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Ctrl + Z: The Right to Be Forgotten
This is going on your permanent record! is a threat that has never held more weight than it does in the Internet Age, when information lasts indefinitely. The ability to make good on that threat is as democratized as posting a Tweet or making blog. Data about us is created, shared, collected, analyzed, and processed at an overwhelming scale. The damage caused can be severe, affecting relationships, employment, academic success, and any number of other opportunities and it can also be long lasting.One possible solution to this threat? A digital right to be forgotten, which would in turn create a legal duty to delete, hide, or anonymize information at the request of another user. The highly controversial right has been criticized as a repugnant affront to principles of expression and access, as unworkable as a technical measure, and as effective as trying to put the cat back in the bag.Ctrl+Z breaks down the debate and provides guidance for a way forward. It argues that the existing perspectives are too limited, offering easy forgetting or none at all. By looking at new theories of privacy and organizing the many potential applications of the right, law and technology scholar Meg Leta Jones offers a set of nuanced choices. To help us choose, she provides a digital information life cycle, reflects on particular legal cultures, and analyzes international interoperability. In the end, the right to be forgotten can be innovative, liberating, and globally viable. "
- GenresNonfictionTechnologyLaw
256 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2016
17 people are currently reading
353 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 29, 2016
In 2016 is anybody unaware that the Internet does not forget? Are we now accustomed to our every public (and often not-so-public) utterance or interaction being stored somewhere for later recall? Should we have the right to be forgotten and be a bit more in control?
The author of this fascinating book drops the reader right into the middle of the issue, looking at the implications of endless Internet memory and the risks that it can pose to us. Even if we believe we are doing nothing wrong today, who knows how it may look tomorrow. Our opinions and values can change over time plus we cannot be sure about the norms and values of the future or that of those looking back at our past. This is even before computers get involved, analysing our entire digital history, for sleights perceived and actual.
This is not a book for the paranoid, but a careful and sensitive treatment of a very serious subject, providing a broad range of viewpoints and noting suggested treatments such as the implementation of a legal right to be forgotten, that is to say the ability to hide, delete or anonymise information held about us. Of course, there will be resistance to this idea, both from government and big business. Data is, after all, a resource to be exploited. Clearly you don’t want a criminal being able to remove their records from a police computer system, but does my neighbour need to be able to see what I wrote 20 years ago during a possibly traumatic phase of life?
It is not necessarily a clear-cut binary decision. The use of stored data can also help us in our everyday lives. A lot of our digital footprint is going to be unimportant. Who cares if I used to look at legal cat pictures until I suddenly went pro-rabbit and eschewed all fluffy kittens. What’s the big deal if Google now shows more rabbit-orientated advertising than cats. However, maybe my political views have changed, maybe I have bought some products online that I’d rather not disclose to the world and his dog or maybe I wrote an angry letter to a local newspaper and now someone has taken offence. This is the problem. With a few clicks someone can build up a picture of me and maybe use that information against me. Maybe I suddenly don’t get that promotion, or that job or even lose my job, all because of a piece of data on the Internet. Heaven help me if I run for public office and someone drags up the embarrassing sort of stuff most younger people can write. You might be entitled to your opinion, but…
The author carefully steers the reader, noting that there are lots of nuances and much light and shade, yet she reflects and draws us towards a workable solution that could provide the means to be digitally forgotten which would be viable, innovative and arguably liberating. The book dispels many myths, corrects some misunderstandings and gets you thinking.
It was all very more-ish, quite impactful and highly recommendable. Even if you might not have anything to hide, someone else may and they deserve this protection and should get it, before it is too late.
The author of this fascinating book drops the reader right into the middle of the issue, looking at the implications of endless Internet memory and the risks that it can pose to us. Even if we believe we are doing nothing wrong today, who knows how it may look tomorrow. Our opinions and values can change over time plus we cannot be sure about the norms and values of the future or that of those looking back at our past. This is even before computers get involved, analysing our entire digital history, for sleights perceived and actual.
This is not a book for the paranoid, but a careful and sensitive treatment of a very serious subject, providing a broad range of viewpoints and noting suggested treatments such as the implementation of a legal right to be forgotten, that is to say the ability to hide, delete or anonymise information held about us. Of course, there will be resistance to this idea, both from government and big business. Data is, after all, a resource to be exploited. Clearly you don’t want a criminal being able to remove their records from a police computer system, but does my neighbour need to be able to see what I wrote 20 years ago during a possibly traumatic phase of life?
It is not necessarily a clear-cut binary decision. The use of stored data can also help us in our everyday lives. A lot of our digital footprint is going to be unimportant. Who cares if I used to look at legal cat pictures until I suddenly went pro-rabbit and eschewed all fluffy kittens. What’s the big deal if Google now shows more rabbit-orientated advertising than cats. However, maybe my political views have changed, maybe I have bought some products online that I’d rather not disclose to the world and his dog or maybe I wrote an angry letter to a local newspaper and now someone has taken offence. This is the problem. With a few clicks someone can build up a picture of me and maybe use that information against me. Maybe I suddenly don’t get that promotion, or that job or even lose my job, all because of a piece of data on the Internet. Heaven help me if I run for public office and someone drags up the embarrassing sort of stuff most younger people can write. You might be entitled to your opinion, but…
The author carefully steers the reader, noting that there are lots of nuances and much light and shade, yet she reflects and draws us towards a workable solution that could provide the means to be digitally forgotten which would be viable, innovative and arguably liberating. The book dispels many myths, corrects some misunderstandings and gets you thinking.
It was all very more-ish, quite impactful and highly recommendable. Even if you might not have anything to hide, someone else may and they deserve this protection and should get it, before it is too late.
May 29, 2016
I found this detailed account more suited to media lawyers and legislators, than to a general readership, which is why I am not rating it more highly, but I applaud the careful research and attention to detail.
