The “Right to be forgotten” lies at the heart of the infosphere debate. It embodies how mature information societies cope and deal with their memories. As such, it has become a defining issue of our time. Drawing on the author’s experience as a member of the Google Advisory panel, this paper discusses some of the salient points of the “Right to be forgotten” discourse, including: privacy vs. freedom of speech and availability vs. accessibility of information. It (...) argues that, while there should be no removal of past information, steps must be taken to ensure that this is not constantly, or unnecessarily, recalled. (shrink)

Modernity is marked by the advent of technologies capable of storing data almost indefi­nitely. On the other hand, the data collection takes place without the conscious permission of the users. The storage and collection of personal data is a potential problem, since the digital footprint of a person on the Internet has an impact on the social and political rep­resentation of the individual, its perception by other actors. Compromising the content of a digital footprint can expose information that is not (...) intended for others. There is cur­rently an increasing trend of misuse of stored data, both by criminals and by companies that use the data for sale or surveillance. The need to control how data is collected, stored and used leads to the emergence in the academic literature and the legal field of the “right to be forgotten”, which allows a person to actively moderate the process of collecting and storing data, to participate in determining the circle of those to whom they can be accessed, and delete personal data. The adoption of such a right not only allows the state to influence the collection and storage of data, regulating interactions through law-making activities, but also to realize the potential of an autonomous individual. The prospect of legislating the right to be forgotten has sparked debate in the academic and professional community about the destruction of the free marketplace of ideas and the imposition of political censor­ship on the Internet. The article deals with the philosophical, ethical and political founda­tions of the right to be forgotten. The article substantiates the conclusion that the right to be forgotten has a positive heuristic potential, but at the same time it has conceptual flaws, and is also not able to completely correct the current situation of data processing. However, the implementation of the right to be forgotten in the future can have a beneficial effect on the current situation in the field of collection and storage of personal data. (shrink)

Although the Internet is frequently referred to as a global public resource, its functioning remains predominantly controlled by private actors. The Internet brought about significant shifts in the way we conceptualize governance. In particular, the handling of “big data” by private intermediaries has a direct impact on routine practices and personal lives. The implementation of the “right to be forgotten” following the May 2014 decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union against Google blurs the boundaries (...) between the public and the private, and extends the responsibilities of the latter to court-style decision making. This article analyzes the regulatory developments in this area and the implications of outsourcing of important governance practices to private intermediaries. It looks at the decision-making process for the “right to be forgotten” to illustrate the extent to which the hybridization of such procedures results in new arrangements between public and private ordering in Internet governance. (shrink)

In a landmark 1994 case, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that individuals had the right to ask for Internet links that contained certain information about them to be delisted by search engines. This came to be known as the “right to be forgotten.” This paper discusses the extent to which this right is consistent with the Islamic tradition. Following an overview of some aspects of the right to be forgotten and (...) why it is endorsed in the European Union with its emphasis on privacy but not in the USA with its exaltation of free speech, the paper discusses two related issues: (1) elements in the Islamic tradition potentially conducive to endorsing a particular understanding of the right to be forgotten and (2) some possible obstacles from that tradition that could challenge the recognition of this right from an Islamic perspective. The paper concludes that despite some challenges, including Qur’anic verses and certain views, activities, and institutions, the right to be forgotten is defendable from within the Islamic tradition by reference to the principle of _satr_, which breaches that one should not seek to publicize personal information that causes harm to other people or even to oneself. The paper seeks to contribute to discussions on this new right by showing what a religious tradition such as Islam can offer to them. (shrink)

Following the trend of sharing, and associating being on-line with being 'on-life', many people are now demanding the ownership and control of their data across all processing phases, including the erasure of their presence on the web. In Europe, recent proposals for regulation include an explicit 'Right to be Forgotten'; this right stated in the European Commission Proposal for Regulation COM 2011/12 does not emerge without controversy. It is being criticised on several grounds, including clashing with other (...) rights, such as freedom of expression, as well as setting the terrain for censorship. Besides the purely legal aspects of the proposed provisions, the chapters of this volume discuss how those legal provisions correspond in practice to worldviews and how individual and collective memory must be governed. They look into the deeper consequences of such provisions to construction of identity, culture and community formation, and how such a right affects how, what and why individuals, groups and societies remember and forget. (shrink)

The debate on the right to be forgotten on Google involves the relationship between human information processing and digital processing by algorithms. The specificity of digital memory is not so much its often discussed inability to forget. What distinguishes digital memory is, instead, its ability to process information without understanding. Algorithms only work with data without remembering or forgetting. Merely calculating, algorithms manage to produce significant results not because they operate in an intelligent way, but because they “parasitically” (...) exploit the intelligence, the memory, and the attribution of meaning by human actors. The specificity of algorithmic processing makes it possible to bypass the paradox of remembering to forget, which up to now blocked any human-based forgetting technique. If you decide to forget some memory, the most immediate effect is drawing attention to it, thereby activating remembering. Working differently from human intelligence, however, algorithms can implement, for the first time, the classical insight that it might be possible to reinforce forgetting not by erasing memories but by multiplying them. After discussing several projects on the web which implicitly adopt this approach, the article concludes by raising some deeper problems posed when algorithms use data and metadata to produce information that cannot be attributed to any human being. (shrink)

