I understand that people want their privacy protected and they want to be protected from other people saying things that are not true, but there are already ways of handling such things. The ability to allow a person to demand that a website delete anything that relates to them is a scary concept. Think about it from a political perpective, I believe that politicians are the ones most interested in seeing such a law pass. They would be able to say demand that wikipedia take down any piece of information about them that they don't like wether true or not. If something like this existed it would be easy for politicians or movie stars, anyone that has a public life and people would be interested in learning about, it would allow them to control what information does or does not get published about them, the things they did or the laws they supported which were unpopular. Things like that.
If we are going to look at it from a regular person's perspective then as said before if you are someone who does not understand how the internet works and you go posting all your personal pictures on your facebook or myspace and everyone can see them, and they show you doing things that are not exactly flattering, the unfortunately that's on you. You choose to use something without understanding how it works and now you must face the consequences. Places like facebook and myspace have ways preventing everyone and their mother from seeing what's on your page, they may not be perfect but if you did not want anyone to see it, you should not have posted it on something as volatile as the internet.
This isn't really about privacy. This is about controlling information. This is about someone being allowed to demand something they dont like wether true or not to be removed. It is entirely impossible to remove every trace of yourself from the internet, but with a law like this and some diligence you could make much more difficult for people to learn about you. The people who already read the information will remember it, but people who have not seen it yet, unless they can find someone who knows this information will have a harder time learning it. As I stated before this not about privacy no matter what they say, this is a way of giving people the power information from the internet, or at the very least attempt to, whether the information is accurate or not.
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If we are going to look at it from a regular person's perspective then as said before if you are someone who does not understand how the internet works and you go posting all your personal pictures on your facebook or myspace and everyone can see them, and they show you doing things that are not exactly flattering, the unfortunately that's on you. You choose to use something without understanding how it works and now you must face the consequences. Places like facebook and myspace have ways preventing everyone and their mother from seeing what's on your page, they may not be perfect but if you did not want anyone to see it, you should not have posted it on something as volatile as the internet.
This isn't really about privacy. This is about controlling information. This is about someone being allowed to demand something they dont like wether true or not to be removed. It is entirely impossible to remove every trace of yourself from the internet, but with a law like this and some diligence you could make much more difficult for people to learn about you. The people who already read the information will remember it, but people who have not seen it yet, unless they can find someone who knows this information will have a harder time learning it. As I stated before this not about privacy no matter what they say, this is a way of giving people the power information from the internet, or at the very least attempt to, whether the information is accurate or not.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Trenzein.
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