With private matters surfacing on the net decades after the incidents may have occurred, some people want information about them struck off the public record. But search engines never forget, do they? A teacher lost her contract after films of her as an exotic dancer decades previously surfaced, while a man took a court action regarding the fact that he was listed as a debtor after he had cleared the matter.
The account looks at how laws had to catch up with life as the net and data storage evolved. While don't forget that data disks can be corrupted and the contents lost. I found some of the issues very interesting and others were like wading through legal treacle so your understanding of and need for various parts will colour your approach.
I recommend The Smart Girl's Guide To Privacy by Violet Blue for those who want to know exactly how to protect themselves online from stalkers, con artists and sites that sell their data.
I downloaded a copy from Net Galley for an unbiased review.
With private matters surfacing on the net decades after the incidents may have occurred, some people want information about them struck off the public record. But search engines never forget, do they? A teacher lost her contract after films of her as an exotic dancer decades previously surfaced, while a man took a court action regarding the fact that he was listed as a debtor after he had cleared the matter.
The account looks at how laws had to catch up with life as the net and data storage evolved. While don't forget that data disks can be corrupted and the contents lost. I found some of the issues very interesting and others were like wading through legal treacle so your understanding of and need for various parts will colour your approach.
I recommend The Smart Girl's Guide To Privacy by Violet Blue for those who want to know exactly how to protect themselves online from stalkers, con artists and sites that sell their data.
I downloaded a copy from Net Galley for an unbiased review.
January 24, 2016
Disclaimer: I received access to a digital copy of Ctrl+Z through NetGalley. I was not required to review this book, and any recommendations are made voluntarily. Any views or opinions expressed are my own.
This book is a heavy read, despite being about 200 pages in length.
Unless you’re very familiar with the exact laws, legislative bodies, and examples Jones mentions in the book, you’re bound to get lost once or twice. The author certainly knows what she’s talking about, but there’s so much more she could have expounded on in order to expand the reader’s understanding of the subject in general.
One of the more engaging parts of the book had to do with children’s psychology in experimenting with different identities online. Other than that, I gleaned the fact that the US and Europe are vastly different in terms of maintaining an individual’s privacy versus maintaining a data controller’s free speech.
I’d recommend this book for those familiar with the legal sphere of privacy/the internet. Any others may want to look for another book that’s slightly easier to digest.
This book is a heavy read, despite being about 200 pages in length.
Unless you’re very familiar with the exact laws, legislative bodies, and examples Jones mentions in the book, you’re bound to get lost once or twice. The author certainly knows what she’s talking about, but there’s so much more she could have expounded on in order to expand the reader’s understanding of the subject in general.
One of the more engaging parts of the book had to do with children’s psychology in experimenting with different identities online. Other than that, I gleaned the fact that the US and Europe are vastly different in terms of maintaining an individual’s privacy versus maintaining a data controller’s free speech.
I’d recommend this book for those familiar with the legal sphere of privacy/the internet. Any others may want to look for another book that’s slightly easier to digest.
July 27, 2018
This book is about privacy issues in the Digital Age, and potential legal/political and technical solutions to them. It's not about practical ways to protect your privacy. I skimmed it because I was barely interested in the content. Although I've been interested in digital security and privacy all my adult life, to me the legal and political aspects are some of the least interesting in the field.
In explaining the privacy problems created by digital technology, the book states, "The digitization and disclosure of life's personal details 'will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.'" It says that in the Digital Age, "forgetting has become the exception, and remembering the default." Human memory revises, forgets, and contextualizes the past; digital memory is "more comprehensive, as well as more accurate and objective than the fallible memory of the forgetful human mind." The book also states that "The Internet, as an integral piece of external memory, also prevents one from moving to a new community to re-create oneself and start fresh. Digital memory, in short, prevents society from moving beyond the past because it cannot forget the past."
The author is Assistant Professor of Communication, Culture, and Technology at Georgetown University.
Notes
"Google CEO Eric Schmidt described the setting as 'living with a historical record' and warned that people will need to be 'much more careful how they talk, how they interact, what they offer of themselves.'"
Lawrence Lessig "describes the four methods of regulation as the market forces that invisibly meet the demands of society; norms and other social regulators that pressure individuals to behave appropriately; technical design that affects behavior; and government regulation."
Wickr offers a more secure Snapchat-like service.
Silent Circle app allows sending self-destructing files.
With predictive analytics (data created about you on basis of history of others), "we are not only at the mercy of our own pasts; we are at the mercy of pasts of others who are like us."
The Privacy Paradox: "Internet users claim to care about protecting information and to value personal data but to do not take steps that reflect these values and give away their data freely."
In explaining the privacy problems created by digital technology, the book states, "The digitization and disclosure of life's personal details 'will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.'" It says that in the Digital Age, "forgetting has become the exception, and remembering the default." Human memory revises, forgets, and contextualizes the past; digital memory is "more comprehensive, as well as more accurate and objective than the fallible memory of the forgetful human mind." The book also states that "The Internet, as an integral piece of external memory, also prevents one from moving to a new community to re-create oneself and start fresh. Digital memory, in short, prevents society from moving beyond the past because it cannot forget the past."
The author is Assistant Professor of Communication, Culture, and Technology at Georgetown University.
Notes
"Google CEO Eric Schmidt described the setting as 'living with a historical record' and warned that people will need to be 'much more careful how they talk, how they interact, what they offer of themselves.'"
Lawrence Lessig "describes the four methods of regulation as the market forces that invisibly meet the demands of society; norms and other social regulators that pressure individuals to behave appropriately; technical design that affects behavior; and government regulation."
Wickr offers a more secure Snapchat-like service.
Silent Circle app allows sending self-destructing files.
With predictive analytics (data created about you on basis of history of others), "we are not only at the mercy of our own pasts; we are at the mercy of pasts of others who are like us."
