What about the rights of the person wronged by someone else to remember, and to tell their story?
Someone who committed a sexual assault, for example, might have served their time and feel like they have changed and deserve a new start. They might want the record of their assault expunged from the Internet.
What about the victim, though? Are they not allowed to keep telling their story, and to tell people who assaulted them? Are they not allowed to warn someone that the person they are dating has assaulted someone in the past? Does the new dating partner not have a right to be warned that their new fling has assaulted people in the past?
I don't think their is a way to enforce the right to be forgotten while preserving the right to tell your story to whomever you please.
If you do something bad that you wish would be forgotten, it isn't up to you to decide when other people have to forgive you and move on. It is the other people's rights to remember as long as they want.
You say you should try to imagine what it would be like to do the hard work to right your wrongs, but you also need to imagine what it would be like to be wronged and then be told that the person who wronged you has the right not to have the wrong known.
Don't you think that the person who committed the crime and served the sentence has had enough of a punishment and deserves to lead a normal life? How long should one carry that on their back? At the end of the day, both the wronged and person who wronged should move on. There should be something called "fair punishment". Otherwise some people who were wronged will never be satisfied by anything other than death sentence.
You're dodging the point. Does the victim have a right to remember and tell people about their experience, or do they not? What they "should" do is irrelevant to a question of law.
It depends. `tell people about their experience` ranges from talking about it with a counselor, friend or family to continuous harassment of the condemned-but-now-reformed's colleagues and friends. Which is starting to look like revenge and has nothing to do with the right to remember.
So, what do you really mean by `tell people about their experience` ?
No, I am not. Victim's right to remember doesn't have anything to do with the person's right to be forgotten unless they are in the same social circle. The question is not to erase memories out of people's mind but whether to continue creating those memories in others.
Of course, no one is taking away their right to speech. But all those news articles that came out when the culprit was being investigated need not be there to always remind them of their past.
I think the judicial system ought to be free to expunge its records when they have outlived their usefulness in the judicial system. However, a mechanism to force another to expunge its records because a third-party objects seems to me an extreme position.
Just because society has dealt out its punishment doesn't mean the perpetrator has had their history erased. Society might not owe me something, but it also doesn't have the right to censor information from me that might be relevant to my safety.
I don't think it is up to us to decide how long someone should go before "moving on." That is deeply personal, and any length of time we set is going to be too short for some people.
Obviously, we set a punishment that is fair in terms of what society gives (jail sentence, fines, etc). But what is fair in terms of the sentiment your peers feel towards you? That is up to each person to decide on their own. You don't get to tell someone they have to forgive someone else, or that they have to move on. They are allowed to hold a grudge for life if they feel it is justified.
Obviously, allowing them to hold a grudge doesn't mean they get carte blanche to harass the person. If they send threats, stalk, harass, or tell lies about the person, they should be held liable and stopped. But if they want to tell TRUTHS about what the person did, and explain to others why they don't think they are worthy of forgiveness, they have that right.
Just imagine the different possibilities. Say a drunk driver kills your child; the law might only send him to jail for a few years, but I have every right to not forgive him for life. If I run into him in the store, I have a right to tell the people around me that he killed my kid. I have a right to write a blog post about why he shouldn't be forgiven. No one has the right to tell me to 'move on'.
> I don't think it is up to us to decide how long someone should go before "moving on." That is deeply personal, and any length of time we set is going to be too short for some people.
The question of what a persons' internal emotional state should be, is a wholly separate topic from removing online records of an event.
It's like juvenile crimes. The event still happened. People will still remember, and no one will stop them from talking publicly about the topic but past the date of the criminals 18th birthday, but the public records are simply sealed.
RTBF, as it is currently implemented, is extremely similar. The past events still occurred, people can still talk about it publicly, but mentions of them are excluded from public search engines.
Removing online records from public searches is troublesome to me.
From our example, if our accident victim writes a blog post about crime and why they haven't forgiven them, would that have to be removed from public search engines? Lets say the incident in question was some corruption charge (like say, police officers taking bribes), would articles that talk about that corruption have to be purged or censored? If so, that means that we would lose the ability to learn from that history and change our practices (for example, when people say 'no need to worry about bribe taking, Officer Joe Smith is such a nice guy!', we couldn't then read up on the time Officer John Doe, who was also a very nice guy, took bribes)
I really think any attempt to censor or whitewash the past is doomed to be abused and cause problems. Facts need to be able to be shared, no matter what harm they may cause. Hiding the truth is a dangerous precedent to set.
See, going about it rationally makes sense if you ignore human impact of such decisions. If that officer already got punished for his crime and learnt his lesson, why do you want to hold it on his head forever? We want people to learn and we want to give them a second chance.
We also want to be able to protect ourselves from people who are dangerous; how do you know the person has 'learnt his lesson', and is no longer dangerous? Yes, we should give people a chance at redemption, but we need to do it with eyes wide open, being vigilant to protect ourselves from the person doing it again.
Someone who committed a sexual assault, for example, might have served their time and feel like they have changed and deserve a new start. They might want the record of their assault expunged from the Internet.
What about the victim, though? Are they not allowed to keep telling their story, and to tell people who assaulted them? Are they not allowed to warn someone that the person they are dating has assaulted someone in the past? Does the new dating partner not have a right to be warned that their new fling has assaulted people in the past?
I don't think their is a way to enforce the right to be forgotten while preserving the right to tell your story to whomever you please.
If you do something bad that you wish would be forgotten, it isn't up to you to decide when other people have to forgive you and move on. It is the other people's rights to remember as long as they want.
You say you should try to imagine what it would be like to do the hard work to right your wrongs, but you also need to imagine what it would be like to be wronged and then be told that the person who wronged you has the right not to have the wrong known.