Peter Fleischer blogs:
How would you resolve the conflict between the cultural imperative to archive human knowledge and the privacy imperative to delete some of it? To put this in perspective, compare the approaches of the US Library of Congress and the French Senate.
As reported by The New York Times, the “the Library of Congress, the 210-year-old guardian of knowledge and cultural history, …will archive the collected works of Twitter, the blogging service, whose users currently send a daily flood of 55 million messages, all that contain 140 or fewer characters.”
Meanwhile, the French Senate is moving in the opposite direction, as it explores a law to legislate “the right to be forgotten”. The French Senate has been considering a proposed law which would amend the current data protection legislation to include, among other things, a broader right for individuals to insist on deletion of their personal information. The proposed law in France would require organisations to delete personal information after a specified length of time or when requested by the individual concerned.
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