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Anorak News | European Commission gives Facebook and Google users ‘right to be forgotten’

European Commission gives Facebook and Google users ‘right to be forgotten’

by | 25th, January 2012

THANKS to the European Commission, you can be non-person on the internet. You can force the like of Google and Facebook to delete all and any information they hold on you.

The European Commission says we all have the “right to be forgotten”.

You will also have the “right of data portability” — being able to move all info on social network to another network.

Thank to Sony’s six-day delay in telling customers on its PlayStation gaming network that hackers had stolen their personal data, all companies will have 24 hours to inform their punters of any security breach. Break those rules and risk being fined 2 per cent of a company’s turnover.

The Times reports on the lastest stuff up:

The need for stricter rules related to data privacy came to the fore today after the mobile network O2 found itself at the centre of a scandal. The company has launched an internal investigation after a blogger revealed that the network sends to the website being visited the phone number of a user connecting to the internet via its 3G network. The technical issue, which has created a furore online, has raised the prospect of millions of O2 customers being spammed or phished if the websites being visited have collated the mobile phone numbers and sold them on. It looks unlikely that the presumably inadvertent problem was in breach of current data protection laws, however, as the number in isolation is not enough to identify the user.

Viviane Reding, the Justice Commissioner, tells media:

“My proposals will help build trust in online services because people will be better informed about their rights and more in control of their information.”

That information posted on a website belongs to you. If the likes of Facebook and Google reuse it are they breaching copyright? Are your posts your intellectual property – the currency of ideas?

Google on Tuesday said it will begin tracking people as they use Google search and Gmail, watch YouTube videos and use other Google services — at their computers and on their mobile devices.

And, of course, the securitry forces and police will not keep copies… Really. They won’t. We live in a culture where the likes of Tony Blair told us that CCTV and us being watched all the time was for our own good. We then learnt of phone hacking at the News of The World – but we’ve never bene told who trained the private investigators to spy on us. We willingly hand over details of our lives to Google and Facebook – but when a phone is hacked, there is outrage. Wake up, people. The internet is not about the joy of sharing. It’s become about the powerful taking…



Posted: 25th, January 2012 | In: Technology Comment | TrackBack | Permalink