>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.
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.