The right to be forgotten is a proposed legal response to the potential harms caused by easy digital access to information from one's past, including those to moral autonomy. While the future of these proposed laws is unclear, they attempt to respond to the new problem of increased ease of access to old personal information. These laws may flounder in the face of other rights and interests, but the social values related to moral autonomy they seek to preserve (...) should be promoted in the form of widespread ethical information practices: information stewardship. Code, norms, markets, and laws are analyzed as possible mechanisms for fostering information stewardship. All these mechanisms can support a new user role, one of librarian - curator of digital culture, protector of networked knowledge, and information steward. (shrink)

The ‘right to be forgotten’ has been labelled censorship and disastrous for the freedom of expression. In this paper, we explain that effecting the ‘right to be forgotten’ with regard to search results is ‘censorship’ at the level of information retrieval. We however claim it is the least heavy yet most effective means to get the minimum amount of censorship overall, while enabling people to evolve beyond their past opinions. We argue that applying the ‘right (...) to be forgotten’ to search results is not a question of just ‘censoring’ search engines, but that seen from a broader perspective we—as society—will inevitably have to deal with developments in information technologies and choose between three types of ‘censorship’: censorship of original sources, that is on the level of information storage; censorship on the level of the initial encoding of that information or censorship on the level of information retrieval. These three levels at which ‘censorship’ can take place are the three basic elements of the memory process; whether biological, technological or hybrid with the use of mnemonic technologies. Applying censorship as a means of ‘forgetting’ in the collective hybrid memory of the Web enables us to counter—at least partially—the functioning of the Web as a ‘Panopticon over Time’. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

The European Union faced high risks from personal data proliferation to individuals’ privacy. Legislation has emerged that seeks to articulate all interests at stake, balancing the need for data flow from EU countries with protecting personal data: the General Data Protection Regulation. One of the mechanisms established by this new law to strengthen the individual’s control over their data is the so-called “right to be forgotten”, the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of records. In (...) gender transition, this right represents a powerful form of control over personal data, especially health data that may reveal a gender with which they do not identify and reject. Therefore, it is pertinent to discern whether the right to have personal data deleted—in particular, health data—is ethically acceptable in gender transition. Towards addressing the ethical dimensions of the right to be forgotten in this case, this study presents relevant concepts, briefly outlines history, ethics and law of records considering the evolution from paper to electronic format, the main aspects of identity construction and gender identity, and explores the relationship between privacy, data protection/information control and identity projection. Also, it discusses in gender transition the relation between “the right to self-determination”, “the right to delete”, and “the right to identity and individuality”. Conclusions on the ethical admissibility of the ‘right to be forgotten’ to control gender-affirming information are presented. (shrink)

This paper argues that debates regarding legal protections to preserve the privacy of data subjects, such as those involving the European Union’s right to be forgotten, have tended to overlook group-level forms of epistemic asymmetry and their impact on members of historically oppressed groups. In response, I develop what I consider an abolitionist approach to issues of digital justice. I begin by exploring international debates regarding digital privacy and the right to be forgotten. Then, I turn (...) to the long history of informational asymmetries impacting racialized populations in the United States. Such asymmetries, I argue, comprise epistemic injustices that are also implicated within the patterns of racialized incarceration in the United States. The final section brings together questions regarding the impact of such epistemic injustices on incarcerated peoples and focuses specifically on the public availability of criminal histories in online search databases as a fundamental issue within conversations regarding digital justice. I thus conclude by building from the work of contemporary abolitionist writers to argue that the underlying concerns of an individualized right to be forgotten should be transformed into a collective effort to undermine societal carceral imaginaries. (shrink)

