If any part of the site is meant to assassinate my character, I could sue you for defamation in the necessary jurisdiction. Alternatively, I could work to improve the SEO scores of my personal and professional pages, acknowledge that you are attempting to character assassinate me in my pages, and move on with my life. The problem is that in reality what's happening is that people who made stupid mistakes as teenagers are now realizing that their arrest record is searchable, and I feel terrible for them, but wouldn't it be better dealt with by passing laws to thwart the arrest record sites rather than forcing every site that indexes content to delist on a case-by-case basis.
The issue here is two fold: if you committed a simple offence like -say- shop lifting at some point of your life, get caught, get punished, regret it then you try to make things right and get back to society. Having a permanent record of that in the internet can pretty much destroy your life even though you didn't kill anybody. We are all humans, we all make mistakes. On the other hand, if it is okay for courts to make things "disappear" from internet gates like Google then any ambitious politician\lawyer with zero concern for public interest can make the internet his pet by hiding some of his history from the public and any dictator can mask everything they do even if their citizens use proxies to bypass their firewalls. In my personal opinion, the most practical way to address this is to prevent publishing names on newspapers for offenders in minor offences as opposed to hiding Google's search results.
Copyright and drug laws are the two largest offenders in this respect. Check out the recent moves the the US Congress to make linking to the 'wrong' site a felony (the '10 Strikes' legislation).
Once they've criminalized being a common person, then the government can exercise discretion and selection to eliminate people they does not like, for any reason.
Yeah, absolutely no doubt that the court systems and judges are so stupid that they would put someone out of business for clicking a link. Absolutely no doubt. Will totally happen.
Why not? Imagine this scenario: the police strongly suspect that person X has some kind of terrorist involvement. They have no solid evidence. However, they are able to show that person X once viewed extremist propaganda. So they prosecute X for what they can prove -- viewing propaganda -- telling themselves, based on their wider investigation and inadmissible evidence, that they’re prosecuting a terrorist.
But what if they’re wrong? Even though they’re trying to follow the spirit of the law, they could still end up prosecuting an otherwise innocent person. What defence does X have?
This is irrelevant to my post. Would removing all transparency from it help, or make it worse? Are there better-regarded ones that don't reveal anything whatsoever to the accused and convicted, because that'd make it so hard to stop criminals that everything would fall apart?
[EDIT] My point is simply that somehow we manage in basically every other space to let those accused of wrongdoing know what we think they did that looked like wrongdoing, but somehow when it's an Internet giant calling the shots that's just impossible and waaaaah too hard and the sky would fall if they ever treated anyone with any amount of humanity and respect. I think it's grade-A bullshit and they've just figured out they can get away with being assholes at scale and no-one will make them stop.
Law enforcement is not effective at dealing with them, because the ones in the spotlight haven't actually broken the law, and the "harassment campaign" is extremely exaggerated.
It isn't illegal to store publicly available info on somebody. It is illegal to use it to harass people, but the site in question permanently bans people if evidence comes forward of it, and so far most if not all of it has cropped up on other sites.
You assume that the legal system is infallible. I don't think it should purged from the public record or search engines. This whole thing reminds me of 1984, where the government alters events in the past by essentially controlling information.
I don't like that people are wrongly charged with a crime either. I think as more information about people becomes made available, our culture will shift to become more permissive as to appropriate behavior. As the sexual revolution brought about attitudes towards personal relationships, I think eventually society will be more forgiving with the information available online about a person.
Go back to 4chan or reddit please. The law isn't your personal playground to arrest people you don't like. Accessing a public URL isn't a crime. Nor is being an asshole (of which you should be very glad!).
To your comment: Wouldn't entrapment laws cover this?
I would have no problem with a site (run by the police) offers recycled CP/allows others to upload (ala youtube) then tracks really active users (say, 10+ hard core downloads or 1 verifiable homemade upload) for a long time while rounding up the ones that are abusing their own children.
