South Korea Embraces Ridiculous Right To Be Forgotten As Well

from the forget-you dept

Mon, Feb 29th 2016 12:40pm — Mike Masnick

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.

“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.”

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:

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.

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.

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.

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Filed Under: free speech, right to be forgotten, south korea

22 Comments

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That One Guy (profile), 29 Feb 2016 @ 11:33am

That's a feature, not a bug
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.

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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Anonymous Coward, 29 Feb 2016 @ 12:46pm

It's more like a Right to Censor.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Feb 2016 @ 12:47pm

You're going to be sorry when President Trump makes you take this post down.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Feb 2016 @ 12:47pm

Google opened the door to this...
by doing it for the EU. Expect governments all over the world to try to get their foot in now too.
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Groaker (profile), 29 Feb 2016 @ 1:08pm

Of course the US could always forget South Korea altogether.
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mcinsand, 29 Feb 2016 @ 1:30pm

In a related note...
I have realized that, no matter what Mexico's president says now, I predict that they will be eager to build and pay for a wall if Trump becomes president. They have enough problems without hordes of refugees storming in from the north.

(I'm not worried, though, since I know how a shovel works.)
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tqk (profile), 29 Feb 2016 @ 2:19pm

Re:
Of course the US could always forget South Korea altogether.

Remember Pol Pot's Cambodia? Want another?
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Feb 2016 @ 2:36pm

As a European let me explain to you about the reasoning about this "right to be forgotten":

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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Tom Mink (profile), 29 Feb 2016 @ 2:40pm

In other words
The right to be forgotten imposes the much more sinister sounding obligation to forget. We've always been at war with Eastasia
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Feb 2016 @ 2:47pm

cry babies being cry babies
"boo hoo somebody said something i dont like"
*censor censor censor*
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Feb 2016 @ 2:53pm

Re:
If you Europeans truly gave people a second chance, then there would be no need of a "right" to be forgotten.
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tqk (profile), 29 Feb 2016 @ 3:29pm

Re: In other words
The right to be forgotten imposes the much more sinister sounding obligation to forget.

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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Anonymous Coward, 29 Feb 2016 @ 4:55pm

Not Sayin' It's Obvious
Politicians everywhere are eager to pass legislation that buries previous misdeeds...

...Huh, imagine that.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Feb 2016 @ 7:39pm

Re:
… we actually want to give people a second chance.
Joe Stalin deserves a second chance, too. He can improve his photoshop skills this time.
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MrTroy (profile), 29 Feb 2016 @ 11:24pm

Re:
You do your time and when you come out you realize that you are effectively still being punished.

... 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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jilocasin (profile), 1 Mar 2016 @ 5:22am

Right idea wrong target
I think all of this right to be forgotten business might be a good idea, it's just directed at the wrong targets.

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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Wendy Cockcroft, 1 Mar 2016 @ 6:12am

Re:
As the subject of a troll campaign I can sympathise with the desire to get inaccurate or out of date information removed, but the only way to get it down so that it stays down is to get it down at source.

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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BeldansFire (profile), 1 Mar 2016 @ 6:15am

Time Traveling Stalin
Hmm commit genocide and be able to expunge all records of it from the internet... Then do it all again. Sounds like the plot of a dumb movie.
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Anonymous Coward, 1 Mar 2016 @ 6:53am

Re: Right idea wrong target
It appears as though the US congress has already forgotten about a majority of its citizens.
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John85851 (profile), 1 Mar 2016 @ 8:06am

Google is not the internet
Just a point of correction:
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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KS Park, 17 Sep 2016 @ 8:13pm

Korea's right to be forgotten is not really what it is called.
The KCC “Guidelines on the Right to Request Access Restrictions on Personal Internet Postings” will not apply the third party contents.[73] To the extent that the right to be forgotten concerns a data subject's right to limit the searchability of third party postings about him/her, the Guideline harldly constitutes a right to be forgotten.[74] Also, as to the right to withdraw one's own posting, critics have noted that people have been able to delete their own postings before the Guideline as long as they have retained their login credentials, and that people who have misplaced their login credentials were permitted to retrieve or receive new ones.[75] The only services significantly affected by the Guideline are Wiki-type services where people's contributions make logical sense only in response to or in conjunction with one another's conributions and therefore the postings are made permanent part of the mass-created content, but KCC made sure that the Guideline applies to these services only when the posting identifies the authors.[76]
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KS Park, 17 Sep 2016 @ 8:13pm

Korea's right to be forgotten is not really what it is called.
The KCC “Guidelines on the Right to Request Access Restrictions on Personal Internet Postings” will not apply the third party contents.[73] To the extent that the right to be forgotten concerns a data subject's right to limit the searchability of third party postings about him/her, the Guideline harldly constitutes a right to be forgotten.[74] Also, as to the right to withdraw one's own posting, critics have noted that people have been able to delete their own postings before the Guideline as long as they have retained their login credentials, and that people who have misplaced their login credentials were permitted to retrieve or receive new ones.[75] The only services significantly affected by the Guideline are Wiki-type services where people's contributions make logical sense only in response to or in conjunction with one another's conributions and therefore the postings are made permanent part of the mass-created content, but KCC made sure that the Guideline applies to these services only when the posting identifies the authors.[76]
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