The Privacy Paradox: "Internet users claim to care about protecting information and to value personal data but to do not take steps that reflect these values and give away their data freely."
February 26, 2016
I'm not completely sure where to start or what to even say about this book. This is not a book for a layperson to this legal arena. If you're looking for intro level, I would say to look elsewhere. However, if you are a professional litigator, I can see this being an interesting read especially if you have previous knowledge in this specific field. Since I am a layperson, I just don't think this book was for me.
The writing is incredibly dense and not particularly organized. Considering the sheer volume of information and theories put forward it would have been nice to see it broken into smaller chunks with headers. The layout just runs from one thought process to another with no real warning to change the direction your mental gears are heading in.
Besides the layout, I felt that a lot of the information was just a bunch of copypasta on laws and theories with no real thesis behind it. This is not a book that takes a position and presents it, instead there are just a lot of competing ideas thrown at you for interpretation on your own. Or at least, if there was a position being presented I never picked up on it.
Again, I think this book just wasn't meant for me, so I don't like giving it a lower rating, but it reflects my actual enjoyment of the book. There was a lot of good information, but it was hard to parse it all apart as a layperson. This book would be much better suited to someone already in the field, or a lawyer in general who is interested in the topic.
Copy courtesy of NYU Press, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
The writing is incredibly dense and not particularly organized. Considering the sheer volume of information and theories put forward it would have been nice to see it broken into smaller chunks with headers. The layout just runs from one thought process to another with no real warning to change the direction your mental gears are heading in.
Besides the layout, I felt that a lot of the information was just a bunch of copypasta on laws and theories with no real thesis behind it. This is not a book that takes a position and presents it, instead there are just a lot of competing ideas thrown at you for interpretation on your own. Or at least, if there was a position being presented I never picked up on it.
Again, I think this book just wasn't meant for me, so I don't like giving it a lower rating, but it reflects my actual enjoyment of the book. There was a lot of good information, but it was hard to parse it all apart as a layperson. This book would be much better suited to someone already in the field, or a lawyer in general who is interested in the topic.
Copy courtesy of NYU Press, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
March 30, 2016
Very informative (detailed to the nth degree!) and necessary, especially for the younger generations and their overwhelming trust with all things social. A truly great guide that I will refer back to during my blog's revamp and subsequent strategies to protect myself and content. Encourage others (esp vulnerable populations) to understand the nitty gritty underworld and greed that forms our public policy.
I could have used some synopsis/cheat sheets to make referring to this easier (hence the minus of one star) but post-its will have to do.
~ Note: I received a free copy from the NYU Press via NetGalley for my honest appraisal.
I could have used some synopsis/cheat sheets to make referring to this easier (hence the minus of one star) but post-its will have to do.
~ Note: I received a free copy from the NYU Press via NetGalley for my honest appraisal.
April 30, 2016
Them that's got shall have, them that's not shall lose, so the Bible says, and it still is news. . . .
– “God Bless the Child”, Billie Holliday and Arthur Herzog, Jr., 1939
Although I can afford to buy my own books (if I don't buy them any faster than I read them), I take a very unseemly and childish pleasure in getting things for free, so you may imagine my delight when I discovered that I could snag newly-published ebooks at Netgalley. Apparently, all you have to do is ask. It may have helped that I've written a bunch of reviews and have, inexplicably, 40+ followers. Perhaps not. Whatever the reason, this is the first book I have received in this fashion.
I'm a little worried that I will kill the golden-egg-generating-goose by going all negative in my first review. Do publishers check to see if the beneficiaries of their electronic largesse are praising their books? I doubt my review would help generate the much-sought-after word-of-mouth, even if it were a rave. I'm afraid that not only will Yale University Press come and electronically yank this one off my device, but also they'll whisper to two other recent hapless victims of my raging parsimony and they will do the same. Before long, I'll find myself paying retail – the horror, the horror.
This is where I take off the velvet gloves and say that this book suffers from bad writing in the service of bad ideas. I would like to address the bad writing first.
Bad Writing
To be fair, the author (at location 392) confesses to “limited language skills”. In addition, I believe this book started life as a well-researched Ph.D. dissertation. The readers of a dissertation would presumably come to the document with a greater previous knowledge of the topic, and clarity of expression might not be as highly prized by the Georgetown University thesis evaluation committee as it is by me. But books published for the general public by prestige university presses are supposed to be vetted by editors. If there was an editor on duty here, he or she was clearly asleep at the switch.
Other reviewers here at Goodreads have commented that this book is slow going and not for the general reader. If not for the general reader, who is this book for? Privacy experts? Lawyers? I guess it's reasonable to expect lawyers, who as a matter of course must endure public statements, press releases, depositions, legal opinions, laws, and rule-making, might have developed a tolerance for unclear expression, like the king who took small amounts of poison every day in a successful (the story goes) effort to survive and take revenge upon his assassins. But I can't imagine any lawyer would enjoy this read more because it is difficult and think: “I'm glad this is so disorganized and filled with jargon, because it'll keep out the riff-raff.”
Two or three of the reviewers here seem to be non-experts and I think it's reasonable to say that this is a topic – and a book ��� that could attract the attention of similarly well-intentioned amateurs in the public at large. This is an issue that is far from settled; a few people want to get ahead of the curve. Here is a case where, for once, public opinion is not yet fully formed and thoughtful contributions from members of the public could actually make a difference. People who wish to inform themselves should be encouraged, but the writing in this book doesn't encourage them.
I'd like to take two examples of bad writing in this book and explain why they are bad. They are, of course, only a small part of the complete book, but I maintain that they are representative of the entire book. I also ask you to believe that they are not taken out of context, nor would reading the text immediately before or after each be much assistance in puzzling out their unclear meanings.
