WHO’S RIGHT?
MAINTAINING ‘RIGHTS’ AND PRIVACY IN THE AGE OF THE INTERNET
THE SCENARIO
Joe is hanging out with his friend, Samantha, for the evening. He snaps a picture
of her in her new dress and shares it on Facebook. As she was a young teenager,
her dad saw it and thought the picture was inappropriate for social media and
asked Joe to take it down. Joe, however, thought that was ridiculous, and promptly
refused.
PERSONAL ‘RIGHTS’ AT PLAY
• Father: Right to protect his daughter’s public image and privacy
• Joe: Right to share pictures in memory of fun times. Right to respect other’s wishes and
concerns more than being technically correct about an issue.
• Who was right?
PRIVACY
• Both Joe and the Dad thought they had an implicitly understood right to
privacy
• Without fully considering each person’s individual privacy ideals, they saw
past each other. Joe thought the dad was over controlling, and the dad
thought Joe was whiny and rude
• Small picture of the wider concern of internet privacy
EMPATHY
“Society and human fellowship will be best served if we confer the most
kindness on those with whom we are most closely associated.” ~ Cicero
Loyalty, generosity, and gratitude should never be set aside when dealing with
privacy or personal conflict
FORGIVENESS
“willingness to abandon one’s right to resentment, negative judgment, and indifferent
behavior toward one who unjustly injured us, while fostering the undeserved qualities of
compassion, generosity, and even love toward him or her,” by psychology professor
and pioneer of the scientific study of forgiveness, Robert Enright.
On the Internet??
“The digital cloud rarely wipes our slates clean, and the keepers of the cloud are
sometimes less forgiving than their all-powerful divine predecessor.” – Jeffery Rosen
Ashley Payne was forced to resign from her
teaching job after posting this picture to
Facebook. She is currently fighting to get her
job back.
THE RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN
• European Commission establishing the idea of forgetting on the internet as a
Right
• could make Facebook and Google, for example, liable for up to two percent
of their global income if they fail to remove photos that people post about
themselves and later regret, even if the photos have been widely distributed
already.
FORGIVE AND FORGET? CAN IT WORK?
• Person to Person Contact: Apologies and Forgiveness have a certain magic
about them that need to be preserved.
• Internet: People need to remember that they deal with real people on the
internet and thus empathy in the form of forgiving and forgetting is just as
important
QUESTIONS?
• (Ambrose) Jones, Meg Leta and Friess, Nicole and Van Matre, Jill, Seeking Digital Redemption: The Future of
Forgiveness in the Internet Age (2012). Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal, Vol. 29,
2012. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2154365
• Asma, S. (2014). The Myth of Universal Love. In Focused Inquiry: Evolving Ideas (2014-2015 ed., pp. 12-16).
Hayden-McNeil Publishing.
• De Cremer, David; Schouten, Barbara C. When apologies for injustice matter: The role of respect European
Psychologist, Vol 13(4), 2008, 239-247. http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040.13.4.239
• Rosen, J. (2012, February 13). The Right to Be Forgotten. Retrieved April 22, 2015, from
http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox/right-to-be-forgotten?em_x=22
• Rosen, J. (2014). The Web Means The End Of Forgetting. In Focused Inquiry: Evolving Ideas (2014-2015 ed.,
pp. 307-317). Hayden-McNeil Publishing.