If you haven’t been following the “right to be forgotten” topic, this article in The Atlantic is a fairly good primer – and it has a few quotes from Marty Abrams as a bonus. I’m with Marty on this – I don’t think that the right to be forgotten has legs. It makes for interesting conversations but I question its practicality.
But this article did jog an old memory. I spent a very happy year of my life studying at the University of Edinburgh. I distinctly remember the day I got my account to access the AI department’s network. The administrator told me that I might want to change the read permissions on my account. By default, all student UNIX account were created world-readable to foster information sharing. I remember thinking – well that’s curious – we did the opposite back home. Oh how the privacy pendulum swings over the Atlantic.