This first example, an error of incorrect word choice, is from Kindle location 1619 (the electronic galley copy I received did not have page numbers): “The story of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot is informative. The protagonist is on a search for the truth of the past, the life of Gustave Flaubert, an ardently private man with a protected reputation as a recluse” [italics mine].
“Protected”? Is that supposed to be “established”? That's my guess. Maybe “long-standing”? “broad”? “general”? Maybe the author meant something like “...an ardently private man with a reputation for [fiercely? aggressively?] protecting his isolation”? In any case, “protected reputation” is just wrong. It can't be just written off as a one-time “damn you autocorrect”-type mistake because errors like this occur elsewhere in the book.
The second example error is incorrect use of discourse markers, a fancy term that means “words that give your reader a clue about how what to expect next”. Like Chekhov's gun which, once placed, must be fired, any time you use a discourse marker to point out that something has two parts, you should quickly proceed to make clear that part one is X and part two is Y.
This quotation picks up in the middle of a long paragraph at location 1950 as follows: “… the German Federal Court of Justice devised a two-part test to settle inconsistencies among lower courts. Some found the online archive the same as the current, and therefore, new, dissemination of the story, and others found the online archive comparable to traditional archives. The Court of Justice asked both how the report was disseminated and how the reader will perceive it. Dissemination of the information that is deemed minor, such as a listing in a website calendar or teasers that lead to pay-to-view archives, will not violate personality rights. The court compared actively searching for the specific information online to prime-time television coverage. If the content must be actively searched, as the Lauber and Werlé content was, the publication is not a violation, but if it is pushed onto the reader or brought to the attention of a reader through links from current content, the publication might constitute a violation. The second part of the test requires that the archived information not give the impression that the content is current or a fresh publication” [italics mine].
Like a shiny object before a baby, the promise of an explanation of the two-part test is dangled before the reader, then snatched away. Things with two parts then confusingly appear (“Some found… others found”, “both how… and how”) and then, upon inspection, turn out not to be parts of the two-part test. Finally, at the end of the paragraph, we are told about the second part of the test, without any mention of the first. Where did it go? Repeated rereadings of the paragraph convinced me that the sentence beginning “If the content must...” is in fact the first part of the two-part test, but it's impossible to tell if that's correct because it's not clearly labelled. In any event, the reader should not have to read a paragraph four or five times to make a guess about information that should be clear upon first reading.
Bad ideas
Any reader who has got this far might be justified in thinking that I am coming down too hard on the author. The reason I'm making such a big fuss about this is that I believe that the purpose of the bad writing in this book, as it is for much bad writing, is “to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind" (George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”).
The issue here, oversimplified, is the right to freedom of speech versus the titular right to be forgotten. US legal and political culture is more sympathetic to the former (as I, an American, am), and Europeans seem to be drawn strongly to the latter (as the author of this book is).
I allege that the author unfairly stacks the deck in favor of her argument through unfair characterizations, that the thesis she presents at the book's beginning is not the actual thesis (the actual thesis is buried toward the end of the book), and author's proposed remedy is worse than the disease.
– unfair characterizations:
US solutions to this problem are “simplistic” (l. 822). Free expression is “feverishly protected” in the US (l. 2124) – I actually don't mind this characterization, but it seems unlikely that, if you say someone is doing something “feverishly”, you believe they are doing it in a wise and admirable manner. However, in Europe, there is an “emphasis on dignity” (l. 2008), citizen enjoy “rich personality rights” (l. 448), and French government agencies “pioneered recognition of the right to be forgotten” (l. 567).
Furthermore, in the US, “...we have started to criminalize schoolchildren drawing on their desks [and] put people in jail for smoking on the subway or not wearing a seatbelt” (l. 2010). While I'm sure that the absurd instances of authority overreach mentioned in this sentence actually are true, I contend they are small in number and not indicative of a sick society. I also dispute that these incidents represent a trend which has “left us isolated from our Western sister nations” (l. 2011) and put the US on a par with the world's totalitarian dictationships, as the author says.
– the actual thesis
“The central thesis of Ctrl + Z is that digital right to be forgotten is an innovative idea with a lot of possibilities and potential” (l. 346). I will not give you the rest of the paragraph, I will summarize it: We need to think about the right to be forgotten in new ways.
No one can object to the recommendation that he or she should try to think in new ways. However, I object to this thesis statement because it is not actually a thesis statement. A thesis statement makes a claim that others might dispute and tells the reader how you will interpret the significance of the subject matter under discussion (two of the five qualities of a good thesis statement, according to the Writing Center at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
I contend that the real thesis statement of this book occurs at location 2253, which my Kindle tells me is 59% of the way through the book. It is: “...the US could construct a constitutional forgiveness law that contains elements of time, oversight, relief, a forgivable offense, specific harm, and social benefit.” Although the word “could” appears in the quotation above, I contend that the author believes the US should do this. Throughout the book, the author is clearly in favor of a well-defined law, set of laws, or set of laws plus judicial precedents, which will make it easier for people to request information about themselves be made difficult or impossible to find. I don't agree with this opinion (see below), but it is completely beyond argument that reasonable people of good will and great learning can hold this opinion and, like the author, back up their opinion with an impressive amount of research.
There is no reason, however, that the statement that summarizes the book's thesis should be unlabelled and plainly stated for the first time only in the second half of the book.
(Further evidence that the statement at l. 2253 is a more accurate statement of the author's thesis: (l. 2080) “the US must incorporate the correct level of oversight by a decision maker” and (l. 2089) “Without organized oversight, any structure for the right to be forgotten will be highly susceptible to manipulation.”)
