[OPLIN 4cast] OPLIN 4Cast #314: The right to be forgotten

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OPLIN 4Cast

OPLIN 4Cast #314: The right to be forgotten
December 26th, 2012

shredded paperDespite what you see on TV and in the movies, libraries do 
not just hand over people's reading records to any guy who walks in off 
the street and says he's a detective. In fact, in Ohio the law 
<http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/149.432> specifies that, "A library shall not 
release any library record or disclose any patron information...." But 
what if you choose to purchase your reading materials over the Internet? 
Or even just download free ebooks? Even if the website promises to keep 
your information private, is that actually possible? In Europe, a 
proposed "right to be forgotten" may be doomed before it even starts 
because of the nature of the Internet.

  * Report by European body cautious about "right to be forgotten"
    <http://www.technollama.co.uk/report-by-european-body-cautious-about-right-to-be-forgotten>
    (Technollama/Andres Guadamuz) "'The right to be forgotten' is one of
    the elements of the new proposed regulation
    <http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/document/review2012/com_2012_11_en.pdf>
    [pdf] (January 2012) on data protection of the European Commission.
    The right allows people to ask for digitally held personal
    information to be deleted. The regulation is still to be adopted by
    the European Parliament. Therefore the EU's 'cyber security' Agency
    ENISA is launching its new report covering the technical aspects of
    'being forgotten', as technology and information systems play a
    critical role in enforcing this right."
  * The right to be forgotten - between expectations and practice
    <http://www.enisa.europa.eu/activities/identity-and-trust/library/deliverables/the-right-to-be-forgotten/>
    [links to full report, pdf] (European Network and Information
    Security Agency) "In a completely open system like the (vast) public
    portion of today's world-wide web, anyone can make copies of a
    public data item and store them at arbitrary locations. Moreover,
    the system does not account for the number, owner or location of
    such copies. /In such an open system it is not generally possible
    for a person to locate all personal data items (exact or derived)
    stored about them; it is difficult to determine whether a person has
    the right to request removal of a particular data item; nor does any
    single person or entity have the authority or jurisdiction to effect
    the deletion of all copies./ Therefore, enforcing the right to be
    forgotten is impossible in an open, global system, in general."
  * Why big data could sink Europe's 'right to be forgotten'
    <http://gigaom.com/europe/why-big-data-could-sink-europes-right-to-be-forgotten/>
    (GigaOM/David Meyer) "If data gets aggregated and crunched by
    analytics software, you can't say in all cases that the process
    can't be reverse-engineered, particularly when you're correlating
    different sets of derived data. But getting it out is, well, a
    challenge. This isn't the only problem ENISA's identified."
  * Facebook: Proposed EU 'right to be forgotten' raises "major
    concerns" over freedom of expression online
    <http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2012/11/20/facebook-proposed-eu-right-to-be-forgotten-raises-major-concerns-over-freedom-of-expression-online/>
    (The Next Web/Martin Bryant) "While it's easy to paint Facebook as a
    bad guy for speaking out against new data protection laws, the voice
    of social networks is important in considering any such legislation
    lest we end up with a clunkier, more frustrating version of the
    social Web thanks to overly zealous legislators in Brussels."

*/Forgetting fact:/*

The ENISA report identifies three levels of "forgetting": strict, in 
which all copies of personal data are erased to the point where 
recovering the data is impossible; slightly weaker, which would allow 
encrypted copies of the data to survive, as long as they can only be 
deciphered by authorized parties; and even weaker, in which data could 
survive, as long as it would no longer appear in public indices, 
database query results, or search engine results.
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