Tomayto, Tomahto: Right to be Forgotten Meets Right to Die

If the surgeon about to operate on you has been disciplined for neglecting patients, wouldn’t you like to know? Well, the mandarins of the European Union privacy lobby beg to differ. Google has been told by a Dutch court not to index that story, and there seems to have been a six-month lag in disclosing even the court ruling. That’s part of this week’s News Roundup. Gus Hurwitz and I are appalled. I tout my long-standing view that in the end, privacy law just protects the privileged. Gus agrees.

The interview is with John Carlin, author of “Dawn of the Code War.” It’s a great inside story of how we came to indict China’s hacker-spies for attacking US companies.

In other news, the Illinois Supreme Court has demonstrated how bad Illinois’ biometric privacy law is—by the simple expedient of applying it the way it’s written.

Dr. Megan Reiss and I air our ambivalence about the latest site hosting collections of doxed messages. We lack enthusiasm for indiscriminate doxing of the kind highlighted on Distributed Denial of Secrets, but if it’s got to happen, it couldn’t happen to a nicer Russian dictator.

Nick Weaver explains the DHS emergency order telling civilian agencies to protect themselves against DNS hijacking, and why the shutdown may have made those agencies more vulnerable.

Nick and I debate YouTube’s latest algorithmic tweak to avoid recommending “borderline” material. He notes that the algorithm used to push people to extremes. I note that this is a suspiciously good way for YouTube Social Justice Warriors to suppress videos they don’t like but can’t actually show to be violating YouTube’s terms of service.

Speaking of which, maybe the real singularity is when Silicon Valley joins forces with Beijing to produce new technology that will suppress the peasants once and for all. If so, the singularity is nigh, as a Chinese app allows you to identify people around you who deserve to be shamed.

 

Download the 248th Episode (mp3).

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