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European Policy, Free Expression, Privacy & Data

Washington Post: How the ‘right to be forgotten’ could take over the American Internet, too

Washington Post:

The implosion of JournalSpace still draws shudders from the geeks who care about this sort of thing. In January 2009, a vengeful ex-employee of the six-year-old blogging site logged into its database and deleted everything. There was no backup, no fail safe, no off-site archive.

Millions of blog posts, spanning years of lives, simply disappeared.

This was, needless to say, the the worst thing to ever happen to Journalspace, which — after a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to get the files back — shut down entirely. It was also, in hindsight, one of the better things to ever happen to me: From the ages of roughly 12 to 15, I’d logged several hundred brutally confessional, angst-ridden and otherwise inadvisable posts on the site, many of them under my real name.

Had JournalSpace’s IT manager not gone nuclear, all those posts would remain underfoot in the Internet detritus, a mere Google search away: from a college admissions officer or a hiring manager or an over-curious date.

Instead, the Internet forgot me. (And oblivion, I assure you, is a beautiful thing.)

Lately, more and more Internet-users are catching on to the slippery attraction of Internet-amnesia. Already the rage in certain European capitals, the “right to be forgotten” has slunk into the United States under the inoffensive guise of the “eraser button”: the requirement that all Web sites with registered, under-18 users allow them to nuke their prior posts when they reach adulthood.

“If we give someone the ability to meddle with someone else’s speech, we’ve crossed a line,” said Emma Llansó, the director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “That is really inconsistent with the principles of free expression.”

Experts like Llansó suspect that’s because teens are getting increasingly creative with how they use social networks — and those network’s privacy controls have grown gradually more transparent in response to users.  Full article.