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* . | | | HABEAS DATA: PRESSING FOR A RIGHT TO OBLIVION
I lost a friend of mine about a year ago. Hard experience when you are confronted to death for the first time, but that’s Life. He is gone. But virtually, he is still there.... | | |
Comments on facebook are regularly left on his wall, friends keep on commenting on his status and on some occasions, they tag him in his loving memory. While some Facebook activists would claim the advantage of making people eternal, others would just consider his page as a modern burial place, where smiley-hearts replace flowers, left ads the tomb, and pokes long prayers and monologues. Some, however, see that as an unacceptable disrespect to the family and their son’s memory. With over 300 million ‘clients’ worldwide, no doubt that facebook users would share one of this stance. From the buildings of Wall Street to the bank of the Nile, Facebook seems also hardly integrating the cultural aspects of its customers, while in fact being the most important cutural imperialist in history. As a non-American I was pretty shocked of this situation, but if you are a US citizen and think there is no issue at all here, keep in mind that in other countries we do not have a culture of personal data transaprency. Names on legal cases in France for example or other civil law countries, are kept anonymous, contrary to common law countries and specifically the US. We also do not have any regulations similar to Megan laws , or passenger name’s records ( which actually led to an intense arm-wrestling with the EU.) etc.. | |
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- You overgeneralize by assuming that civil law framework determines attitudes about data transparency. Norway is a civil law country in which everyone's tax return is public information, for example. French attitudes are, as always, French, and are assumed by the French to be universally applicable to everyone except Englishmen and barbarian Americans.
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This situation actually confused me, and showed me how important data conservation was and how infringed is our privacy, even when passed away. Facebook is not the only web tools that makes us eternal. Imagine yourselft caught in trouble, and for some reason you have a record. You were young, and now a responsible grown up, you regret it. The person you sent your resume to will also have the regret to learn this little secret when googling you. Or, imagine yourself in Wendy Whitaker’s shoes , name-listed forever on the web… in a very ungloriously manner. Data are kept, we don’t know where, by who, and how. More worrying, as Eben noted in class, some information given without risk at a point, such as religion, sexual preference etc.. could be used against you later on. Some might argue that this web issue only occurs when bad reports, articles, or facts are spoiling one’s reputation: after all, who has never been sensitive to the positive information people all over the world can find about you on google, facebook etc… However, one would be entitled to be freed on any stigma and not reduced to one’s past, when it applies. More importantly, one should not see his life exposed to the public if not consented… | | | Kamel, | |
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< | Since you suggested comments from the class, I added this comment box to your page. You can delete it if you like of course, just find the text that says ! | >
> | Since you suggested comments from the class, I added this comment box to your page. You can delete it if you like of course, just find the text that says %COMMENT% and delete it. It will be near the bottom of the page in edit mode. I also modified the hyperlinks since they previously all linked to http://.../. All I did was copy the text of the link that you included in your essay into the hyperlink code. Here's how it works so you can do it too (I'm copying from Justin's explanation of this elsewhere). A link should be coded in edit view like this:
[[LINK][LINK TEXT]]
So if you wanted "Megan's Laws" to hyperlink to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan's_Law you would use the above syntax with:
LINK = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan's_Law
LINK TEXT = Megan's Law
So in the end, it would look like this:
[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan's_Law][Megan's Law]]
I hope that is helpful. I will try to return to provide substantive comments at a later time.
-- BrianS - 03 Dec 2009 | | | Hi Brian,
Thank you very much for the tip!! | | |
-- KamelB - 28 Dec 2009 | |
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< | and delete it. It will be near the bottom of the page in edit mode. I also modified the hyperlinks since they previously all linked to http://.../. All I did was copy the text of the link that you included in your essay into the hyperlink code. Here's how it works so you can do it too (I'm copying from Justin's explanation of this elsewhere). A link should be coded in edit view like this:
[[LINK][LINK TEXT]]
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< | So if you wanted "Megan's Laws" to hyperlink to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan's_Law you would use the above syntax with:
LINK = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan's_Law
LINK TEXT = Megan's Law
So in the end, it would look like this:
[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan's_Law][Megan's Law]]
I hope that is helpful. I will try to return to provide substantive comments at a later time.
-- BrianS - 03 Dec 2009 | >
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- Much as I yield to nobody in my belief that Facebook's a problem, this seems to me an evidently trumped-up issue. No one gains legal rights by being dead, so this whole "right to oblivion" stuff is obvious nonsense. But people don't lose legal rights in this particular situation by being dead either: the executor or other legal representative has all the powers the decedent had to shut down the Facebook account or do whatever else is desired. When Bradley raised this you treated it as a solution for rich people, but that's untrue: next of kin wind up the matters of their dead relatives among the poor of the world, too. Arguing about the default rule for those whose executors or other representatives have taken no action is
- foolish
- the matter is evidently committed to their prudence and discretion. You don't have to instruct your executor specifically to cancel your magazine subscriptions. The technicalities are what they are: there's all sorts of complexity about the frequent flyer miles of the dead, too, and we don't need international treaties or in fact any transnational institutions to deal with that, either.
- You consider it shocking when a French minister talks total political bullshit and nobody bothers to scrape and bow? Hostile, doubtless English-speaking, bribery is the only possible reason, of course.
- From the revision point of view, I think you need to go back to basics. Either you can convince a skeptical editor that there's really a problem here, or you can't.
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