In court the police would have to prove motive, etc.. But a good event log table should do the trick.
If I happen to get emailed CP spam, that is one thing, but when you can prove that a person clicked on button A then button B then button C and searched for "...", that is pretty good evidence in my eyes.
Egh. I really wish there was an easy way to shut this shit down without massive internet privacy invasion.
That would be great, but unfortunately cops don't seem to care, even under rather egregious circumstances. My friend went to both the FBI and local police, after the person that controls the website said they would take it down in exchange for $100K. Textbook blackmail. Yet they never did anything about it.
I totally agree that we should not prosecute based on being the originator. But I'm saying it is a reasonable place to start an investigation. Being able to pick a starting point for an investigation even if it just narrows the search to a neighborhood or city or even country(even if it may not totally be correct in cases of people of high technical skill) is at least a better starting point then searching for John Doe who is somewhere, presumably on the planet earth.
I'm not suggesting that we have a system where someone can look up what anyone is doing on the Internet at any point in time. I'm simply saying that if there is no way to connect an action made online to the real world such that it cannot be used as evidence against someone then anything a person does on the internet has no possible repercussions. Which I think would have some horrific consequences. Yes there is room for some abuse, and an actual implementation of any system would have to work out how to minimize this abuse, but at a certain point you need to trust your government. They have the ability to do a lot worse to a person then find out what they are browsing online.
It isn't an either or. You want to do both, because doing one or the other doesn't really solve the problem created. If you can't get the perpetrator for some reason, at least having a way to mitigate the damage is useful. In some cases that might be de-listing in the search engine, in others it might be making a service provider take action. The trick is to not give it undue power so it can be used as a bludgeon where it doesn't make sense, and that balancing act is actually the hard part, IMO.
The reason strong bad men don't rob us constantly us because other strong men are legally permitted to do violence unto them. I don't think that's a model that works for the Internet.
Instead I think we should take Mr McNealy's words as prescient. Even if you protect your privacy, people you know are still willing to tag you in photos or upload their contact lists.
Instead of pretending that we can remain private online perhaps we should be thinking about how to compartmentalise our online identities so that the whole 'us' can't be revealed by an inadvertent mouse click.
TLDR: Scott was right, so let's work out what to do next.
> To make the law work needs the removal of anonymity to ensure that users cannot cause harm by using online platforms to abuse others. Where an offence has taken place they ought to be easily identified and reported to the police and punished.
Being mean isn’t a crime and it doesn’t stop just because a person is identifiable. Have you ever seen a Facebook comment section?
something that has been proven to cause harm ... should be preemptively terminated and should not require a court order
I don't see why. Law enforcement has been dealing with exigent circumstances since before the Internet existed. It's a problem that they refuse to do their jobs in many cases, but we should fix that rather than privatize it.
>'The issue here is two fold: if you committed a simple offence like -say- shop lifting at some point of your life, get caught, get punished, regret it then you try to make things right and get back to society. Having a permanent record of that in the internet can pretty much destroy your life even though you didn't kill anybody.'
Not necessarily.
Exactly such a conviction didn't stop at least one guy from becoming in some sense the most notable CIO in the US and VP at a major SV company.
Of course, I expect he was better equipped than many to mitigate such things, but not exceptionally so.
Ideally, we would - as a society stop discriminating against or wholly shredding each other over petty bullshit. We'd acknowledge a whole range of stuff that currently is called at best an indiscretion or lapse in judgement as actually perfectly average, human behavior.
Obviously, that's not to say any and everything is simply 'OK', particularly if it is habitual or done with malice.
It's simply getting back to a reality where we try to hold each other to such squeaky clean ideals that someone representing them would either be so bland as to have little in common with the rest of the world or more likely, have done a great job of covering it all up.
Moving forward, I actually think we get to that point one way or the other. I don't think information security has much hope of keeping up with our increasing connectedness, sharing (intentional or otherwise) and growing trail of digital footprints.
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