– remedy is worse than the disease
I'd like to divide this part into two subparts: “Rights creep” and “Another complex bureaucracy”
1) “Rights creep”
Of course, everyone is in favor of rights. It's hard to talk skeptically about rights without appearing like something of a villain. Nevertheless, I argue that too many activities are now phrased in terms of rights, both in the world in general and in this book in particular. For example, this book mentions “the right to free development of personality” (l. 607), “the right to object to data processing” (l. 643), and “the right to dignity” (multiple mentions). When more and more rights are proposed, the debate is muddied and the word "rights" is debased. When people will use to the word “rights” to justify getting anything they feel they don't yet have, it becomes more difficult to discuss even long-standing rights which everyone agrees a free society should have. “Rights creep” is the term I use to condemn this practice.
You might object, correctly, that I shouldn't set myself up as the arbiter of what rights get to be discussed. Still, I argue that valid rights are easy to understand, and I further argue you don't have to take my word for it. To determine whether a proposed right is easy to understand, I propose what I am pleased to called “the average middle-schooler test”, which could be an actual test, or just a thought-experiment. The test is: If an average middle-schooler (12-15 years old in the US) can understand a right sufficiently to give a coherent example of the right in action, then it is a valid right. For example, you say to a middle-schooler: “Ann lives in a country with freedom of speech. Beth does not. Tell me some of the things Ann can do legally and without fear, but Beth can't”, the middle-schooler could be reasonably expected to give answers like: posting comments critical of the country's leader on Facebook, making a speech in the park, and so on.
Now, I don't have the means to run such a test myself, but I think that the book's central right, the right to be forgotten, easily passes this test. A middle-schooler would likely to be able to say that someone could have embarrassing photos or videos from the Internet, or give some other example.
However, I feel that the rights to personality, dignity, and objecting to data processing would not pass this test.
Proposed new society-wide rights must be understood by an overwhelming majority of society members. The introduction of new and difficult-to-define rights will encourage an already-suspicious populations to regard all rights talk – include that of rights of long-standing and dignified lineage – as legalistic lipservice of out-of-touch elites pursuing a narrow rent-seeking agenda at the expense of the good of society.
2) “Another complex bureaucracy”
This author admires the European Union's solution to the right-to-be-forgotten problem. There is no doubt in my mind that the many people who had a hand in forming the EU's policies about digital forgetting had their hearts in the right place. But it's astonishing to be caught championing the problem-solving methods of the European Union at this moment in history. We are seeing a widespread disenchantment with Brussels-made policies, fueling populist and nationalist movements across Europe which might even bring the European Union to an end. (Off-topic: we are seeing much the same in the US too.) Much of the disenchantment stems from the feeling that distant and unfeeling technocrats are spreading their influence where they have no business being. I don't agree about the technocrats, but I think it's foolish to act as if the many people who feel this way are not important, because these people are unlikely to feel that other complex bureaucracy (May I suggest “The Office of Forgetting Affairs”?) or set of rules are the solution.
The author invokes a classic “appeal to emotion”-category logical fallacy (l. 68: “...imagine the worst thing you have ever done, your most shameful secret. Imagine that cringe-inducing incident has made its way online”) in her quest to establish the importance of the problem. As a compelling argument, this is on a level with the people who ask candidates for public office if they would favor the death penalty of the hypothetical murderers of their wives or daughters. Of course, when you're in a situation of shame or grief, you want the system set up as to give you speedy satisfaction. That doesn't mean the law should be set up that way. (To be fair, the author herself – later in the book – confesses that this argument is an invalid appeal to emotion.)
Some problems are of a vast scale and importance. They deserve active government intervention. In 1963, roughly 10% of the 190 million people in the US were African-American. These people were on the receiving end of systematic injustice and extrajudicial killing – even more so, and with far less public debate, than today. The oppression of 19 million people, in a process that was over 300 years old, deserves the creation of new laws and government agencies, not only because it is the right thing to do but also because of the potential security risk to the nation of a large and disgruntled underclass.
The right to be forgotten is not of this scale. I don't have statistics, but I guess that the number of people who are made miserable by persistent unwanted notoriety is much much less. These people, like everyone, deserve justice, but perhaps they don't deserve a taxpayer-funded justice agency. They deserve an avenue to ask for justice.
If anyone ever gets this far, he or she may ask, OK wise guy, what do YOU think the answer is? I am not a lawyer or a privacy expert. There is room for original thinking on this problem. But, as a model, I propose the US Supreme Court decision written by Justice William Brennan in the case of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan , which the author cites in this book. This decision established a durable and easy-to-understand yardstick for libel – “actual malice” when public officials are the complainants. This standard led to a lower standard for people who don't seek the limelight. Of course, over the years, this has led to a lot of legal hair-splitting, arguing over definitions, and full employment for attorneys in the process of determining who, for example, was a public figure, whether public figures can eventually recover their private-person status, and so forth. A similarly broad and easy-to-understand definition of the right to be forgotten will probably do the same.
I'm not saying that a law on forgetting has to be the same, or even similar, to the Sullivan decision. I'm saying that it has to be as easy to understand as this standard. This book is not proposing a solution like this. That is why I disagree with the author's proposals.
– “God Bless the Child”, Billie Holliday and Arthur Herzog, Jr., 1939
Although I can afford to buy my own books (if I don't buy them any faster than I read them), I take a very unseemly and childish pleasure in getting things for free, so you may imagine my delight when I discovered that I could snag newly-published ebooks at Netgalley. Apparently, all you have to do is ask. It may have helped that I've written a bunch of reviews and have, inexplicably, 40+ followers. Perhaps not. Whatever the reason, this is the first book I have received in this fashion.
I'm a little worried that I will kill the golden-egg-generating-goose by going all negative in my first review. Do publishers check to see if the beneficiaries of their electronic largesse are praising their books? I doubt my review would help generate the much-sought-after word-of-mouth, even if it were a rave. I'm afraid that not only will Yale University Press come and electronically yank this one off my device, but also they'll whisper to two other recent hapless victims of my raging parsimony and they will do the same. Before long, I'll find myself paying retail – the horror, the horror.
