Right To Be Forgotten

2100 Words5 Pages

Has anyone ever posted lies about you on the internet? Did you want some way to remove them? The problem is who decides what is true and what is not. Who decides what about your personal life is relevant to the world? America protects freedom of speech in the Bill of Rights, but what about websites on the internet? Are they protected by American law, or should those freedoms be determined by international consensus? These are the kind of issues facing the internet world today and freedom of speech groups today. The Right to be Forgotten will not affect freedom of speech in America, but it will affect those who use local websites that serve internationals, thus international consensus needs to be reached on internet policy.
The Right to Be …show more content…

Because the internet is stored in so many places, how could one be sure that every instance of something that should be forgotten is, in fact, forgotten? Data can leave trails that can be hard to trace. Certain websites such as politiwoops store already-deleted information (Landau 11). What if someone decides to save a picture of that web page to his hard-drive, and then decides to publish it on social media in the future? This kind of problem illustrates the flaws in the Right to Be Forgotten. In article 12 of the Data Protection Regulation is says that every individual has the right to erase or block data that is inaccurate or incomplete. It must be done unless it is wholly impractical (DG Communication 2) While the right to be forgotten specifically protects again unpractical deletions there are still some issues with this. “Wholly Impractical” could be assigned to almost any kind of request for information deletion because of the perpetual nature of the Internet. The task of deciding case-by-case whether links should be taken down or not seems daunting. For example, should a sketchy politician be able to remove his information from the web? (Grossman 17) The whole idea of having something forgotten about another person on the internet sounds, frankly, frightening. What if historical revisionists decide that articles that oppose their viewpoint should be forgotten. A government could even …show more content…

Can consensus be reached between countries, or should we keep the same system that we have, disjointed but more or less free? In the past, control of the internet has been very US centric.(Benny) The US helps to run the internet by assignment and management of domain names. Some countries have their own, and some just end in .com. All of this is run by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is part of the US government. (Benny) Even though this is a somewhat small part of running the internet, it illustrated how much the internet is US-centric. Every website that one visits will have had some sort of involvement by the US Government. However, ICANN's contract is ending soon and many wonder who will take over. Some have advocated that the U.N should take over for such responsibilities and, perhaps, other responsibilities as

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