Forwarding from internal. The right to vanish... or a part of it... proposed as law.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Richard Symonds richard.symonds@wikimedia.org.uk Date: Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 11:46 AM Subject: [Internal-l] Right to be Forgotten To: internal-l@lists.wikimedia.org
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16677370
A new law promising internet users the "right to be forgotten" will be proposed by the European Commission on Wednesday.
It says people will be able to ask for data about them to be deleted and firms will have to comply unless there are "legitimate" grounds to retain it.
The move is part of a wide-ranging overhaul of the commission's 1995 Data Protection Directive.
Richard Symonds Office& Development Manager Wikimedia UK ----------------------------------------
As Bence noted:
You can find the December 2011 draft at http://epic.org/privacy/intl/EU-Privacy-Regulation-29-11-2011.pdf (Article 15 is the relevant part).
The stated exceptions do not include expense or technical difficulty, but include " except to the extent that the retention of the personal data is necessary: (a) for exercising the right of freedom of expression in accordance with Article 79; or (b) for historical, statistical and scientific research purposes in accordance with Article 83; or (c) for compliance with a legal obligation to retain the data by Union or Member State law to which the controller is subject; this law shall meet an objective of public interest, respect the essence of the right to the protection of personal data and be proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued; or (d) in the cases referred to in paragraph 4."
I'll leave it to the lawyers to decide how this affects Wikimedia (which is hosted outside the EEA) and whether any of the exceptions can be applied to it.
Is the worry primarily around article-space, or around Wikipedia users? There's already http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Courtesy_vanishing, though it would have to be made somewhat more rigorous (and no longer a mere courtesy) if it were an actual legal obligation.
As a non-lawyer, I would consider our uses in article-space to all fall under the exceptions, though I wouldn't want to speculate on whether a court would agree. At least in principle, Wikipedia articles only cover material of historical, cultural, scientific, artistic, sociological, etc. interest. If anything, we're more often criticized for upholding that viewpoint too strongly; vociferous complaints about Wikipedia's "deletionism" seem to pop up in nearly every external discussion of Wikipedia. Though this may lower the bar for people wanting information removed from Wikipedia, by providing an alternate route from the usual libel-law approach that doesn't require them to prove libel, so might be bad pragmatically.
-Mark
On 2/11/12 7:42 AM, Samuel Klein wrote:
Forwarding from internal. The right to vanish... or a part of it... proposed as law.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Richard Symondsrichard.symonds@wikimedia.org.uk Date: Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 11:46 AM Subject: [Internal-l] Right to be Forgotten To: internal-l@lists.wikimedia.org
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16677370
A new law promising internet users the "right to be forgotten" will be proposed by the European Commission on Wednesday.
It says people will be able to ask for data about them to be deleted and firms will have to comply unless there are "legitimate" grounds to retain it.
The move is part of a wide-ranging overhaul of the commission's 1995 Data Protection Directive.
Richard Symonds Office& Development Manager Wikimedia UK
As Bence noted:
You can find the December 2011 draft at http://epic.org/privacy/intl/EU-Privacy-Regulation-29-11-2011.pdf (Article 15 is the relevant part). The stated exceptions do not include expense or technical difficulty, but include " except to the extent that the retention of the personal data is necessary: (a) for exercising the right of freedom of expression in accordance with Article 79; or (b) for historical, statistical and scientific research purposes in accordance with Article 83; or (c) for compliance with a legal obligation to retain the data by Union or Member State law to which the controller is subject; this law shall meet an objective of public interest, respect the essence of the right to the protection of personal data and be proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued; or (d) in the cases referred to in paragraph 4."
I'll leave it to the lawyers to decide how this affects Wikimedia (which is hosted outside the EEA) and whether any of the exceptions can be applied to it.
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The greatest challenge with the entire notion of vanishing is that it is intended to be permanent. That is, the person who wants to vanish should not return in the future, under any guise. I cannot speak for any other project here, but I know that there has been a non-negligible amount of disruption from people who used the "right to vanish" and then returned to participate in the project under a new account - often editing in the same area, commenting on the same topics, and revisiting prior disputes without linking to their prior account.
On the other hand, as an oversighter I've seen hundreds of pages created by people that contain huge amounts of personal information (not just about themselves, but often their family and friends as well) that I have little doubt they will come to regret in the future. While we try to mitigate the harm as much as possible, these pages get mirrored all over the web and are well outside our control.
I can understand why legislators will have to really think carefully about this one. Even within our own communities, there are wildly different opinions on this issue.
Risker/Anne
On 11 February 2012 12:30, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Is the worry primarily around article-space, or around Wikipedia users? There's already http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/** Wikipedia:Courtesy_vanishinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Courtesy_vanishing, though it would have to be made somewhat more rigorous (and no longer a mere courtesy) if it were an actual legal obligation.