I recall an old man selling Paul Lafargue’s Right to be Lazy on a busy street in the Latin Quarter in the 1980s. At the time, I was writing then my first book on the history of work time and leisure and felt by seeing this strange and grumpy man so energetically promoting the nearly forgotten work of Marx’s son-in-law somehow vindicated in my efforts. Paul Lafargue’s pamphlet makes an interesting assumption: The “natural” state of human being was (...) relaxation and that only a century or so of propaganda convinced the naïve worker and labor movement to embrace the doctrine of the “right” to work. The industrial revolution had produced the craziness of workers’ overproduction and legions of savants and servants for the small utterly unbusy rich. Once freed from the illusion of the right to work, machines, Lafargue insisted, would liberate us all from the drudgery of labor and let us live as the ancient Greek philosophers had dreamed—but without the dependence upon slaves. Lafargue’s view was hardly unique for its day. Many in the late nineteenth century believed that overwork caused production gluts and the irrational excesses of the rich. Busyness was a false doctrine of modern capitalism that was devoted to endlessly extending and intensifying work. Before and after him, many fought to win freedom from busyness with the reduction of worktime. But Lafargue’s dream that mechanical progress would liberate humanity from labor hardly happened. Instead, the “overproduction” that ceaseless toil created was “absorbed” by mass consumption. Even the “wastefulness” of the rich and their minions came to be seen merely as indifferent contributions to the Gross Domestic Product. So what happened? (shrink)

The concept of people’s memory maintains the finiteness of time and capacity. However, with the advancement in technology, the amount of storage memory a person can use has increased dramatically. Given that digital traces can hardly be erased or forgotten, individuals have begun to express their desire to be forgotten in the digital world, and governments and academia are considering methods to fulfill such wishes. Capturing the difficulties in terms of a cultural lag between technological advancements and regulations (...) on individuals’ data privacy needs, we identify six motives for individuals wishing to be forgotten online and investigate its expected effects on online content generation through a qualitative content analysis of 222 responses from open-ended surveys in Korea. Our findings provide implications for the literature on individual privacy and the right to be forgotten employing the cultural lag, as well as, elaborate further on the relationship between being forgotten online and the legitimacy of such requests of individuals. Additionally, implications for data providers, data controllers/processors, and governments to address this lag and build a balanced system of personal information are provided. (shrink)

The decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Google Spain v AEPD and Mario Costeja González enshrined the “right to forget” in the jurisprudence of the European Union. The judgment caused concern to transparency and open information advocates in terms of pitting a right to forget against the general right of the public to know. This, as this paper will argue, is a false distinction. The Internet is, and has always been, a (...) regulated space. Nor is the right to free expression, even in its American form, absolute. While there are genuine concerns about how the balance is struck, evolving practice is likely to identify what cases deserve deletion, to those that do not. The biggest challenge lies in how, and who, tests that balance as to what is removed from the search engines of the Internet. Finding material is important but forgetting may be just as vital to liberties as well. (shrink)

This essay claims that a rupture between two languages permeates human rights discourse in contemporary Anglo-American legal thought. Human rights law is no exception. The one language is written in the sense that a signifying relation inscribed by institutional authors represents concepts. Theories of law have shared such a preoccupation with concepts. Legal rules, doctrines, principles, rights and duties exemplify legal concepts. One is mindful of the dominant tradition of Anglo-American conceptual jurisprudence in this regard. Words have been thought to (...) copy ready-made concepts. Acts of intellectualisation and the accompanying analytic technique have excluded a consideration of a very different sense of legal language. The second sense of a language concentrates upon unwritten acts of meaning which lack a discrete and assignable author. This essay aims to unconceal the importance of an unauthored language. Drawing from Edmund Husserl’s early writings, particularly his Logical Investigations, I shall argue that an unwritten language embodies the written language with acts of meaning. An act of meaning confers one’s experiential body into the content of a concept signified in a written language. In order to understand the importance of such pre-legal acts of meaning in human rights laws, I begin by outlining how universal human rights have been signified as universal by virtue of their content-independence. I then raise the problem of the exclusion of social-cultural phenomena as elements of human rights laws. The clue to this exclusionary character of human rights law rests in the analytic leap from an unwritten to a written legal language. The essay then addresses the effort to link legality with the social world: namely, the effort of grounding legality in a social convention. I examine how a social convention itself is conceptualized, leaving the remainder of acts of meaning. This failure of social conventions to access social-cultural phenomena encourages me to turn to acts of meaning as such acts were understood by Edmund Husserl in his earlier works. Meaning-constituting acts exist prior to intuitions and prior to social conventions. This priority exists analytically as well as phenomenologically. In order to exemplify this prior character of acts of meaning, I retrieve Antigone’s experiential knowledge in Sophocles’ Antigone. Antigone’s unwritten laws are characterized by an absence of mediating concepts. I then identify several elements of an act of meaning in an unwritten language: the experiential body as the source of the acts of meaning, praeiudicia (prejudgements), collective memories, the act character of meaning, and the act of interpretation of social behaviour. My final section raises the prospect of whether human rights can be considered universal if acts of meaning are that important in the identity of a law. (shrink)

