EU Report: The 'Right To Be Forgotten' Is Technically Impossible... So Let's Do It Anyway

from the just-forget-it dept

Every few months, it seems, we hear about yet another attempt in Europe to implement the absolutely ridiculous idea of the "right to be forgotten." We wrote about it in 2010, 2011 and again earlier this year. It's a silly idea for a variety of reasons. The general idea is that someone, say, who has committed a crime, but is then rehabilitated / served his time / whatever, deserves a "fresh start" and the stories of the crime and punishment should be erased from publications. Europeans who support this wacky idea argue that it's a form of a privacy right. But that's ridiculous. It has nothing to do with "privacy" at all, as the fact that someone committed and convicted of a crime is a public fact, not private info. Telling people (and publishers) that they can't talk about factual information, or even leave available factual stories written at the time just seems completely offensive to anyone who believes in the basic idea of free speech.

And, of course, there's an even bigger problem. The whole idea isn't just silly and complex, but it's totally impossible. And it's not just me saying that. As Stewart Baker points out, the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has put out a report making the basic impossibility of a "right to be forgotten" quite clear:

Consider Alice viewing Bob’s personal information on a computer screen, while she is allowed to do so (i.e., before Bob has invoked his right to be forgotten). Alice can take a picture of the screen using a camera, take notes or memorize the information. It is technically impossible to prevent Alice from doing so, or even to recognize that she has obtained a copy of Bob’s personal data.

They seem to make that clear just by the image they chose to put on the cover of the report: That said... given the very admission that this is impossible, you'd think the recommendation would be (perhaps) to find something a little more productive to work on. But, no, that would be wishful thinking. Instead, despite the admission that the whole endeavor is doomed to be a failure for the simple fact that it's impossible, they still discuss ways that it might be implemented. And their ideas? Well, to double down on the impossible with crazy regulations. Take for example, the following two "recommendations" in the final section, one right after the other:

• For any reasonable interpretation of the right to be forgotten, a purely technical and comprehensive solution to enforce the right in the open Internet is generally impossible.
• A possible pragmatic approach to assist with the enforcement of the right to be forgotten is to require search engine operators and sharing services within the EU to filter references to forgotten information stored inside and outside the EU region.

Got that? So it's impossible, but let's regulate the hell out of search engines and tell them what they can't link to. Perhaps if they'd stopped after the point at which they determined it was "impossible" we'd all have been better off.

Filed Under: enisa, europe, free speech, impossible, privacy, public information, reporting, right to be forgotten

Court Says State Department Can Live In Fantasyland & Pretend Documents Leaked By Wikileaks Are Still Secret

from the head-in-sand-approach dept

We've talked about the problem in which classified documents that are leaked and widely available to the public are still considered classified by the government, even though the concept is ludicrous. It leads to absolutely ridiculous situations, such as government employees not being able to look at documents available on Wikileaks, even as everyone else in the world can easily log in and see them. Or the case (linked above) in which lawyers representing Guantanamo detainees weren't allowed to look at these documents -- which anyone else in the world can see -- which relate to their clients. Even the NY Times called this situation "absurd." And it is. In the business world, people commonly sign "non-disclosure agreements," but they're always considered null and void if that same information becomes public by other means. It's bizarre that the government doesn't recognize the same policy.

However, in a lawsuit we first discussed last year, where the ACLU sued the State Department for failing to declassify (under a FOIA request) documents that were already widely available on Wikileaks, a judge has ruled against the ACLU, and said that the documents remain classified. Once again, this is absurd. It's as if everyone is actively denying reality.

The ACLU relied on the part of the test that questions whether the disclosure of the information "reasonably could be expected to result in damage to national security." Seeing as anyone seeking to "damage" our national security can just surf over to Wikileaks, and has been able to do that for quite some time, you'd think that the ACLU's argument was pretty rock solid. Not according to the court (pdf and embedded below). The court seems to tapdance around the issue. It argues that the Court should "defer" to the judgment of the administration on this question, and that it's possible that the official release of these documents could impact national security. I don't buy it. Any official release is unlikely to have any different impact than the unofficial release. To argue that making those releases official has some sort of new "threat" involved just doesn't pass the laugh test.

What's most distressing about this is that it shows a government that is not dealing in reality, but is dealing in a fantasy land, where it pretends that if it sticks its fingers in its ears, and hands over its eyes, it can pretend that the documents, which are very, very public, are not at all public. I want a government that deals in reality and not fantasy. Unfortunately, with this situation, we have the reverse -- and, bizarrely, the courts are saying that an executive branch that lives in fantasyland is just fine.

Filed Under: classified, documents, public information, state department, wikileaks
Companies: aclu

The Story Behind Facebook Threatening To Sue Developer Into Oblivion For Highlighting Useful Facebook Data

from the how-nice-of-them dept

Facebook's lawyers have been getting pretty nasty lately. We recently covered the company's threats against the creator of a useful Greasemonkey script, and now a developer named Pete Warden has shared the sordid details of his legal run-in with Facebook -- where they threatened to sue him for his activity aggregating publicly available data found on Facebook.

You should read the full story, but basically, he built a simple crawler for public Facebook info, initially for his own purposes. He made sure that Facebook's robots.txt didn't block such crawlers -- and he also emailed someone at Facebook (who he had dealt with before), but didn't hear back from anyone. As his crawler worked, it started collecting a bunch of interesting data, and so he set up a website to let people explore some of this (again, public) data.

After playing with some of the data himself, he started making some interesting maps and charts with the data, and did a simple analysis of geographic locations of Facebook friend connections to show people what you could do with the data. He noted that if others (such as professional researchers) wanted to dig into the data, he would let them access a version of the data set (with identifying info stripped). The chart he released got picked up by a variety of sites and quickly got passed around.

And that's when the lawyers called:

On Sunday around 25,000 people read the article, via YCombinator and Reddit. After that a whole bunch of mainstream news sites picked it up, and over 150,000 people visited it on Monday. On Tuesday I was hanging out with my friends at Gnip trying to make sense of it all when my cell phone rang. It was Facebook's attorney.

He was with the head of their security team, who I knew slightly because I'd reported several security holes to Facebook over the years. The attorney said that they were just about to sue me into oblivion, but in light of my previous good relationship with their security team, they'd give me one chance to stop the process. They asked and received a verbal assurance from me that I wouldn't publish the data, and sent me on a letter to sign confirming that. Their contention was robots.txt had no legal force and they could sue anyone for accessing their site even if they scrupulously obeyed the instructions it contained. The only legal way to access any web site with a crawler was to obtain prior written permission.

Mathew Ingram reported on the data getting forced down, and got a statement from Facebook that seems to miss the point:

Andrew Noyes, manager of public policy communications at Facebook, said in an email that Warden "aggregated a large amount of data from over 200 million users without our permission, in violation of our terms. He also publicly stated he intended to make that raw data freely available to others." Noyes also noted that Facebook's statement of rights and responsibilites says that users agree not to collect users' content or information "using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission."

But I still don't see what the legal argument is. At best, I could see them terminating his account for disobeying the terms of service -- but even then the whole thing doesn't make much sense. The data is publicly available and, as Peter notes, it's pretty much standard practice for people to aggregate and analyze such data. However, he also pointed out that he couldn't afford to be a legal test case, and so he gave in and negotiated with Facebook to remove the data.

In the end, though, this shows Facebook's rather schizophrenic view towards data and privacy. On the one hand, it tries to push everyone to open up their info, but then if anyone does anything useful with it, they threaten to sue?

Filed Under: crawler, facebook, legal threats, public information