Category Archives: Privacy

The right to be forgotten and the crumbling protection of free speech around the world

August 8, 2015 7:14 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Just when you think the crazy train ran out of tracks they go and build an extension out to the crazytown suburbs…

I mean it would have been ludicrous back in the 80s to think let alone propose that blatant censorship and the alteration of databases would be something that we would want to do for good reasons, right?  There’s no such thing as a memory hole after all.

The “right to be forgotten”.  Back in the early part of the century some plaintiffs in Europe found to their dismay that their criminal and otherwise infamous past continued to live on digitally in the form of news stories and articles preserved on the internet and that search engines could magically whisk users off to find these less than savory tidbits just by typing a few keywords.

So a few European plaintiffs banded together and sued Google, the biggest search engine in the planet, and won a case against them and forced them to take down the links to the pages where the plaintiffs misdeeds continued to live on.  The suit of course only worked for search engine results in Europe.  In any other part of the planet you could still find this information.

Not satisfied with this a french government agency called the CNIL has now asked Google to make the results disappear globally.  Google of course gave the CNIL the finger and said no, so the whole thing is going back into court.

This of course is only part of the worldwide epidemic of censorship that seems to be in vogue lately.  Try typing in certain key phrases in a certain country about a certain recent historical event and watch nothing appear.

China, Tiananmen square, 1989.

Happy?  I just lost 1.7 billion potential readers.

Think we’re immune in America?  Look up CISA or SOPA or PIPA or COICA.  All laws supposedly intended to protect one thing or another and all of them curtailing freedom of speech in some form.

The internet, what was once the digital equivalent of the open range and the last wild frontier, is rapidly becoming as closely regulated and monitored as any piece of government-owned property.

All the mad and ridiculous musings of the George Orwells of yesteryear are coming to pass.  They’re not coming in openly harsh and repressive packaging but in soft are ill-defined laws meant as “protection” or “privacy” laws.  No matter what you decide to call them however they are coming.

Posted in: censorship, internet, privacy, technology, thought

So what’s wrong with that?

May 11, 2014 6:49 AM , Leave a Comment ,

We’ve all heard about all the excesses of the federal government collecting data on American citizens or of the attempts to regulate the internet more and more.  But have you taken a look at what’s happening locally?

A few weeks ago the Houston city council voted to pass a law allowing neighbors to inform the police if their neighbors are “hoarders”.  The law would allow the police to enter the home and assess if the person is a hoarder and then fine them if necessary.

Yesterday I caught a story about a parent whose son participated in sports and died during spring training due to a heart defect.  He has begun a campaign to make heart EKG screenings mandatory for all student athletes in Texas.

Little things.  You could argue they’re innocuous if not beneficial for individuals and society as a whole.  Why would anyone in their right mind complain about such things?  You’d be right in thinking that by themselves they are beneficial but these laws don’t exist in a vacuum.  You can easily argue that they’re the stepping stones to laws that will have greater latitude to intrude on your privacy.

Mayor Parker already alluded to that as she commented that at the current time the new anti-hoarding ordinance would only apply to townhouses and apartments but that it could easily be expanded to single family homes in the future.  The public good is what is important.  The individual counts for little or not at all.  What really gets to me is that this law relies upon neighbors to become government informants.

The EKG screenings?  Wonderful for student athletes but what happens when someone wants to make the program mandatory for all students and wants to include other conditions besides heart defects?  What happens to all that private medical information when it’s in the hands of a bureaucracy?   Maybe someone in the insurance field or some future employer gets his hands on it?

So what’s the answer to these 2 problems?  I don’t really know.  But thrashing our individual liberties sure isn’t the answer.  Giving away our right to privacy for convenience sake is the last thing that our government should be engaged in.

 

Posted in: politics, privacy