This book presents the latest research on the challenges and solutions affecting the equilibrium between freedom of speech, freedom of information, information security, and the right to informational privacy. Given the complexity of the topics addressed, the book shows how old legal and ethical frameworks may need to be not only updated, but also supplemented and complemented by new conceptual solutions. Neither a conservative attitude (“more of the same”) nor a revolutionary zeal (“never seen before”) is likely to lead (...) to satisfactory solutions. Instead, more reflection and better conceptual design are needed, not least to harmonise different perspectives and legal frameworks internationally. The focus of the book is on how we may reconcile high levels of information security with robust degrees of informational privacy, also in connection with recent challenges presented by phenomena such as “big data” and security scandals, as well as new legislation initiatives, such as those concerning “the right to be forgotten” and the use of personal data in biomedical research. The book seeks to offer analyses and solutions of the new tensions, in order to build a fair, shareable, and sustainable balance in this vital area of human interactions. (shrink)

Morality bears on what we should forget. Some aspects of our identity are meant to be forgotten and there is a distinctive harm that accompanies the permanence of some content about us, content that prompts a duty to forget. To make the case that forgetting is an integral part of our moral duties to others, the paper proceeds as follows. In §1, I make the case that forgetting is morally evaluable and I survey three kinds of forgetting: no-trace forgetting, (...) archival forgetting, and siloing. In §2, I turn to how we practice these forms of forgetting in our everyday lives and the goods these practices facilitate by drawing on examples ranging from the expunging of juvenile arrest records to the right to privacy. In §3, I turn to how my account can help us both recognize and address a heretofore neglected source of harm caused by technology and big data. In §4, I end by addressing the concern that we lack control over forgetting and thus can't be required to forget. I argue this challenge can be answered, but there’s a harder challenge that can’t. Forgetting is under threat. To address this challenge and preserve forgetting, we must change the world. (shrink)

S. Matthew Liao argues here that children have a right to be loved. To do so he investigates questions such as whether children are rightholders; what grounds a child's right to beloved; whether love is an appropriate object of a right; and other philosophical and practical issues. His proposal is that all human beings have rights to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life; therefore, as human beings, children have human rights to the fundamental conditions for (...) pursuing a good life. Since being loved is one of those fundamental conditions, children thus have a right to be loved. Liao shows that this claim need not be merely empty rhetoric, and that the arguments for this right can hang together as a coherent whole. This is the first book to make a sustained philosophical case for the right of children to be loved. It makes a unique contribution to the fast-growing literature on family ethics, in particular, on children's rights and parental rights and responsibilities, and to the emerging field of the philosophy of human rights. (shrink)

In 1926, Haldane published an essay titled 'On Being the Right Size' in which he argued that the structure, function, and behavior of an organism are strongly conditioned by the physical forces that exert the greatest impact at the scale at which it exists. This chapter puts Haldane’s insight to work in the context of contemporary cell and molecular biology. Owing to their minuscule size, cells and molecules are subject to very different forces than macroscopic organisms. In a sense, (...) macroscopic and microscopic entities inhabit different “worlds”: the former is ruled by gravity and inertia, whereas the latter is governed by Brownian motion. One implication is that we should be extremely skeptical of models and analogies that seek to explain properties of microscopic entities by appealing to properties of macroscopic ones. Unfortunately, this is precisely what the appeal to engineering metaphors in molecular biology attempts to do. Molecular biologists routinely resort to such metaphors because they are familiar and intuitively intelligible. But if our machines were the size of molecules it would be impossible for them to function the way they do. It follows that we should avoid distorting biological reality by construing it in engineering terms. In this chapter I examine four key metaphors in molecular biology – “genetic program,” “cellular circuitry,” “molecular machine,” and “molecular motor” – and I argue that their deficiencies derive from their neglect of scale. I also try to explain why many biologists today appear to have forgotten the importance of scale that Haldane drew attention to in his essay. I suggest that the reason has to do with the influence of Schrödinger’s argument in 'What is Life?' regarding the stability of the gene. (shrink)

Following the collapse of communism and the decline of Marxism, some commentators have claimed that we have reached the 'end of history' and that the distinction between Left and Right can be forgotten. In this book - which was a tremendous success in Italy - Norberto Bobbio challenges these views, arguing that the fundamental political distinction between Left and Right, which has shaped the two centuries since the French Revolution, has continuing relevance today. Bobbio explores the grounds (...) of this elusive distinction and argues that Left and Right are ultimately divided by different attitudes to equality. He carefully defines the nature of equality and inequality in relative rather than absolute terms. Left and Right is a timely and persuasively argued account of the basic parameters of political action and debate in the modern world - parameters which have remained constant despite the pace of social change. The book will be widely read and, as in Italy, it will have an impact far beyond the academic domain. (shrink)

If Martin Heidegger was a philosopher who poetized, Wallace Stevens was a poet who philosophized. In "The Sail of Ulysses," one of his later poems, Stevens speaks enigmatically of a "right to be." The phrase is straightforward, if taken to indicate the right to life. But Stevens is rarely, if ever, straightforward. The poem is much more understandable if we take "being" in a Heideggerian sense, as an understanding of what it means to be.

