The right to be forgotten


Recently a very powerful meme has found its way into the discussion about data protection and privacy: The “right to be forgotten”. Even the EU champions it in side by side with German and international privacy advocates. Here in Germany the “right to be forgotten” also has a twin sibling called the “digitale Radiergummi” (“digital eraser” in English). The recently bubbled up again when Facebook decided to switch all profiles to the new “timeline” view that’s basically an album of everything Facebook knows about a person.

What both of those concepts mean is that every person, every user of the Internet should have the right to have the data a service or company has gathered about the user deleted. This is thought to be a suitable way to fight one of the main problem that many privacy advocates have with the net, namely its inability to forget.

You’ve probably heard the following advice in this or in similar form:

Don’t share your party pictures online because the Internet does not forget and in the future when you apply for a job you will not get it because of your adolescent behavior.

Today I do not want to talk about how ridiculous that law would be on a technical level, how hard it would be to actually implement by service provider who would have to tamper with their backups risking the integrity of their data. Let us instead first focus on what that law would actually mean.

So the law proposes is that, if somebody online has some sort of data about me (it actually does not matter what kind of data) I can force them to remove it from their data storage. Sounds reasonable in its abstract simplicity, doesn’t it?

But when we leave the abstraction it means that I demand to have mind control about the people around me. So X deletes my data set from their servers. Obviously they still have the email I sent them about my wish for removal. So they delete that one as well. They drop my data from all backups and they’re clean, right? Oh no, wait, the person having to type my name 20 times to make sure it was removed probably remembers it. So we get the Men in Black to remove all memory about me? What about a journalist having gathered all sorts of data about someone in order to write a story about that person’s wrongdoings? Do we want that person to be forced to forget it all?

People as well as services on the Internet can only remember the things around them, the things they came in contact with. I can remember your face if we met, I can’t if we haven’t. In fact I don’t have any data about many of the people reading this. But you have data about me now. You know my name (if not you could look it up on the contact page) you know how I write and which words I tend to misspell. You know many of my thoughts that I willingly shared with you. Should I be allowed to force you to forget it now? Would you be forced to forget all the thoughts you yourself created based on the input I gave you?

Engineers spend a lot of time to make sure we don’t just “lose” data. I’d be seriously pissed if my harddrive or one of my backups decided to just remove files for fun. Our technology, hard- as well as software, is build to last. And for good reasons!

Think about it. How much data have you personally lost? How brilliant would it be if we hadn’t lost the Library of Alexandria because we could just restore it from backups after it was destroyed?

Because the biotech our brains are based on is flawed, because we tend to lose information all the time, we seem to think that that state is “normal” or “good”, but why do you store your data in computers? It is because they don’t forget or lose it. Losing data is a bug, it is bad.

I think that the demand for the right to be forgotten is really a misconception, a misunderstanding of what we as human beings want. We think that we need to have the ability to have our past deleted if it no longer suits our lifestyle or we think it might hurt us.

The actual problem is our fetish of perfection. We spend hours and almost limitless energy to appear perfect. We try to get our flaws and past failures removed from everyone’s mind because we believe that we have to be perfect in order to be accepted. Because all the other people seem to be perfect or at least way more perfect that we are. And we are not just the victims, we are the culprits.

Like hyenas we hunt down every simple flaw in the people around us. We laugh about the sorta ridiculous teeny pictures of the people we know. We love to point out how the people we know failed just to appear better because a lot of the time, bringing others down is a way simpler strategy to look better than they do than improving one’s own self. Self improvement is hard, let’s just fling poo at the others!

We don’t want our past to be deleted (if we did we’d hunt historians down and wouldn’t let all sorts of agencies keep track of our data). Hell, people love flipping through their old photos reliving their past. We just want not to be judged for it or have any fallout from it.

It is a vicious circle. We don’t want to be judged for what we did or were but we perpetuate the system by judging others for similar things.

Our perspective needs readjusting. Not only do we need to drop our ridiculous fetish of perfection we also need to see that if we were rather stupid 10 years ago and feel sorta ashamed for what we said that means that we are smarter today.

When I was 18 I was a really unpleasant ass. You could blame puberty of my lack of social status but what it boils down to is that I was a know-it-all asshole. That does not mean that all I did or said or wrote was wrong, it just means that I was deeply flawed.

I still am but looking at myself I have gotten better. Smarter. More empathetic. Less judgmental. I still sorta suck at times but I suck less. A lot less.

If you look at newsgroups from 10 years ago you will probably find me struggling with simple PHP tasks. Things I would know how to do today. Do I want those posts deleted? No. They just document who I was back then, what I knew back then. If they say anything about me it’s just how much I have learned in between.

Whatever people tell you, whatever reasons they present, the deletion of data is not what you want.