This is where I take off the velvet gloves and say that this book suffers from bad writing in the service of bad ideas. I would like to address the bad writing first.
Bad Writing
To be fair, the author (at location 392) confesses to “limited language skills”. In addition, I believe this book started life as a well-researched Ph.D. dissertation. The readers of a dissertation would presumably come to the document with a greater previous knowledge of the topic, and clarity of expression might not be as highly prized by the Georgetown University thesis evaluation committee as it is by me. But books published for the general public by prestige university presses are supposed to be vetted by editors. If there was an editor on duty here, he or she was clearly asleep at the switch.
Other reviewers here at Goodreads have commented that this book is slow going and not for the general reader. If not for the general reader, who is this book for? Privacy experts? Lawyers? I guess it's reasonable to expect lawyers, who as a matter of course must endure public statements, press releases, depositions, legal opinions, laws, and rule-making, might have developed a tolerance for unclear expression, like the king who took small amounts of poison every day in a successful (the story goes) effort to survive and take revenge upon his assassins. But I can't imagine any lawyer would enjoy this read more because it is difficult and think: “I'm glad this is so disorganized and filled with jargon, because it'll keep out the riff-raff.”
Two or three of the reviewers here seem to be non-experts and I think it's reasonable to say that this is a topic – and a book ��� that could attract the attention of similarly well-intentioned amateurs in the public at large. This is an issue that is far from settled; a few people want to get ahead of the curve. Here is a case where, for once, public opinion is not yet fully formed and thoughtful contributions from members of the public could actually make a difference. People who wish to inform themselves should be encouraged, but the writing in this book doesn't encourage them.
I'd like to take two examples of bad writing in this book and explain why they are bad. They are, of course, only a small part of the complete book, but I maintain that they are representative of the entire book. I also ask you to believe that they are not taken out of context, nor would reading the text immediately before or after each be much assistance in puzzling out their unclear meanings.
This first example, an error of incorrect word choice, is from Kindle location 1619 (the electronic galley copy I received did not have page numbers): “The story of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot is informative. The protagonist is on a search for the truth of the past, the life of Gustave Flaubert, an ardently private man with a protected reputation as a recluse” [italics mine].
“Protected”? Is that supposed to be “established”? That's my guess. Maybe “long-standing”? “broad”? “general”? Maybe the author meant something like “...an ardently private man with a reputation for [fiercely? aggressively?] protecting his isolation”? In any case, “protected reputation” is just wrong. It can't be just written off as a one-time “damn you autocorrect”-type mistake because errors like this occur elsewhere in the book.
The second example error is incorrect use of discourse markers, a fancy term that means “words that give your reader a clue about how what to expect next”. Like Chekhov's gun which, once placed, must be fired, any time you use a discourse marker to point out that something has two parts, you should quickly proceed to make clear that part one is X and part two is Y.
This quotation picks up in the middle of a long paragraph at location 1950 as follows: “… the German Federal Court of Justice devised a two-part test to settle inconsistencies among lower courts. Some found the online archive the same as the current, and therefore, new, dissemination of the story, and others found the online archive comparable to traditional archives. The Court of Justice asked both how the report was disseminated and how the reader will perceive it. Dissemination of the information that is deemed minor, such as a listing in a website calendar or teasers that lead to pay-to-view archives, will not violate personality rights. The court compared actively searching for the specific information online to prime-time television coverage. If the content must be actively searched, as the Lauber and Werlé content was, the publication is not a violation, but if it is pushed onto the reader or brought to the attention of a reader through links from current content, the publication might constitute a violation. The second part of the test requires that the archived information not give the impression that the content is current or a fresh publication” [italics mine].
Like a shiny object before a baby, the promise of an explanation of the two-part test is dangled before the reader, then snatched away. Things with two parts then confusingly appear (“Some found… others found”, “both how… and how”) and then, upon inspection, turn out not to be parts of the two-part test. Finally, at the end of the paragraph, we are told about the second part of the test, without any mention of the first. Where did it go? Repeated rereadings of the paragraph convinced me that the sentence beginning “If the content must...” is in fact the first part of the two-part test, but it's impossible to tell if that's correct because it's not clearly labelled. In any event, the reader should not have to read a paragraph four or five times to make a guess about information that should be clear upon first reading.
Bad ideas
Any reader who has got this far might be justified in thinking that I am coming down too hard on the author. The reason I'm making such a big fuss about this is that I believe that the purpose of the bad writing in this book, as it is for much bad writing, is “to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind" (George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”).
The issue here, oversimplified, is the right to freedom of speech versus the titular right to be forgotten. US legal and political culture is more sympathetic to the former (as I, an American, am), and Europeans seem to be drawn strongly to the latter (as the author of this book is).
I allege that the author unfairly stacks the deck in favor of her argument through unfair characterizations, that the thesis she presents at the book's beginning is not the actual thesis (the actual thesis is buried toward the end of the book), and author's proposed remedy is worse than the disease.
– unfair characterizations:
US solutions to this problem are “simplistic” (l. 822). Free expression is “feverishly protected” in the US (l. 2124) – I actually don't mind this characterization, but it seems unlikely that, if you say someone is doing something “feverishly”, you believe they are doing it in a wise and admirable manner. However, in Europe, there is an “emphasis on dignity” (l. 2008), citizen enjoy “rich personality rights” (l. 448), and French government agencies “pioneered recognition of the right to be forgotten” (l. 567).
Furthermore, in the US, “...we have started to criminalize schoolchildren drawing on their desks [and] put people in jail for smoking on the subway or not wearing a seatbelt” (l. 2010). While I'm sure that the absurd instances of authority overreach mentioned in this sentence actually are true, I contend they are small in number and not indicative of a sick society. I also dispute that these incidents represent a trend which has “left us isolated from our Western sister nations” (l. 2011) and put the US on a par with the world's totalitarian dictationships, as the author says.
