Amazing how technology has inverted our collective social experience. Boundaries that once appeared real have evaporated and data connectivity is both a positive and negative outcome.
The UN Rights of the Child states that every child MUST have a databased identity and Nationality (article 7). Preventing children from being forgotten is an administrative objective at the highest level of civil Society, driven by the desire to prevent child abuse in so many forms. And yet, the structure of our efforts yields unintended results not considered in drafting these "Rights".
The Right to be Forgotten is a response to this universal databasing methodology. How deep does this well go? All the way to the core of Society?
Modern "Society" is nothing if it is not a "method of administration" driven by the impetus to store personal information about every Individual on this planet, starting at birth. "Legal identity" is administered based on structural constraints that imply Sovereign integrity is not contributed to Society by Individuals, but is manufactured by Society through absolute universal management of Individuals as data subjects.
What is the starting point of living data integrity within Society? Is it possible for different Societies to function with different philosophies, or will the mere existence of different philosophies break the experience of "data integrity" within any/every Society?
The NSA is an expression of the American Society that projects its capabilities under legal philosophies of the day. What is a "spy" in a global network capable of processing "data integrity" in infinite methods. Who is accountable to what? To what end is personal data utility contrived, now, now, now, now...etc....
Is Society a byproduct of Individuals choosing to exist in relationship with other Individuals under certain philosophical constraints? Or is Society a byproduct of the administration of each Human life, irrespective of Individual considerations?
This is our root data model... where does it begin... and what design does our data structure reflect?
We live in a world that creates Inside/Outside structures and methods everywhere we look. We use administrative models that put people into roles that contrive capabilities based on their access to provisioned Rights inside or outside of the systems that administer them. Citizens do not manage the administrative system they provide authority to... they are managed by employee administrators with authority to do such administration upon citizens structured as data subjects.
We all know America is not what it purports to be... and when we talk about it out loud, the irritation it produces causes regular people struggling to just keep a paycheck consistently entering their own bank accounts to throw their hands in the air and ignore the problem.
Complexity makes cowards of us all.
When the foundation of a house is eaten by termites to such a degree that it can no longer support its own structural integrity, let alone the people who aspire to live safely and freely within it... only then does the wisdom of burning it down become practical. How long does it take for the destructive acts of these crawlers to scour their source of nourishment and destroy the intended utility of their food supply in Human Terms? What is more just... to squeeze as many days out of the existing structure as possible... or to hasten its demise?
Society today functions, or aspires to function, as an "Always On" process. The structure of "legal identity" produces this strategic outcome. Individual participation is a captured event leveraged en mass for the benefit of "Society", as deemed valuable by the political philosophy of the day.
Is Society supposed to be "Always On"? Is the "Right to be Forgotten" fundamentally challenging this notion and pointing to the Individually Sovereign origin of integrity in any Society... that being the Right of any Individual to be "Off by Default", with the freedom to self-provision transactional integrity within Societies "On by Choice" interactions?
The tools of administering Society's data no longer require the same rigorous constraints that they once did. In some cases, the inability for these tools to reflective the living reality of Society is damaging Society inherently. That we were not ready for the massive structural change the internet has brought about will not serve as an excuse for long... the negative repercussions are gaining mass and momentum, even if great profits result along the way.
Look at Facebook... Inside/Outside is the defining characteristic driving the structural problem of this data structure... all of the value of this data structure is driven by users on the "Outside" of the administrative system being interacted with as "products"... while on the "Inside", employees, contractors, developers and organizations with hierarchical views and access to the data created by the "Outside" products capture, formulate and derive all of the monetary value of this shared activity... even culminating in these "Outside" assets being traded on a public stock exchange as assets with increasing/decreasing value.
What is the fundamental difference between administering the data value of Facebook users/products from the "Inside" or "Outside"? Access Rights + Risk Management methods in servitude to a corporate charter? Under what Law does this corporate charter exist? If "Inside" views of data were made equally available to "Outside" data sources, how would these Rights of access and risk management models be affected? What structural changes would this corporate charter undergo in order to accommodate this outcome? Do we have a system of Law capable of dealing with this structural issue?
Risk management methodologies have carved the world up into Inside/Outside constructs that drive credentialed interactions. So what happens when that which was on the inside is now everywhere and "always on"? Should we all celebrate this shift, or will this lead us to burn the house down?
I suggest that the NSA, Google, Facebook, and all of the issues we are seeing pick up the attention of ordinary people around the world has a trajectory other than celebration. While there are benefits to technical progress, it is the costs that matter in the end. As our labor markets increasingly find themselves affected by automated inputs, and public education finds itself ineffective in preparing students for a workplace that prioritizes Human input, Society will grapple with what it means to "participate" under the legal constraints of our present administrative design.
By all outward evidence... our political machinery is inept at confronting this outcome. So the problem is yours.
What will you do?
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