I'm the same, and very grateful that the mistakes and generally embarrassing stuff I posted probably didn't get archived or saved anywhere. The contents of my Xoom site are long gone, and so are the comments in my BeSeen guestbook. Someone, somewhere, maybe has logs from irc.scifi.com circa 1998, but they're certainly not published.
I think this right to fail without a trace is an important one, and one that, intentionally or not, we've taken away from those who came after us.
No one has a right to have their mistakes hidden, though certainly we could talk about whether a merciful & forgiving society should forget because it's the right thing to do.
Actually it’s my understanding that kids have their records cleared once they hit 18 in the US. I don’t know the full specifics of that or whether it applies in only certain states/locals. But I think there is logic to it that also suggests allowing people a rewrite.
I’m intrigued by your idea, but I don’t understand.
I think of a right as something inalienable—even if it’s blocked, you still have it. And morally unquestionable. I have a right to move about my country freely, so long as I don’t interfere with people. I believe I can morally use violence to defend myself on someone else’s “property”. Of course the U.S. disagrees. They think someone simply buying a deed is enough to strip me of that right. We’ll see if the U.S. ever recognizes my right. I believe Finland does.
But I don’t understand the right you’re referencing. It seems to amount to: if I do something when I am a child, I have a right to use physical violence to stop people from telling stories about it later.
And you want this right to be recognized by the courts so you can use the police to exact that force, rather than doing it yourself and risking your own incarceration.
Is that right? Sorry I’m extrapolating your position. I know you didn’t say that directly, but I am trying to understand what legal reality you are hoping for and what you mean when you say “right”.
>But I don’t understand the right you’re referencing. It seems to amount to: if I do something when I am a child, I have a right to use physical violence to stop people from telling stories about it later.
You seem to be using "physical violence" in the sense that anarchists to do when referring to states and their monopoly on force, yet there is no physical violence involved in the removal of data from a database, and I'm not aware of any laws which insist upon using the police, incarceration or similar coercion to enforce such removal.
I believe you're being disingenuous in implying that one political construct (the "right to be forgotten") is rooted in thuggishness while another (the "right to roam") is a universal, and therefore morally pure, constant.
No, I mean literal violence, as in the police coming to my house and handcuffing me so they can remove the hard drive from my server... that’s what you’re advocating isn’t it?
As for the roaming vs forgetting thing... the difference is it’s me who is doing the roaming, but I’d have to get everyone else to do the forgetting.
It’s analogous to the difference between sodomy laws and pronoun laws... sodomy is something I do with my partner. Pronouns are something that everyone else around us does.
I don’t have a strong opinion here.. I’m just asking for your help understanding this positive/negative rights thing.
> No, I mean literal violence, as in the police coming to my house and handcuffing me so they can remove the hard drive from my server... that’s what you’re advocating isn’t it?
No, no one is advocating that. I'm not, b5 wasn't - at least not in any way that could reasonably be inferred from their comment - proponents of the right to be forgotten aren't, and because it's a concept of civil law, rather than criminal law, nowhere in the GDPR is any reference made to anything resembling "literal violence, as in the police coming to my house and handcuffing me so they can remove the hard drive from my server."
The "right to be forgotten" is just the right of ownership over one's identity and over the data one provides to businesses. That's it - no violence, no mind control, no gestapo breaking down your door and confiscating your hard drive, no "literal violence", no dystopian nightmare.
If you don't agree that such a right should exist, fair enough - but you've pushed the premise to an absurd extreme and constructed a strawman version of it here. Any right or law, when taken to extremes, because extremist - that's tautological, but arguments from absurdity on that basis are also far from compelling.
"if I do something when I am a child, I have a right to use physical violence to stop people from telling stories about it later."
Well you have taken a very reasonable argument, removed all context, and taken it to the most illogical extreme you could.
The argument is that for all of human evolution we have been able to try, fail and learn in small societies which forget, now we have to do it in a large society that doesn't forget.
If we fail society will remind us of our failure by mocking us, this is a natural thing, and good for us, it encourages us to learn from our failures. Once we learn and correct the failure society and ourselves move on and forget.
If we can't forget we can't move on, instead of trying new things we over think our past failures. You can't change the past or learn anything new from the failure and so just live in regret and get depressed.
A society full of depressed people that wallow in regret is not good, check out the statistics of male suicide if you want to see just how self destructive such a society is.
The internet is a world wide society that never forgets. If you make a mistake instead of your society of friends and family taking the micky, you have the entire world mocking you.
Many of the people mocking you are depressed and filled with regrets, they are not worried about things getting out of hand, in fact they want it they want other people to feel their regret so the mocking quickly escalates beyond healthy mocking.
Maybe you are made of tougher stuff, maybe you can elevate yourself above all the criticism, but most people in a society can't.
Its not about morality, the right to fail, learn and move on is necessary property of a functioning society.
I think this right to fail without a trace is an important one, and one that, intentionally or not, we've taken away from those who came after us.