– the actual thesis
“The central thesis of Ctrl + Z is that digital right to be forgotten is an innovative idea with a lot of possibilities and potential” (l. 346). I will not give you the rest of the paragraph, I will summarize it: We need to think about the right to be forgotten in new ways.
No one can object to the recommendation that he or she should try to think in new ways. However, I object to this thesis statement because it is not actually a thesis statement. A thesis statement makes a claim that others might dispute and tells the reader how you will interpret the significance of the subject matter under discussion (two of the five qualities of a good thesis statement, according to the Writing Center at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
I contend that the real thesis statement of this book occurs at location 2253, which my Kindle tells me is 59% of the way through the book. It is: “...the US could construct a constitutional forgiveness law that contains elements of time, oversight, relief, a forgivable offense, specific harm, and social benefit.” Although the word “could” appears in the quotation above, I contend that the author believes the US should do this. Throughout the book, the author is clearly in favor of a well-defined law, set of laws, or set of laws plus judicial precedents, which will make it easier for people to request information about themselves be made difficult or impossible to find. I don't agree with this opinion (see below), but it is completely beyond argument that reasonable people of good will and great learning can hold this opinion and, like the author, back up their opinion with an impressive amount of research.
There is no reason, however, that the statement that summarizes the book's thesis should be unlabelled and plainly stated for the first time only in the second half of the book.
(Further evidence that the statement at l. 2253 is a more accurate statement of the author's thesis: (l. 2080) “the US must incorporate the correct level of oversight by a decision maker” and (l. 2089) “Without organized oversight, any structure for the right to be forgotten will be highly susceptible to manipulation.”)
– remedy is worse than the disease
I'd like to divide this part into two subparts: “Rights creep” and “Another complex bureaucracy”
1) “Rights creep”
Of course, everyone is in favor of rights. It's hard to talk skeptically about rights without appearing like something of a villain. Nevertheless, I argue that too many activities are now phrased in terms of rights, both in the world in general and in this book in particular. For example, this book mentions “the right to free development of personality” (l. 607), “the right to object to data processing” (l. 643), and “the right to dignity” (multiple mentions). When more and more rights are proposed, the debate is muddied and the word "rights" is debased. When people will use to the word “rights” to justify getting anything they feel they don't yet have, it becomes more difficult to discuss even long-standing rights which everyone agrees a free society should have. “Rights creep” is the term I use to condemn this practice.
You might object, correctly, that I shouldn't set myself up as the arbiter of what rights get to be discussed. Still, I argue that valid rights are easy to understand, and I further argue you don't have to take my word for it. To determine whether a proposed right is easy to understand, I propose what I am pleased to called “the average middle-schooler test”, which could be an actual test, or just a thought-experiment. The test is: If an average middle-schooler (12-15 years old in the US) can understand a right sufficiently to give a coherent example of the right in action, then it is a valid right. For example, you say to a middle-schooler: “Ann lives in a country with freedom of speech. Beth does not. Tell me some of the things Ann can do legally and without fear, but Beth can't”, the middle-schooler could be reasonably expected to give answers like: posting comments critical of the country's leader on Facebook, making a speech in the park, and so on.
Now, I don't have the means to run such a test myself, but I think that the book's central right, the right to be forgotten, easily passes this test. A middle-schooler would likely to be able to say that someone could have embarrassing photos or videos from the Internet, or give some other example.
However, I feel that the rights to personality, dignity, and objecting to data processing would not pass this test.
Proposed new society-wide rights must be understood by an overwhelming majority of society members. The introduction of new and difficult-to-define rights will encourage an already-suspicious populations to regard all rights talk – include that of rights of long-standing and dignified lineage – as legalistic lipservice of out-of-touch elites pursuing a narrow rent-seeking agenda at the expense of the good of society.
2) “Another complex bureaucracy”
This author admires the European Union's solution to the right-to-be-forgotten problem. There is no doubt in my mind that the many people who had a hand in forming the EU's policies about digital forgetting had their hearts in the right place. But it's astonishing to be caught championing the problem-solving methods of the European Union at this moment in history. We are seeing a widespread disenchantment with Brussels-made policies, fueling populist and nationalist movements across Europe which might even bring the European Union to an end. (Off-topic: we are seeing much the same in the US too.) Much of the disenchantment stems from the feeling that distant and unfeeling technocrats are spreading their influence where they have no business being. I don't agree about the technocrats, but I think it's foolish to act as if the many people who feel this way are not important, because these people are unlikely to feel that other complex bureaucracy (May I suggest “The Office of Forgetting Affairs”?) or set of rules are the solution.
The author invokes a classic “appeal to emotion”-category logical fallacy (l. 68: “...imagine the worst thing you have ever done, your most shameful secret. Imagine that cringe-inducing incident has made its way online”) in her quest to establish the importance of the problem. As a compelling argument, this is on a level with the people who ask candidates for public office if they would favor the death penalty of the hypothetical murderers of their wives or daughters. Of course, when you're in a situation of shame or grief, you want the system set up as to give you speedy satisfaction. That doesn't mean the law should be set up that way. (To be fair, the author herself – later in the book – confesses that this argument is an invalid appeal to emotion.)
Some problems are of a vast scale and importance. They deserve active government intervention. In 1963, roughly 10% of the 190 million people in the US were African-American. These people were on the receiving end of systematic injustice and extrajudicial killing – even more so, and with far less public debate, than today. The oppression of 19 million people, in a process that was over 300 years old, deserves the creation of new laws and government agencies, not only because it is the right thing to do but also because of the potential security risk to the nation of a large and disgruntled underclass.
The right to be forgotten is not of this scale. I don't have statistics, but I guess that the number of people who are made miserable by persistent unwanted notoriety is much much less. These people, like everyone, deserve justice, but perhaps they don't deserve a taxpayer-funded justice agency. They deserve an avenue to ask for justice.
