'Donkey-tugging' EU data protection law backed by MEPs MEPs voted for an overhaul to existing data protection laws in Europe late yesterday, after the parliament's civil liberties committee made nearly 4,000 amendments to Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding's draft bill. The lawmakers, in recent months, have been lobbying for tougher controls in the wake of the PRISM/NSA scandal …
I worry this will be just as splendidly well thought through as the EU enforcing annoying pop ups about accepting cookies that did nothing but waste end users time.
Who wants to replace them all with Monkey's on typewriters?
I try to discover
A little something to make me sweeter
Oh baby refrain from breaking my heart
I'm so in love with you
I'll be forever blue
That you give me no reason
Why you're making me work so hard
That you give me no.. [x4]
..soul, I hear you calling
Oh baby pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeease give a little respect toooooooo ooo ooo me!
Wait,.. not that kind of erasure?
> it is very difficult to completely remove potentially offensive or upsetting material
Consider a name to be a pointer to a structure containing all the online material about an individual.
There seems to be a lot of scope for a person to change their name and leave all that old stuff behind. So what if "Fred Smith" has been tagged in lots of FB photos, banned from every forum west of the Caucasus and #FredSmith has made several career-limiting comments about certain types of people - or politicians.
A quick name change, moustache, new accounts, a (very) limited migration of email contacts and a ceremonial burning of his/her/its old PC and as a musician might say: viola! Fred Symthe comes into the online world - reborn, fresh, all slates wiped clean. All the old stuff is still there, but now orphaned and so long as the moustache stays in place or the prosthetic nose doesn't fall off, should stay that way.
I can see this become a right of passage and possibly even a very popular 18th birthday present (and again: post-graduation, prior to trying one's luck in the job/partner markets).
Oh - all those suckers potential clients for my new WhitewashYourTeens service. I get loads of indians to spend years building profiles from 0 to whenever - twitter, FB,etc. Then - when your human beingness gets in the way of that job/political role etc hey presto - instant virgin!!!! I can actually see possibilities for losing the indians and getting appzombies(tm) to create such personas and think they are having such cool fun.
There is nothing new under the sun.
But where's the background history of your new identity? Your employers will be suspicious if you only appear on FaceBook, fully formed, at 18yo.
This, of course, is where FaceBook can make some real money ... selling you a squeeky clean timeline to go with your new identity. Perhaps plundering your old identity's timeline for a some clean photos (should there be any.)
Anything that has been negotiated through 4,000 proposed amendments is guaranteed to be next to worthless for the average person: That's simply too complex. By the time the 537.65 exceptions for any given clause are taken into account it will be a miracle if this doesn't move everything backwards.
The "law enforcement agency" will still be that universal failure called the ICO.
Therefore there will be no investigations, and any action caused by a member of the public making an informed complaint with evidence, will cease the moment the ICO calls the perp organisations, with the question "are you breaking the DPA", and the perps say "of course not". Case closed, "no breach" says ICO.
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