Privacy – cearta.ie

Seán Quinn, the Streisand Effect, and improving the operation of the right to be forgotten – updated

9 November, 202116 November, 2021

Google search RtbF notice

I have just conducted a search on a popular search engine for “Seán Quinn”, and the above message – that Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe – appears at the bottom of each page of results. Over the past weekend, there was widespread media coverage of attempts by Seán Quinn to rely on the EU’s right to be forgotten to remove newspaper articles from search listings that highlighted significant aspects of his bankruptcy and of his family’s lavish pre-bankruptcy lifestyle. This attempt at reputation management backfired spectacularly on him, and stands as an example of the Streisand effect, which is:

… a phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information has the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of that information, often via the Internet. It is named after American singer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt to suppress the California Coastal Records Project photograph of her residence in Malibu, California, taken to document California coastal erosion, inadvertently drew greater attention to it in 2003.

On Saturday, in the Irish Independent, Shane Phelan published the following story:

Revealed: Quinn family succeeds in campaign to erase press coverage of lavish lifestyle

Google delists dozens of articles on court battles and even €100,000 wedding cake

Members of ex-billionaire Seán Quinn’s family have mounted a successful campaign to have press coverage about their past ‘forgotten’ by Google.

…

The legal basis of the US$170m fine on Google for YouTube’s infringement of children’s privacy

10 September, 2019

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| GDPR, Privacy

FTC NYAG Google YouTube logos

At the end of last week, the media was full of stories that Google had been “Fined $170 Million for Violating Children’s Privacy on YouTube” (that’s a headline from the New York Times; see also, for example, NPR | BBC | RTÉ | Silicon Republic). In this post, I want to sketch the legal background to, and consequences of, this fine; and, at the end, I will say a few words about the equivalent position in Europe.

In the US, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (15 USC §§ 6501–6506; hereafter: COPPA), and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (16 CFR § 312; hereafter: the COPPA Rule) made under it, regulate unfair and deceptive acts and practices in connection with the collection and use of personal information from and about children on the internet. In particular, 15 USC §§ 6502(b)(A) COPPA, and 16 CFR § 312.3 COPPA Rule, require the operator of any website or online service directed to children that collects personal information from children, or the operator of a website or online service that has actual knowledge that it is collecting personal information from a child,

(i) to provide notice on the website of what information is collected from children by the operator, how the operator uses such information, and the operator’s disclosure practices for such information; and
(ii) to obtain verifiable parental consent for the collection, use, or disclosure of personal information from children; …

Giving further effect to the second paragraph here, 16 CFR § 312.5(b)(1) COPPA Rule provides

An operator must make reasonable efforts to obtain verifiable parental consent, taking into consideration available technology.

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The Great Hack and the dysaguria of Cambridge Analytica

24 July, 201919 August, 2019

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| Digital Rights, Dysaguria, Media and Communications, Privacy

The Great Hack has just dropped on Netflix (IMDB | Rotten Tomatoes | wikipedia | poster left). It is a documentary that explores “how a data company named Cambridge Analytica came to symbolize the dark side of social media in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election”. Much has already been written about the Cambridge Analytica scandal (eg ICO here and here (pdfs) | Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian), and a great deal more will be written as the movie is reviewed in the coming days. I don’t propose to add to those torrents here. Rather, I simply want to observe that there is a word for a company that symbolizes the dark side of social media.

Reacting to Thomas More’s coinage of “utopia” as the “perfect state”, from the Greek “eu” meaning “good”, and “topos” meaning “place”, John Stuart Mill coined “dystopia” as the “frightening state”, from the Greek “dys” meaning “bad”, and (again) “topos” meaning “place”. But, whilst “dystopia” is perfect to describe a “frightening state” and its frightened society, it is not particularly apt to describe a “frightening company” and its frightened society. Indeed, we don’t really have the words for when a corporate society goes bad; “dystopia” and “dystopian” have been pressed into service (even in the context of reviewing The Great Hack: “Watching this film, you literally start to wonder if history has been warped towards a sickening dystopia”); but the warped society in that movie is very different to the warped society in classic dystopian fiction (such as, to take the obvious example, Orwell’s 1984).…