As a non-lawyer, I would consider our uses in article-space to all fall under the exceptions, though I wouldn't want to speculate on whether a court would agree. At least in principle, Wikipedia articles only cover material of historical, cultural, scientific, artistic, sociological, etc. interest. If anything, we're more often criticized for upholding that viewpoint too strongly; vociferous complaints about Wikipedia's "deletionism" seem to pop up in nearly every external discussion of Wikipedia. Though this may lower the bar for people wanting information removed from Wikipedia, by providing an alternate route from the usual libel-law approach that doesn't require them to prove libel, so might be bad pragmatically.
-Mark
On 2/11/12 7:42 AM, Samuel Klein wrote:
Forwarding from internal. The right to vanish... or a part of it... proposed as law.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Richard Symonds<richard.symonds@**wikimedia.org.ukrichard.symonds@wikimedia.org.uk
Date: Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 11:46 AM Subject: [Internal-l] Right to be Forgotten To: internal-l@lists.wikimedia.org
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/**technology-16677370http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16677370
A new law promising internet users the "right to be forgotten" will be proposed by the European Commission on Wednesday.
It says people will be able to ask for data about them to be deleted and firms will have to comply unless there are "legitimate" grounds to retain it.
The move is part of a wide-ranging overhaul of the commission's 1995 Data Protection Directive.
Richard Symonds Office& Development Manager Wikimedia UK ------------------------------**----------
As Bence noted:
You can find the December 2011 draft at http://epic.org/privacy/intl/**
EU-Privacy-Regulation-29-11-**2011.pdfhttp://epic.org/privacy/intl/EU-Privacy-Regulation-29-11-2011.pdf (Article 15 is the relevant part). The stated exceptions do not include expense or technical difficulty, but include " except to the extent that the retention of the personal data is necessary: (a) for exercising the right of freedom of expression in accordance with Article 79; or (b) for historical, statistical and scientific research purposes in accordance with Article 83; or (c) for compliance with a legal obligation to retain the data by Union or Member State law to which the controller is subject; this law shall meet an objective of public interest, respect the essence of the right to the protection of personal data and be proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued; or (d) in the cases referred to in paragraph 4."
I'll leave it to the lawyers to decide how this affects Wikimedia (which is hosted outside the EEA) and whether any of the exceptions can be applied to it.
______________________________**_________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.**org foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/foundation-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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Risker, 11/02/2012 18:45:
The greatest challenge with the entire notion of vanishing is that it is intended to be permanent. That is, the person who wants to vanish should not return in the future, under any guise. [...]
I don't think it's useful to discuss this. It's certainly not to the point; remembering some German cases might help to understand what could be the problem, for articles. This has been discussed some weeks ago on WikiIT-l and we didn't reach any conclusion about the dangers posed by the proposed legislation, also because as usual journalists are not able to say anythin useful. The linked article looks very old as well; there's some material here: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/newsroom/data-protection/news/120125_en.htm
Nemo
I think the biggest problems might involve users who have been trashed for one reason or another, justified or not.
Fred
Is the worry primarily around article-space, or around Wikipedia users? There's already http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Courtesy_vanishing, though it would have to be made somewhat more rigorous (and no longer a mere courtesy) if it were an actual legal obligation.
As a non-lawyer, I would consider our uses in article-space to all fall under the exceptions, though I wouldn't want to speculate on whether a court would agree. At least in principle, Wikipedia articles only cover material of historical, cultural, scientific, artistic, sociological, etc. interest. If anything, we're more often criticized for upholding that viewpoint too strongly; vociferous complaints about Wikipedia's "deletionism" seem to pop up in nearly every external discussion of Wikipedia. Though this may lower the bar for people wanting information removed from Wikipedia, by providing an alternate route from the usual libel-law approach that doesn't require them to prove libel, so might be bad pragmatically.
-Mark
On 2/11/12 7:42 AM, Samuel Klein wrote:
Forwarding from internal. The right to vanish... or a part of it... proposed as law.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Richard Symondsrichard.symonds@wikimedia.org.uk Date: Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 11:46 AM Subject: [Internal-l] Right to be Forgotten To: internal-l@lists.wikimedia.org
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16677370
A new law promising internet users the "right to be forgotten" will be proposed by the European Commission on Wednesday.
It says people will be able to ask for data about them to be deleted and firms will have to comply unless there are "legitimate" grounds to retain it.
The move is part of a wide-ranging overhaul of the commission's 1995 Data Protection Directive.
Richard Symonds Office& Development Manager Wikimedia UK
As Bence noted:
You can find the December 2011 draft at http://epic.org/privacy/intl/EU-Privacy-Regulation-29-11-2011.pdf (Article 15 is the relevant part). The stated exceptions do not include expense or technical difficulty, but include " except to the extent that the retention of the personal data is necessary: (a) for exercising the right of freedom of expression in accordance with Article 79; or (b) for historical, statistical and scientific research purposes in accordance with Article 83; or (c) for compliance with a legal obligation to retain the data by Union or Member State law to which the controller is subject; this law shall meet an objective of public interest, respect the essence of the right to the protection of personal data and be proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued; or (d) in the cases referred to in paragraph 4."
