Simon,
You raised a very important point. I tried to explore this in a previous paper at the 5th information Rights Conference hosted by Northumbria University Law School.
The issue is that the individual has never had control over the personal data held by the state. The power of the RTBF as enshrined in the still forthcoming legislation would be, literally, revolutionary. For the first time in history the individual would tell the state what it could or could not control or hold. The change, if it happens, would be profound as it would almost bring to fruition the full autonomy of the individual.
The change would be revolutionary because it would also change the relationship between the state and the individual, in the sense that the individual is a creature of the state, because the individual would have control over their data. We do not have a say over our birth certificate, marriage certificate, or #NINO and a myriad of other data that is created by the state to support us in our rights and obligations.
As most of you may know, I am not a big fan of the idea of privacy, which I see as a state created right that does not (did not) exist prior to the 20th century with the discovery of human rights. The challenge is, dare I say it, existential, because it suggests that we just might be able to organise world on a non-state based system. The state, as you may realize, is a self-generating machine (to borrow some ideas from its create Thomas Hobbes) and if a RTBF is to be created and sustained, it would mark the first direct and open challenge to the state's primacy (sorry the UN does not count as that further enshrines the state and the state system), since the Papacy lost its ability to represent individuals. I have purposefully subsumed the monarchy into the UK state, as UK parliament and the UK state has de facto primacy, but that still is not accurate given the residual power of the monarchy although it will have to do for the less rigorous confines of this list.
We are in for a new era. I am not sure it will be a wonderful world to be a fully autonomous individual but that future is coming whether we want it or not. The only offset would be a world state but that in itself my prove a stop gap measure as the draw and appeal of the fully autonomous individual continues apace. The problem does not come from the search for autonomy, rather it comes from the mistaken belief that such autonomy will be found in the digital domain and the digital domain will dictate what the physical domain must do to accommodate the individual.
On the substantive point of finding history in the archives, I would note that the ICO does not agree with you. They have argued, in their policy line to take, that something held in a newspaper file at a library would not necessarily count as being in the public domain. They do suggest that what the average person can find would limit the definition of what is in the public domain. As the web now dominates the common understanding of search and research, the idea of going to a library (if they still exist) and knowing where to search and how to search seems rather remote. Perhaps, what we will find, is that data searchers of a sort, forensic searchers, will be employed to find the dirt that cannot be found through the web, which brings us back to where we were in 1960s and 1970s and even into the 1980s.
Best,
Lawrence
-----Original Message-----
From: This list is for those interested in Data Protection issues [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Simon Howarth
Sent: 02 June 2014 13:48
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: How to get your details from Googke
I personally believe the right to be forgotten is a massive red herring. There has never been a right to be forgotten before, one person (I forget who) said Google is really just an extension of the village gossips that have existed for millennia. A right to have errors corrected, might be workable, but forgotten? I doubt it and I think the effort wasted on this could be better spent on more productive things.
Data mining methods, the sheer volume of information stored means that the chances of successfully anonymising personal data becomes more remote with every passing day. Some systems are so good at crunching "big data" that the systems almost identify people automatically purely because the algorithms used allow it to do so. It's one of the reasons why when the NHS says that care.data information will be anonymised, I don't believe them as I honestly think that when linked with other big data sets identification becomes inevitable, maybe not on day 1, but at some not-too-distant future point.
What we need to be doing is focussing our efforts not on protecting the privacy of data - those days are long gone, it's all out there now for those that want to look for it - but working on how we manage the data that is out there to ensure ethical and legal use regardless of how collected, matched, sorted, briefed, indexed, debriefed the data are.
The right to be forgotten is a massive waste of time and energy. Nothing has changed, just how accessible it is. Go into a newspaper archive in a library, history is there. It's not forgotten, it just takes a little study time to find what you need....
Simon Howarth MSc. MBCS CITP
www.informationedge.co.uk
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