The "Right to be Forgotten" debate reminds me once again of the cultural differences between technology and privacy.
On September 30, I was honoured to be part of a panel discussion hosted by the IEEE on RTBF; a recording can be viewed here. In a nutshell, the European Court of Justice has decided that European citizens have the right to ask search engine businesses to suppress links to personal information, under certain circumstances. I've analysed and defended the aims of the ECJ in another blog.
One of the IEEE talking points was why RTBF has attracted so much scorn. My answer was that some critics appear to expect perfection in the law; when they look at the RTBF decision, all they see is problems. Yet nobody thinks this or any law is perfect; the question is whether it helps improve the balance of rights in a complex and fast changing world.
It's a little odd that technologists in particular are so critical of imperfections in the law, when they know how flawed is technology. Indeed, the security profession is almost entirely concerned with patching problems, and reminding us there will never be perfect security.
Of course there will be unwanted side-effects of the new RTBF rules and we should trust that over time these will be reviewed and dealt with. I wish that privacy's critics could be more humble about this unfolding environment. I note that when social conservatives complain about online pornography, or when police decry encryption as a tool of criminals, technologists typically play those problems down as the unintended consequences of new technologies, which on average overwhelmingly do good not evil.
And it's the same with the law. It really shouldn't be necessary to remind anyone that laws have unintended consequencesf. That's the stuff of the entire genre of courtroom drama! So everyone take heart: the good guys nearly always win in the end.