This paper provide the first extended discussion in the philosophical literature of the epistemic significance of the phenomenon of “being known” and the relationship it has to reparations that are distinctively epistemic. Drawing on a framework provided by the United Nations of the “right to know,” it is argued that victims of gross violations and injustices not only have the right to know what happened, but also the right to be known—to be a giver of knowledge to (...) others about their own experiences. It is shown that such victims can suffer epistemic wrongs by being rendered invisible, vilified or demonized, or systematically distorted, and that these ways of not being known demand epistemic reparations. While there are traditional reparations that are epistemic in nature, such as memorialization and education, it is argued that there is a prior and arguably more important epistemic reparation—knowing victims of gross violations and injustices in the sense of bearing witness. The paper concludes with a sketch of an epistemological picture to underwrite this notion of epistemic reparations, one that significantly expands the traditional picture by including epistemic duties that are imperfect in nature and concern actions in addition to beliefs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Chiao-Wei Liu, "Response to Leonard Tan and Mengchen Lu, 'I Wish to be Wordless': Philosophizing through the Chinese Guqin," Philosophy of Music Education Review 26, no. 2 (Fall, 2018): 199–202Leonard Tan and Mengchen LuChiao-Wei Liu's response to our paper raised important issues regarding the translation and interpretation of Chinese philosophical texts, our construals of Truth and ethical awakening, differences between the various Chinese philosophical traditions, and the (...) importance of recognizing students' selves as music educators work with them through diverse musical traditions. In this paper, we respond to each of these issues in turn.Liu rightly pointed out that the translation and interpretation of classical Chinese texts is complex. To support her argument, she cited a phrase from the [End Page 210] Zhuangzi that was quoted in our paper ("The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you've gotten the fish, you can forget the trap") and noted that it has often been used "to attribute to one's ungrateful attitude after receiving help from others."1 Taken on its own as a standalone, this reading appears plausible. Our interpretation, however, takes into account the quote in its original context:荃者所以在魚，得魚而忘荃；The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap.蹄者所以在兔，得兔而忘蹄；The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare.言者所以在意，得意而忘言。Words exist because of meaning; once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.吾安得忘言之人而與之言哉？Where can I find someone who has forgotten words so I can talk with the person?"2In each of the first three phrases, there are six characters followed by five. This pattern indicates that the first three phrases should be read as a whole rather than independently, which then lead to the final phrase–the playful climax which reveals that Zhuangzi's purpose here is to discuss language. The fish trap and rabbit snares are metaphors for words, while the fish and the rabbit are metaphors for meaning. Each of the first three phrases convey the same idea that if we get overly hung up on the means (that is, the fish trap, the rabbit snare, and words), we will never get to the Dao. Taken as a whole, the passage conveys the idea of words being mere means to the Dao, rather than the Dao itself, which supports the central theme of our paper: Philosophizing without words. Indeed, as Liu noted, the translation and interpretation of Chinese philosophical texts is a complex one, to which we add the importance of context.In our paper, we drew on the Buddhist notion of mingxin jianxing (明心見性) to explain how a guqin player quietly and meditatively clears her heart-mind before playing the instrument so that she can search for Truth within and discover her innermost self. Extending and adapting our ideas for contemporary music education, we proposed that music education is not just an outward journey to learn about composers, but also an inward one to learn about the self. Liu's construal of our work as claiming that "Truth does not reside within the [End Page 211] performer or the music, but is located in the space where the two are in sync" and also that "qualities aligned with the music are ethically good, whereas those that differ are not"3 extend our writing in ways we did not intend. Quite on the contrary, we agree with Liu that different students have different needs, hence our proposition for students to search inwards and discover themselves.In like vein, we agree with Liu that "when music learning becomes a means of assimilating toward one prescribed/predetermined standard, regardless of students' lived realities or how they make sense of the world, teaching then ceases to be moral."4 As noted in our paper, we are not in favor of a standards-based approach to music education that is rigid; similarly, we do not advocate the prescription of moral standards. The moral stories associated with the guqin tradition are heuristic; they aim to inspire ethical awakening, not to impose moral standards, and are therefore neither mechanistic nor to be... (shrink)

It appears at least intuitively appropriate to claim that we owe it to victims to punish those who have wronged them. It also seems plausible to state that we owe it to society to punish those who have violated its norms. However, do we also owe punishment to perpetrators themselves? In other words, do those who commit crimes have a moral right to be punished? This work examines the sustainability of the right to be punished from the standpoint (...) of the two main theories of rights—the will and the interest conceptions. The right to be punished is shown to be largely indefensible on both accounts: on the will theory, the right to be punished conflicts with autonomy, and it can neither be claimed nor waived by a perpetrator; on the interest theory, a perpetrator’s interest in punishment, inasmuch as it exists, is not sufficient to ground a duty on the part of the state. (shrink)

