South Korea Embraces Ridiculous Right To Be Forgotten As Well
from the forget-you dept
It's spreading! Now that the right to be forgotten is in full swing (and likely expanding) in Europe, it appears other parts of the world are jumping in as well. The latest? South Korea, whose governmental "media monitoring agency" has said it will release guidelines for people who wish to remove information from the internet:Under the administrative guidelines to be proposed by the Korea Communications Commission, Web users will be able to demand that Web portals remove personal information that they do not want online.Basically, South Korea is figuring out just how much censorship of truthful and legal information it will allow -- which is kind of crazy when you think about it. Apparently, there are still some big decisions to be made, though:
“We have studied the rights to be forgotten for more than a year through a group composed of legal, academic and industry experts,” an official from the media watchdog said. “We plan to introduce the guidelines in the first half of the year.”
The media watchdog said it will map out the guidelines in a loose, self-regulated form, given ongoing controversy over censorship and the public’s right to know.I'm still in a position where I don't understand this at all. If the information is somehow false or "illegal" I can understand the desire to remove it. But I have a lot more trouble understanding the ability to remove truthful and legal information just because someone doesn't like it. This kind of system will always be abused to just censor perfectly reasonable and often useful information, just because it exposes something someone doesn't like. It's disappointing that South Korea appears to be embracing such a head in the sand approach to information.
One sticking point is whether to give the right to ask for deletion only to those who write the posts in question. Also, it has yet to be decided whether the guidelines will only apply to large search engines or even include smaller Web platforms. The communications regulator is also mulling over whether to set up a separate body to determine what data can be removed.
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Filed Under: free speech, right to be forgotten, south korea
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That's a feature, not a bug
Why would those in positions of power, whether that be wealth, political or otherwise, want the ability to remove information regarding them even if it's true?
Hmm, lemme think about that for a bit, I'm sure a possible reason will come to me eventually...
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In a related note...
(I'm not worried, though, since I know how a shovel works.)
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Google opened the door to this...
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Re:
Remember Pol Pot's Cambodia? Want another?
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It's simple, you fuck up, badly, you may even be imprisoned and/or fined for your crimes. You do your time and when you come out you realize that you are effectively still being punished.
Around here we don't do the American prison system, we actually want to give people a second chance. It's trivial to see cases where this continued punishment is grossly unfair just as you can pick cases where it's grossly abused.
An alternative to solve the same problem could be to make it easy for such people to change their name. Presto, no more bad google juju without ruining freedom of speech.
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Re:
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... we actually want to give people a second chance.
I agree with the first AC that responded to you. If you (plural) really did want to give people a second chance, then those people wouldn't realise that they're still being punished... because they wouldn't be.
If the only way that you will give those people a second chance is if you don't know and can't find out about their history... then you're not really proposing what you think you're proposing.
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Re:
If the story has been recorded in the papers, etc., take the advice provided here: How To Resurrect Your Reputation: 5 Steps To Success. I'm in the "make lemonade" phase because I don't want to start all over again.
Potential employers, etc., don't judge you by the search results but by how you deal with them. I'm creating more relevant results by creating more internet footprints. How am I doing? It's either working or it's not.
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In other words
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Re: In other words
Even worse, it imposes on inconvenient facts the obligation to never have existed. You get to re-write history. The facts don't get to speak for themselves. They can continue to hide in yet undiscovered archives and Samizdat, that's all.
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"boo hoo somebody said something i dont like"
*censor censor censor*
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Not Sayin' It's Obvious
...Huh, imagine that.
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Right idea wrong target
Here in the US we shouldn't be left out. We should have a right to be forgotten too.
Just in our case it's the government, not Google or Facebook, that should be required to expunge truthful data about us that they should never have acquired in the first place.
The difficult part will be knowing all the government agencies we would need to send our requests too; NSA, CIA, ICE, Homeland Security.... IRS.
You don't think the government would consent to having a single agency handle all of our requests to be forgotten.... do you?
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Re: Right idea wrong target
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Time Traveling Stalin
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Google is not the internet
South Korea, whose governmental "media monitoring agency" has said it will release guidelines for people who wish to remove information from the internet:
But the Right To Be Forgotten laws don't remove information from the internet: it removes information from Google's indexing, assuming Google approves the request. The information is still out there on the original publisher's site and anyone can still use Bing or any other search engine to find the information. Heck, they could even go to a newspaper's website and search for the information.
Could you please be more precise with your wording so people don't confuse Google with the rest of the internet.
And to the poster who said people should be given a second chance: I completely agree.
But the RTBF laws only stop the casual person using Google- they don't affect law enforcement. This means if someone really wants a second chance, they better hope their potential employer doesn't do a criminal background check.
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Korea's right to be forgotten is not really what it is called.
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Korea's right to be forgotten is not really what it is called.
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