http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=1214708

Polymaths,

What do you think of General_Data_Protection_Regulation? I'm interested to know if your companies are behind it or minimally complying, more interested to know if you think individuals ought to have the rights expressed in that law and if there is really a moral obligation on site owners to comply. Or, if it should be scrapped or changed.

The right of erasure specifically contradicts PM policy which is defended with the same argument that Wikipedia uses, the "Memory hole" argument. If one user decides to revoke the site owners permission to use their nodes, that creates a hole in the link of the chain, and every user is negatively affected. That is a pretty utilitarian view point. It smells slightly self serving to me to hear that argument from sites whose success directly rides on user generated content.

It really only benefits future users, because if you were there, you don't need a tattoo of the conversation to remember it later. I don't see that a site owner, especially if it's not the hoster ie back in time machines, gets a perpetual license after you leave. Recipe sites -- let's say you participate for years honing the craft and eventually decide to write a cookbook, you don't ever have the right to revoke your recipes down off the boards and make the world pay for your stuff? But your dishes have probably benefited from all that recipe sharing, so it seems you would owe something too.

I can't help but think of the social contract put forth in Crito. You have a good idea of what you are getting into when you participate online, seems reasonable that the site architects who built your playground would be able to dictate the terms, but I don't see how they have the right to continue to do so once you leave.

I googled: Social contract, copyright law, landlord tenant, looked up about 10 web sites that were closing down or blocking EU Customer, but I can't make up my mind. There seems to be a lot of data players operating in the shadows without consent that should be addressed, but I can't see how it affects my life at all. I see an ad about something I almost bought on Amazon, big deal.

Well surely we do not live in a perfect world, but does the GDPR move the decimal point either direction? Or just adding more compliance factories to the world? And who are the people who wrote the bill that made me get all this TOS spam. I tried to find the authors' names and I could not. Maybe this is a stepping stone to better "digital rights"?