The so-called ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ cases have been provoked by people’s desires to make their own determinations about what personal information is accessible online to others (and when, and how) in a world of data permanence. Legally at stake is how personhood is defined and defended. Thus far, European law has primarily concerned itself with the delisting of ‘data subjects’ from search results and the deletion or anonymization of personal information from and by search engine operators. As (...) a result, personhood has fallen into a kind of legislative void [ 43 ] I argue that this void is engendered by an old friction between the traditional Western secularist cognitive models that have formed the skeleton of Western law and the pulsing flesh of living human subject creation that pushes back against it. At the very least, the digital immortality of our images, voices, words and more, are bringing forth a variety of aspects of our ‘person.’ Meanwhile, religious worldviews have long understood and made use of phenomenological ideas of human becoming and transcendence that are far more congruous with how—even modern secular—people make meaning of their lives and self-creation, and how they think of posthumous existence. Moving through and with some of the most recent thinking in philosophy, anthropology, and cognitive science, I will develop the argument that human subjectivity is not only impossible to limit to the body, but that a radicalized ecological view is the only one that can ‘save’ us. (shrink)

This paper examines whether American parents legally violate their children’s privacy rights when they share embarrassing images of their children on social media without their children’s consent. My inquiry is motivated by recent reports that French authorities have warned French parents that they could face fines and imprisonment for such conduct, if their children sue them once their children turn 18. Where French privacy law is grounded in respect for dignity, thereby explaining the French concerns for parental “over-sharing,” I show (...) that there are three major legal roadblocks for such a case to succeed in US law. First, US privacy tort law largely only protects a person’s image where the person has a commercial interest in his or her image. Secondly, privacy tort laws are subject to constitutional constraints respecting the freedom of speech and press. Third, American courts are reluctant to erode parental authority, except in cases where extraordinary threats to children’s welfare exist. I argue that while existing privacy law in the US is inadequate to offer children legal remedy if their parents share their embarrassing images of them without their consent, the dignity-based concerns of the French should not be neglected. I consider a recent proposal to protect children’s privacy by extending to them the “right to be forgotten” online, but I identify problems in this proposal, and argue it is not a panacea to the over-sharing problem. I conclude by emphasizing our shared social responsibilities to protect children by teaching them about the importance of respecting one another’s privacy and dignity in the online context, and by setting examples as responsible users of internet technologies. (shrink)

The presumption of innocence has often been understood as a doctrine that can be explained primarily by instrumental concerns relating to accurate fact-finding in the criminal trial and that has few if any implications outside the trial itself. In this paper, I argue, in contrast, that in a liberal legal order everyone has a right to be presumed innocent simply in virtue of being a person. Every person has a right not to be subjected to criminal punishment unless (...) and until he or she has done something that is criminally wrong. Since disagreements about allegations of criminal wrongdoing are inevitable, the liberal legal order requires a process for determining whether wrongdoing has occurred. In order to preserve the right not to be punished without wrongdoing, the accused person must be presumed innocent throughout this process. The presumption of innocence is therefore as much a basic human right as, for example, the right to bodily integrity or the right to freedom of expression. Specifications of and limitations on the right should therefore be justified not primarily in terms of their instrumental effectiveness in fact-finding or crime control but in terms of the role of the criminal process in a liberal legal order. I consider some implications of this view of the presumption of innocence for the pre-trial process and for substantive criminal law. I argue that the presumption of innocence, understood as a basic human right, should condition the entire pre-trial process; it has, however, minimal implications for the definition of offences. (shrink)

In the present paper, we first argue that it is critical for humans to forget; that is, to have some means of preventing out-of-date information from interfering with the recall of current information. We then argue that the primary means of accomplishing such adaptive updating of human memory is retrieval inhibition: Information that is rendered out of date by new learning becomes less retrievable, but remains at essentially full strength in memory as indexed by other measures, such as recognition and (...) word-fragment completion. We conclude with a speculation that certain unconscious influences of prior events may, in fact, be stronger if those events were to be forgotten rather than to be remembered. (shrink)

Recognizing the right of LGBT students and educators to be out at school.

