"These rules are particularly aimed at young people as they are not always as aware as they could be about the consequence of putting photos and other information on social network websites, or about the various privacy settings available," said Matthew Newman.
He noted that this could cause problems later if the users had no way of deleting embarrassing material when applying for jobs. However, he stressed that it would not give them the right to ask for material such as their police or medical records to be deleted.
Although the existing directive already contains the principle of "data minimisation", Mr Newman said that the new law would reinforce the idea by declaring it "a right".
This shows a terrifying and very SOPA/PIPA like misunderstanding of the way that the Internet works. There is much information on the net, not all of it true or of a good quality, but it should be up to the individual to filter what they pay heed to. The example give is particularly flawed as any such photo may very well have 'gone viral' if it was particularly amusing and would exist in any number of places. This is a bad law because it gives the uninformed the right to expect the impossible!
The really dangerous thing however is it makes it look ok and normal to revise history for the most trivial of reasons. This will completley destroy peoples trust in the Internet as a store of knowlege and memories. Maybe this is what the people behind this legislation want? Here is the quote from George Orwells 1984. Luckily the Internet is still free enough that I could find an online copy of this work STILL copyrighted after more than sixty years to paste this from!
"Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. Each
contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon — not
actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words — which was used
in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran:
times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify
times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue
times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite
fullwise upsub antefiling
With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside.
It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last. The
other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably mean
some tedious wading through lists of figures.
Winston dialled ’back numbers’ on the telescreen and called for the appro-
priate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a
few minutes’ delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news
items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as
the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from The Times
of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous
day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a
Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened,
the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and
left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of
Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had
actually happened. Or again, The Times of the nineteenth of December had
published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption
goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the
Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today’s issue contained a statement of the actual out-
put, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly
wrong. Winston’s job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree
with the later ones. As for the third message, it referred to a very simple er-
ror which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a time ago as
February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a ’categorical pledge’
were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration
during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be
reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that
was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would
probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.
As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his
speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed
them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as
possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that
he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured
by the flames.
What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led,
he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the
corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The
Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the
original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.
"
In the days of electronic storage of data no dictator would have to go to all this trouble of messing with re-printing physical newspapers. The fact that you can no longer rely on the Internet to be a back up of your own memory of what has happened is very disturbing. It looks like the EU is attempting to produce legislation that needs to be questioned and resisted alongside SOPA, PIPA and ACTA. Please spread the word. There is something fundamentally wrong about this. Establishing it is OK to revise the past just because someone did something they later regret is a very dangerous precedent. Just change that for you do something that your government regrets that you did!
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