German statesman Konrad Adenauer (1876 – 1967) is famously quoted to have said "What do I care about my chitchat from yesterday?"
Luckily for Adenauer, he didn't live in the age of the internet. Nowadays, we have to assume that everything we've ever said (or done), could potentially be permanently registered somewhere on the internet – if we like it, or not.
An example: a 18 year-old teenager writes a stupid and racist comment on the local firefighter department's Facebook-page. The comment provokes a shitstorm and media starts reporting about it. On his Facebook-profile, the 18y/o made his employer public – a mistake. Some angry Facebook-user uses this information in order to contact the young man's employer (a big car manufacturer) and denounces him. The company, fearing for its good reputation, decides to sack the teenager. The majority of the newspapers didn't make the young man's name public, but some did. And so, everyone googling today the young man's name, will land on those newspaper's websites. The young man's reputation is ruined; even if he had changed his opinion on the matter in the meantime – the internet doesn't forget.
The European Union has taken up this problem and has enacted, since 2006, a so called "right to be forgotten". The right to be forgotten "reflects the claim of an individual to have certain data deleted so that third persons can no longer trace them."[1] It has been defined as "the right to silence on past events in life that are no longer occurring."[2] The right to be forgotten leads to allowing individuals to have information, videos or photographs about themselves deleted from certain internet records so that they cannot be found by search engines.[1]
The right to be forgotten is not without its critics. There are concerns about its impact on the right to freedom of expression, its interaction with the right to privacy, and whether creating a right to be forgotten would decrease the quality of the Internet through censorship and a rewriting of history. [3]
However, as described with the young man's example, there can be good reasons to "make something forgotten", especially, if the related event had happened during someone's teenage years.
Now Blockchain technology threads to bring the issue on a whole new level. Whereas it is possible to delete an article from, say, a newspapers website, it's technically impossible to delete an entry from a Blockchain. The Blockchain registers everything, for eternity. In some cases, this makes perfectly sense. For example, in the case of financial transactions, the principle of non-deletability enhances transparency and prevents fraudulent practices.
However, how do we evaluate this aspect, when we're looking at a social community, such as Steemit? On Steemit, there is no possibility to delete one's blog-posts. Even if we'd like to. Everything that we will ever write, will be traceable through search engines. You might say that everyone has a personal responsibility of choosing his/her words wisely. However, we're not machines. Sometimes it happens, that we were having a bad day and that we'd write things, that we're regretting already a couple of hours later.
And if Steemit should one day reach the masses (which I believe in), then this could lead many new users into problems, because they were not aware of Blockchain's non-deletability characteristic.
Therefore, I was wondering, whether @steemitblog considers tackling this issue, or is there nothing, that they can do about it?
[1] Weber, Rolf H. "The right to be forgotten." More than a Pandora's Box, Vol. 2 (2011)
[2] Pino, G. (2000). "The right to personal identity in Italian private law: Constitutional interpretation and judge-made rights". In: M. Van Hoecke; F. Ost (eds.). The harmonization of private law in Europe (pp. 225-237). Oxford: Hart Publishing. p. 237.
[3] Mayes, Tessa (2014-05-21). "We have no right to be forgotten online". theguardian.com. Retrieved 2014-08-09.
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