Courts, Litigants, and the Digital Age examines the ramifications of technology for courts, judges, and the administration of justice. It sets out the issues raised by technology, and, particularly, the Internet, so that conventional paradigms can be updated in the judicial context. In particular, the book dwells on issues such as proper judicial use of Internet sources, judicial ethics and social networking, electronic court records and anonymization techniques, control of the courtroom and jurors' use of new technologies, as well as (...) the Internet's impact on judicial appointments and the diversity of the judiciary. The second edition includes discussion of current issues in this rapidly developing area, such as privacy protection, the "right to be forgotten," cyber intimidation, freedom of digital speech, and litigant anonymity. Through examination of relevant practical, legal, and ethical issues, it endeavours to extract lessons from the developing issues surveyed and proposes forward-thinking approaches based on proportionality principles. (shrink)

Worldwide wisdom teaches, and philosophy demonstrates, that universally valid is only the perspective able to recognize everybody’s right to be treated in a just manner. From this point of view we have to recognize that all propositions are in some sense true, and hence that even those who are wrong are, from a particular point of view, right. Therefore, we have the duty to understand in which sense even populist stances are, at least in some sense, true. For (...) instance, they can help us to keep in mind the limits of democracy and, in this way, to escape the dangerous “democratic superstition.”. (shrink)

Robert Nozick's book is a major event in contemporary political philosophy. There has, in recent years, been no sustained and competently argued challenge to the prevailing conceptions of social justice and the role of the state. Political philosophers have tended to assume without argument that justice demands an extensive redistribution of wealth in the direction of equality; and that it is a legitimate function of the state to bring about this redistribution by coercive means like progressive taxation. These assumptions may (...) be correct; but after Anarchy, State, and Utopia they will need to be defended and argued for instead of being taken for granted. (shrink)

Imagine a case of wrongdoing—not something trivial, but nothing so serious that adequate reparations are impossible. Imagine, further, that the wrongdoer makes those reparations and sincerely apologizes. Does she have a moral right to be forgiven? The standard view is that she does not, but this paper contends that the standard view is mistaken. It begins by showing that the arguments against a right to be forgiven are inconclusive. It ends by making two arguments in defense of that (...) right. (shrink)

This book on privacy and data protection offers readers conceptual analysis as well as thoughtful discussion of issues, practices, and solutions. It features results of the seventh annual International Conference on Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection, CPDP 2014, held in Brussels January 2014. The book first examines profiling, a persistent core issue of data protection and privacy. It covers the emergence of profiling technologies, on-line behavioral tracking, and the impact of profiling on fundamental rights and values. Next, the book looks (...) at preventing privacy risks and harms through impact assessments. It contains discussions on the tools and methodologies for impact assessments as well as case studies. The book then goes on to cover the purported trade-off between privacy and security, ways to support privacy and data protection, and the controversial right to be forgotten, which offers individuals a means to oppose the often persistent digital memory of the web. Written during the process of the fundamental revision of the current EU data protection law by the Data Protection Package proposed by the European Commission, this interdisciplinary book presents both daring and prospective approaches. It will serve as an insightful resource for readers with an interest in privacy and data protection. (shrink)

We propose simple nonlinear mathematical models for the legal concept of balancing of interests. Our aim is to bridge the gap between an abstract formalisation of a balancing decision while assuring consistency and ultimately legal certainty across cases. We focus on the conflict between the rights to privacy and to the protection of personal data in Art. 7 and Art. 8 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (EUCh) against the right of access to information derived from Art. 11 (...) EUCh. These competing rights are denoted by ( \(i_1\) ) _right to privacy _ and ( \(i_2\) ) _access to information_; mathematically, their indices are respectively assigned by \(u_1\in [0,1]\) and \(u_2\in [0,1]\) subject to the constraint \(u_1+u_2=1\). This constraint allows us to use one single index _u_ to resolve the conflict through balancing. The outcome will be concluded by comparing the index _u_ with a prior given threshold \(u_0\). For simplicity, we assume that the balancing depends on only selected legal criteria such as the social status of affected person, and the sphere from which the information originated, which are represented as inputs of the models, called legal parameters. Additionally, we take “time” into consideration as a legal criterion, building on the European Court of Justice’s ruling on the right to be forgotten: by considering time as a legal parameter, we model how the outcome of the balancing changes over the passage of time. To catch the dependence of the outcome _u_ by these criteria as legal parameters, data were created by a fully-qualified lawyer. By comparison to other approaches based on machine learning, especially neural networks, this approach requires significantly less data. This might come at the price of higher abstraction and simplification, but also provides for higher transparency and explainability. Two mathematical models for _u_, a time-independent model and a time-dependent model, are proposed, that are fitted by using the data. (shrink)

Many liberal democracies have legal restrictions on nudism. This article argues that when public nudity does not pose a health threat, such restrictions are unjust. To vindicate this claim, I start by showing that there are two weighty interests served by the freedom to be naked in public. First, it promotes individual well-being; not only can nudist activities have great recreational value, recent studies have found that exposure to non-idealised naked bodies has a positive impact on body image, and, ultimately, (...) on life satisfaction. Second, public nudity has expressive value; apart from being a constitutive element of various spiritual and religious worldviews, public nudity is frequently used to protest social and political evils. As I go on to argue, the reasons for abolishing current anti-nudist laws that stem from these interests are not overridden, let alone cancelled, by the offence that public nudity might cause. Indeed, whereas my principal aim is to defend the freedom to be publicly naked when this poses no health threat, I will contend that states should recognise this liberty as a distinct legal right rather than try to subsume it under existing rights or secure it simply by excluding non-sexual, non-exhibitionist public nudity from existing laws against public indecency, sexual exhibition, and disorderly conduct. (shrink)

Dillon, John Opponents of equal rights for homosexual people, particularly regarding same-sex marriage, predicate their opposition on ignorant misconceptions of human biology, and unsupportable reliance on religious precepts. Let's discuss this matter.

