. Therefore the main -
and preventive - principles should and MUST (in order to be adopted) be to
ensure contextual identity, so each function or purpose is isolate from
each-other and as such can be discarded if such need may arise.</p>
<p>As a general comment to EU Data Reform, it will be the claim that the
principle of "Rigth to be Forgotten" is correct, but only makes sense if the
root principle of NON-identification (or the technical ability to link
non-related transactions with the same person) is implemented through
technology.</p>
<p>If EU wants to solve the massive "Google" problem, it simply required for EU
to begin protecting citizens when entering the digital networks as in ensuring
that each transaction is under new "identities" as in new identifiers including
everything related to the transaction. This is the only operational way to
enforce the principles on Google and others preventing data abuse and
market-destabilizing power concentration in infrastructure.</p>
<p><strong>3. Google lobbyism is actively trying to sabotage the
principles.</strong></p>
<p>Google is far from the only commercial entity trying to undermine the
principles of a free market, but Google is by far the largest and most powerful
entity as Google has managed to use the self-reinforcing nature of
winner-takes-all networking business models to systemically erode competition
and drive this setup from one industry into the next.</p>
<p>Google's business model of systemic data abuse and market control is
actively threatened by enforcement of EU data Regulation. Google therefore
would do almost anything to sabotage or circumvent this regulation as they did
and do with e.g. the EU ePrivacy directive related to Cookies.</p>
<p>Operationally, Google is trying to utilize the recent Legal Ruling in a
Spanish case to create the media illusion, that the Right to Be Forgotten is
only about censoring details of peoples past and not - what it is mainly about
- related to all Google data profiling of individuals in order to profit from
behavioral marketing.</p>
<p>And the lobbyism works just fine. E.g. in UK, the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/30/right-to-be-forgotten-unworkable-peers" hreflang="en">House of Lords EU sub-committee</a> just characterized the Right
to be Forgotten as "unworkable".</p>
<p>The real problem here is both that the treatment of said problem is wrong.
We need to split this problem into two different problems. a) A really hard
"media problem" - when - and especially how - are media required to be able to
"forgive" past deeds. and b) Search engines role to track down source of such
data to be "forgiven" or "forgotten" at source rather than the search engine
having to "censor" the Internet.</p>
<p>Google is extremely smart here. By trying to turn the Data Reform into
"legitimizing censorship", it is certain to backfire massively as it will
generate a massive number of openly absurd cases and be utilized e.g. by both
commercial organizations and government institutions to hide criticism. Google
is simply waiting for the first attempt for some government institution, e.g UK
GCHQ to require filtering "Snowden" or some claimed national security related
information.</p>
<p>As this emerge, Google can simply claim the high chair working for
"democracy" against such "censorship" creating an outcry against the "The Right
to be Forgotten". Google is utilizing the same strategy on "Dictatorships"</p>
<p>But this is wrong - in both cases. Even though such filtering require a few
resources, Google donĀ“t care about "forgetting" some detail (and Google still
have the detail and only filter the search output - Google can still utilize
the implied sensitivities in the active profiling of citizens). What Google
really cares about is having control of personal data and behavioral profiles
as the mission critical resource to control. By diverging the attention from
the main problem and crate a non-solution to the illusion case, Google is
actively trying to sabotage the legal principle.</p>
<p>Even though e.g. Facebook and Twitter may help disperse knowledge of regime
wrongdoings, the deliberate lack of security in these structures (to facilitate
the winner-takes-all network models) make these the most powerful tools for
dictatorships ever. We already see how regimes in e.g. Eqypt, Turkey, US, UK,
China, Russia and elsewhere use these data source to track-down and map the
dissidents so they can target the leaders that fuel activism.</p>
<p>This will only get worse, if politicians - however non-intentional -
legitimize history Revisionism and censorship on a grand scale by allowing
technical structures to be built-in into infrastructure that filter reality.
This will just be the European version of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China" hreflang="en">Chinas Great Digital Wall</a> and it will be abused commercially
to hide criticism and even fraud.</p>
<p><strong>4. The EU and members states need to act timely and augment the
"Right to be forgotten".</strong></p>
<p>The principle of a "Right to be forgotten" is fundamentally human and
critical to maintain society stability in e networked age. But it cannot be
implemented as a legal-only structure. To become operational, it has to be
enforceable and by nature of the problem, this require law to dictate technical
design principles from preventive approach as technology design will otherwise
override the legal principle making it void and "unworkable" - and as such easy
to ignore by commercial or shady (read in reality non-democratic) government
institutions.</p>
<p>The main technical design principle has to change so as to enable
non-identification or contextual identity (YES eliminate digital
identification) in all legitimate society transactions including eCommerce and
public health-care. This is both possible and critical for markets and
democracy - and it is the only way to protect society from the likes of Google
from acquiring destabilizing and self-reinforcing power over citizens and
society processes</p>
<p>As to the "Spanish case" - this is a minor problem. It is a real problem,
but minor in the perspective. Both because it is complex trying to create
general rules of when to "rewrite history" without enable serious abuse if not
taking care of preventively e.g. through avoiding identification in the initial
publication. But also because citizens - in really bad cases - under certain
conditions even though a rather radical move have and should have the
possibility of a social identity change to wipe the past clean and start
over.</p>