If anyone ever gets this far, he or she may ask, OK wise guy, what do YOU think the answer is? I am not a lawyer or a privacy expert. There is room for original thinking on this problem. But, as a model, I propose the US Supreme Court decision written by Justice William Brennan in the case of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan , which the author cites in this book. This decision established a durable and easy-to-understand yardstick for libel – “actual malice” when public officials are the complainants. This standard led to a lower standard for people who don't seek the limelight. Of course, over the years, this has led to a lot of legal hair-splitting, arguing over definitions, and full employment for attorneys in the process of determining who, for example, was a public figure, whether public figures can eventually recover their private-person status, and so forth. A similarly broad and easy-to-understand definition of the right to be forgotten will probably do the same.
I'm not saying that a law on forgetting has to be the same, or even similar, to the Sullivan decision. I'm saying that it has to be as easy to understand as this standard. This book is not proposing a solution like this. That is why I disagree with the author's proposals.
December 8, 2019
A small bureaucrat wanting to convert you to his own veneration of the leaders. Yes, you should love your leaders! And the leaders should be able to remove any trace of their past acts so you, like Jones, would truly believe when the leaders tell you "it's fake news!". And Jones is right. I mean, for centuries, in Europe, peasants were coming with a switch in the back of their neck. And every few years, the priest would round them up and flick the switch so the citizen would enjoy "the right to be forgotten". Never mind all governments continuously tracking the global population in a way that would put STASI to shame, the leaders mandated that and Jones won't bother with such trivialities.
June 13, 2021
An insightful look at control over digital data — a topic which will only increase in significance.
October 3, 2024
read for research - dense but so informative and interesting
June 8, 2016
The right to be forgotten is a tough issue to decide. I mean, I was trying to decide where I stood on it, and for every different case study, I came up with a different verdict.
A victim of a crime who wants to stop being defined as a victim? Definitely for the right.
A pedophile applying to teach at a pre-school and wants his criminal record hidden? No way. Even if he has managed to reform himself, I think the school has the right to know his past and then decide if they want to trust him.
For every case where I think "yeah, it's a sensible right", I can think of another where I think "Nah, people deserve to know this".
Basically, this is a complicated issue. And Ctrl+Z tries to make sense of the mess. The American position is basically framed as "the public has a right to know" and the European position is "you have a right to be forgotten". This is a generalisation, but that's how I saw the two positions. After introducing the two polar views, the book looks at the "theoretical and conceptual muddles surrounding to be the right to be forgotten", and then criticises the way this issue has been presented before reframing it. The last chapter looks at the US system as a case study and "discusses how to construct digital redemption within existing legal systems". The last chapter says "International Community", but it's really about the US and the EU.
This book is a tough read, but I managed to understand it. It's probably not for the general audience - I have the sneaking suspicion that I understood it basically because I've studied this issue in class before. The text can be dry at times, and I had to reread certain pages to make sure I understood what it's about.
If you're somewhat familiar with the Right to be Forgotten and want a deeper look into it, this is probably the book for you. If you want an accessible introduction, then you might want to look somewhere else.
Disclaimer: I got a free copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for a free and honest review.
This review was first posted at Inside the mind of a Bibliophile
A victim of a crime who wants to stop being defined as a victim? Definitely for the right.
A pedophile applying to teach at a pre-school and wants his criminal record hidden? No way. Even if he has managed to reform himself, I think the school has the right to know his past and then decide if they want to trust him.
For every case where I think "yeah, it's a sensible right", I can think of another where I think "Nah, people deserve to know this".
Basically, this is a complicated issue. And Ctrl+Z tries to make sense of the mess. The American position is basically framed as "the public has a right to know" and the European position is "you have a right to be forgotten". This is a generalisation, but that's how I saw the two positions. After introducing the two polar views, the book looks at the "theoretical and conceptual muddles surrounding to be the right to be forgotten", and then criticises the way this issue has been presented before reframing it. The last chapter looks at the US system as a case study and "discusses how to construct digital redemption within existing legal systems". The last chapter says "International Community", but it's really about the US and the EU.
This book is a tough read, but I managed to understand it. It's probably not for the general audience - I have the sneaking suspicion that I understood it basically because I've studied this issue in class before. The text can be dry at times, and I had to reread certain pages to make sure I understood what it's about.
If you're somewhat familiar with the Right to be Forgotten and want a deeper look into it, this is probably the book for you. If you want an accessible introduction, then you might want to look somewhere else.
Disclaimer: I got a free copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for a free and honest review.
This review was first posted at Inside the mind of a Bibliophile
August 2, 2016
A very interesting and in depth look into what happens on the internet stays on the internet and the fight by some people to get that information removed. At initial glance, you would think that what you put on the internet stays on the internet and you should think about what you put on it. However this book points out that you don't always have control of what gets out there about you in the first place and this then leads to a struggle between the right to privacy/correctness and the right to know/public opinion/documentation.
This book is not an easy read - there is a lot of technical information and legalese due to the subject matter so sometimes it does get hard to follow.
Even as an IT Professional, this book was still an eye opener and made me think about several legal issues and complexities that I had not considered in the past. However, there are still many questions (probably even more now!) left unanswered.
isclaimer: I received access to a digital copy of Ctrl+Z through NetGalley.vAny views or opinions expressed are my own.
This book is not an easy read - there is a lot of technical information and legalese due to the subject matter so sometimes it does get hard to follow.
Even as an IT Professional, this book was still an eye opener and made me think about several legal issues and complexities that I had not considered in the past. However, there are still many questions (probably even more now!) left unanswered.
isclaimer: I received access to a digital copy of Ctrl+Z through NetGalley.vAny views or opinions expressed are my own.
July 25, 2016
Another useful book on information control in the digital age.
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