Social experimental research commonly employs media to elicit responses from research subjects. This use of media is broadly protected under fair use exemptions to copyright, and creators of content used in experiments are generally not afforded any formal consideration or protections in existing research ethics frameworks. Online social networking sites are an emerging and important setting for social experiments, and in this context the material used to elicit responses is often content produced by other users. This article argues that users (...) may have a reasonable interest in controlling the use of their content in experiments conducted in online social networks. Matters of risk and autonomy in research ethics are explored by analogy to active debates in law over adhesion contracts, moral rights, and the right to be forgotten. The article concludes by considering practical difficulties in identifying and protecting the interests of creators. (shrink)

Both many critics of abortion and many defenders of abortion have suggested that artificial wombs could end the abortion debate. If the fetus is removed from the uterus, women have an end to an unwanted pregnancy. If the living fetus is then put in an artificial uterus for ectogenesis, there is no termination of the life of the fetus. Joona Räsänen challenges this view in his article, Ectogenesis, abortion and a right to the death of the fetus. Räsänen provides (...) three arguments for a right to secure the death of the human being in utero, namely the ‘right not to become a biological parent argument’, the ‘right to genetic privacy argument’, and the ‘right to property argument’. This article critiques these three arguments for a right to the death of the fetus. (shrink)

Recommendation systems (RSs) predict what the user likes and recommend it to them. While at the onset of RSs, the latter was designed to maximize the recommendation accuracy (i.e., accuracy was their only goal), nowadays many RSs models include diversity in recommendations (which thus is a further goal of RSs). In the computer science community, the introduction of diversity in RSs is justified mainly through economic reasons: diversity increases user satisfaction and, in niche markets, profits.I contend that, first, the economic (...) justification of diversity in RSs risks reducing it to an empirical matter of preference; second, diversity is ethically relevant as it supports two autonomy rights of the user: the right to an open present and the right to be treated as an individual. So far, diversity in RSs has been morally defended only in the case of RSs of news and scholarly content: diversity is held to have a depolarizing effect in a democratic society and the scientific community and make the users more autonomous in their news choices. I provide a justification of diversity in RSs that embraces all kinds of RSs (i.e., a holistic moral defense) and is based on a normative principle founded on the agency of the user, which I call the right to be an exception to predictions. Such a right holds that the proper treatment of a RS user qua agent forbids providing them with recommendations based only on their past or similar users’ choices. (shrink)

This volume brings together papers that offer conceptual analyses, highlight issues, propose solutions, and discuss practices regarding privacy and data protection. The first section of the book provides an overview of developments in data protection in different parts of the world. The second section focuses on one of the most captivating innovations of the data protection package: how to forget, and the right to be forgotten in a digital world. The third section presents studies on a recurring, and (...) still important and much disputed, theme of the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) conferences : the surveillance, control and steering of individuals and groups of people and the increasing number of performing tools (data mining, profiling, convergence) to achieve those objectives. This part is illustrated by examples from the domain of law enforcement and smart surveillance. The book concludes with five chapters that advance our understanding of the changing nature of privacy (concerns) and data protection. (shrink)

: A popular belief is that the process whereby search engines tailor their search results to individual users, so-called personalization, leads to filter bubbles in the sense of ideologically segregated search results that would tend to reinforce the user’s prior view. Since filter bubbles are thought to be detrimental to society, there have been calls for further legal regulation of search engines beyond the so-called Right to be Forgotten Act. However, the scientific evidence for the filter bubble hypothesis (...) is surprisingly limited. Previous studies of personalization have focused on the extent to which different users get different results lists without taking the content on the webpages into account. Such methods are unsuitable for detecting filter bubbles as such. In this paper, we propose a methodology that takes content differences between webpages into account. In particular, the method involves studying the extent to which users with strong opposing views on an issue receive search results that are correlated content-wise with their personal view. Will users of with strong prior opinion that X is true on average have a larger share of search results that are in favor of X than users with a strong prior opinion that X is false? We illustrate our methodology at work, but also the non-trivial challenges it faces, by a small-scale study of the extent to which Google Search leads to ideological segregation on the issue of man-made climate change. (shrink)

Conceptions of life. Chinese, Greeks, and Christians.--Conceptions of life. Modern rationalism and science.--The rights of human beings. Food; work; knowledge.--The rights of human beings. Sex and parenthood.--The rights of children.--Modern civilization.