South Korea Embraces Ridiculous Right To Be Forgotten As Well

It's spreading! Now that the right to be forgotten is in full swing (and likely expanding) in Europe, it appears other parts of the world are jumping in as well. The latest? South Korea, whose governmental "media monitoring agency" has said it will release guidelines for people who wish to remove information from the internet:

Under the administrative guidelines to be proposed by the Korea Communications Commission, Web users will be able to demand that Web portals remove personal information that they do not want online. “We have studied the rights to be forgotten for more than a year through a group composed of legal, academic and industry experts,” an official from the media watchdog said. “We plan to introduce the guidelines in the first half of the year.”

Basically, South Korea is figuring out just how much censorship of truthful and legal information it will allow -- which is kind of crazy when you think about it. Apparently, there are still some big decisions to be made, though:

The media watchdog said it will map out the guidelines in a loose, self-regulated form, given ongoing controversy over censorship and the public’s right to know. One sticking point is whether to give the right to ask for deletion only to those who write the posts in question. Also, it has yet to be decided whether the guidelines will only apply to large search engines or even include smaller Web platforms. The communications regulator is also mulling over whether to set up a separate body to determine what data can be removed.

I'm still in a position where I don't understand this at all. If the information is somehow false or "illegal" I can understand the desire to remove it. But I have a lot more trouble understanding the ability to remove truthful and legal information just because someone doesn't like it. This kind of system will always be abused to just censor perfectly reasonable and often useful information, just because it exposes something someone doesn't like. It's disappointing that South Korea appears to be embracing such a head in the sand approach to information. Permalink | Comments | Email This Story