The Information Welfare State

[Robb]

The Information Welfare State

The "right to be forgotten" doesn't go far enough. We need mandatory insurance to protect online reputations.

By Evgeny Morozov

(snip)


What's to be done? One solution would be to make the Web a less anonymous place, so that it becomes possible to trace and punish the likes of, well, Anonymous. Another solution would be to accept such disasters as inevitable and focus on managing one's online reputation. A bevy of startups already advertise their ability to push damaging information about oneself down the search results. This may cost thousands of dollars, creating new digital divides between the rich and the poor.

The third, more popular solution is to embrace the so-called “right to be forgotten”—a right so ambiguous that even its proponents can't often define what it is. In its weakest form, it is commonsensical: Users should have the ability to delete whatever information they upload to online services. In its strongest form—whereby users are able to delete information about themselves even from third-party sites or search engines—it is too restrictive and unrealistic.

However, “the right to be forgotten” won't do much to mitigate debacles like Google Buzz and Path, let alone regulate Anonymous. While it may limit the distribution of inadvertently released information, it won't console those users whose reputation has already been damaged by the first instance of publication. Sometimes, a quick glance at the compromising information is enough; “the right to be forgotten” may force such information to disappear from the Internet—but it won't remove the memory from the minds of one's friends or business partners.

Here is a more elegant solution: We need a mandatory insurance scheme for online disasters. For what is an accidental disclosure of information if not an online disaster—a ferocious man-made information tsunami that can destroy one's reputation the way a real tsunami can destroy one's home?.....

Read More: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/02/_right_to_be_forgotten_how_facebook_google_and_other_companies_can_protect_internet_user_privacy_.html

[saras]

1. Nonsense or blither? It's hard to tell.

"Should you have to live down that one crazy night forever?"
Yes. Of course. You always have, short of pulling up stakes and moving to a new city as an anonymous person without connections. You do in the real world, you do in the real internet, why try to create a pretend internet in which you don't? Who but coke-huffing young Republicans, does this benefit?

Worrying about what "damage to reputation" comes from the release of TRUE information seems an unimaginably trivial bit of business to be attending to at this time.


On an entirely different subject...

"Anonymous" and "unreliable" are not correlated when it comes to information. They are independent variables.

Anonymous (the organization) is a model of success, not a failure to regulate. The corporate media (including Google) are failures that need to be regulated.

[DCKit]

2. Both. Scrubbing the Intertubes isn't an option.

Just another way to separate suckers from their cash.