I'll leave it to the lawyers to decide how this affects Wikimedia (which is hosted outside the EEA) and whether any of the exceptions can be applied to it.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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On Sat, 11 Feb 2012 11:25:56 -0700 (MST), "Fred Bauder" fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
I think the biggest problems might involve users who have been trashed for one reason or another, justified or not.
Fred
My understanding is that the legislation is not so much about users (which we can handle anyway), but about notable persons which have some information about them leaked into media and they want toi remove this information. I remember when I was still an admin in Russian Wikipedia, I had a long conversation with an admin of a website of a rock star, who wanted to change the birth year in the article on the person (basically, making her five years younger) even though we had sources claiming the opposite. This did not happen, since I accidentally knew I was younger than the star, and the proposed year would make her younger than me, but I think the legislation in this case would require to have the information on the birth year deleted from all sources (and, obciously, also from our articles). I would like to hear a legal opinion though.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Sat, 11 Feb 2012 11:25:56 -0700 (MST), "Fred Bauder" fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
I think the biggest problems might involve users who have been trashed for one reason or another, justified or not.
Fred
My understanding is that the legislation is not so much about users (which we can handle anyway), but about notable persons which have some information about them leaked into media and they want toi remove this information. I remember when I was still an admin in Russian Wikipedia, I had a long conversation with an admin of a website of a rock star, who wanted to change the birth year in the article on the person (basically, making her five years younger) even though we had sources claiming the opposite. This did not happen, since I accidentally knew I was younger than the star, and the proposed year would make her younger than me, but I think the legislation in this case would require to have the information on the birth year deleted from all sources (and, obciously, also from our articles). I would like to hear a legal opinion though.
Cheers Yaroslav
Anything that produces a substantial expansion of a court's docket, and requires close examination of a mass of material, will prove very unpopular.
Fred
Do the people at MeatballWiki know?
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, 19/02/2012 08:12:
Do the people at MeatballWiki know?
Why should they care?
I don't know if this has already been mentioned somewhere: http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com/2012/02/our-thoughts-on-right-to-be-f... It's a very cautious comment I think.
Nemo
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 7:08 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, 19/02/2012 08:12:
Do the people at MeatballWiki know?
Why should they care?
This is where it all started,
http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/RightToLeave
On 19 February 2012 18:06, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 7:08 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, 19/02/2012 08:12:
Do the people at MeatballWiki know?
Why should they care?
This is where it all started,
The Right to Leave is very different from the Right to Vanish. Nobody can stop you leaving, so the Right to Leave is just a statement of fact. The Right to Vanish is something that we (and possibly this new law) explicitly grant to people.
On 19 February 2012 18:06, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 7:08 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, 19/02/2012 08:12:
Do the people at MeatballWiki know?
Why should they care?
This is where it all started,
The Right to Leave is very different from the Right to Vanish. Nobody can stop you leaving, so the Right to Leave is just a statement of fact. The Right to Vanish is something that we (and possibly this new law) explicitly grant to people.
How can we remove ten thousand comments and signatures using the users real name or well-known handle?
Fred
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 10:13 PM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
On 19 February 2012 18:06, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 7:08 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, 19/02/2012 08:12:
Do the people at MeatballWiki know?
Why should they care?
This is where it all started,
The Right to Leave is very different from the Right to Vanish. Nobody can stop you leaving, so the Right to Leave is just a statement of fact. The Right to Vanish is something that we (and possibly this new law) explicitly grant to people.
How can we remove ten thousand comments and signatures using the users real name or well-known handle?
And how about all the mirrors, blogs, etc.
On 19 February 2012 20:13, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
How can we remove ten thousand comments and signatures using the users real name or well-known handle?
With a bot (or AWB) going through the What Links Here list for your user page. People have done that before (although maybe not if they had ten thousand comments to change).
On 19/02/2012 4:25 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
With a bot (or AWB) going through the What Links Here list for your user page. People have done that before (although maybe not if they had ten thousand comments to change).
Yes, and on enwp at least the one time I remember this having been attempted on a large scale caused so much disruption and strife that it resulted in bans, departures and ArbCom-level disputes over more than a year. In other words: it can't be done systematically without causing a revolution.
-- Coren / Marc
On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 7:13 AM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
On 19 February 2012 18:06, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 7:08 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, 19/02/2012 08:12:
Do the people at MeatballWiki know?
Why should they care?
This is where it all started,
The Right to Leave is very different from the Right to Vanish. Nobody can stop you leaving, so the Right to Leave is just a statement of fact. The Right to Vanish is something that we (and possibly this new law) explicitly grant to people.
How can we remove ten thousand comments and signatures using the users real name or well-known handle?
If we are using the wonderful Liquid Threads extension, all signatures change when we rename the account.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads
It is implemented on a few WMF projects, but it is being rewritten at the moment.
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