One thing that has always bothered me it's that if you ever decide to post a comment on a site that uses the Facebook commenting system and you decide not to publish that comment on your timeline, then you have no way of recovering it (and thus deleting it, if you ever decide so). You have to resort to search engines that behave poorly for this kind of things.
I admit that after some mishaps Facebook has greatly improved the privacy controls on the site and allowed user to more easily control what they share and with whom, but I guess pretty much everyone would agree that it's not enough yet. We need the ability to delete the very content that we create, everyone has the right to be forgotten should he decide so.
>everyone has the right to be forgotten should he decide so
This is going to sound like a devil's advocate post, but it isn't. I don't believe that such a right exists.
Why? Because removing all your input from a given medium (a social network, a forum, what have you) destroys context and therefore useful information for other people. Imagine someone who frequented a web forum (say.. Hacker News?) for a number of years, building up a large body of content, helpful posts, etc.
They then, for whatever reason, invoke the EU's "right to be forgotten" (pretending that HN is headquartered in the EU), getting all their posts deleted.
Those posts gone, every single conversation that user was in is now SIGNIFICANTLY harder to follow. What are those thousands of replies in relation to? Who knows? Those conversations are permanently lost to the sands of time.
Putting something out in public should not place any binds on the people who display that information. I believe everyone else's right to learn supersedes the individual's supposed "right to be forgotten".
It's easy enough to fix - don't comment in public if you don't want someone else having those words later.
That said, this isn't to condone Facebook's behavior of "soft-deleting" things that they say are gone. This is downright fraudulent, IMHO.
I admit that after some mishaps Facebook has greatly improved the privacy controls on the site and allowed user to more easily control what they share and with whom, but I guess pretty much everyone would agree that it's not enough yet. We need the ability to delete the very content that we create, everyone has the right to be forgotten should he decide so.