erasing history – Techdirt (original) (raw)

HHS' New Spokesman So Good At Communications Strategy That He Thinks He Can Delete Tweets From The Internet

from the noooooooope dept

It never ceases to amaze me how often people that really should know better seem to think that they can simply remove their own histories from the internet effectively. It seems the be a lesson never learned, be it from major corporations or even the Pope, that the internet never forgets. Thanks to tools like The Wayback Machine and others, attempts to sweep history under the rug are mostly fruitless endeavors. And, yet, people still try.

Such as Michael Caputo, the new spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. That department is just a tad important at the moment, given the COVID-19 pandemic we’re all enduring. Well, Caputo got the job and decided he better get to Twitter to delete all that racist and conspiratorial shit he said so that we all don’t find out about it.

The new spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services in a series of now-deleted tweets made racist and derogatory comments about Chinese people, said Democrats wanted the coronavirus to kill millions of people and accused the media of intentionally creating panic around the pandemic to hurt President Donald Trump.

Michael Caputo, a longtime New York Republican political operative who worked on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, was appointed last week as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at HHS, a prominent communications role at the department which serves a central role in the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Caputo, a prolific user who often tweeted insults and profanity, recently erased nearly his entire Twitter history from before April 12. CNN’s KFile used the Internet Archive’s “The Wayback Machine” to review more than 1300 deleted tweets and retweets from late February to early April many of which were regarding the rapidly spreading coronavirus.

If you feel like wallowing in the muck, you can see more of Caputo’s once-musings from Twitter here, where someone saved them. Now, I know precisely what you’re thinking: But, Tim, how can we go and see these tweets when Caputo very smartly and correctly deleted them?

Great question, Michael Caputo, and thanks for coming to Techdirt to read this. See, the internet isn’t a piece of paper in front of you that you can crumple up and light on fire after you’ve finally written down all the hateful stuff you’ve wanted to say but never had the guts to say out loud. Instead, it’s made up of computers and servers and probably lots of other things too! Like transistors or something, who knows! But what I do know is that there are ways to go back and capture things that are deleted on the internet. And then, you know, discuss them out loud like we are now.

It’s called The Streisand Effect. It’s how you go from “Hey, I’ll just delete these tweets” to “Holy shit, CNN now has an article discussing those tweets I didn’t want anyone to see!”

In Caputo’s defense, his comments to CNN after the publication amount to him telling CNN he doesn’t really mind if anyone sees the tweets he went and deleted.

After publication, Caputo responded to CNN’s request for comment by saying that reporting on his past tweets is “fair game, dude. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me at all.” He claimed that he deletes his tweets “every month and I do it because it drives people mad.”

He added “when you tweet in spirited fashion, KFile is going to have them. I’ve known that all my days. So I don’t mind what you’ve done.” Caputo defended his past Twitter behavior saying he was “a defender of the President” tweeting in a “spirited manner” that included calling out reporters, but he said he’s “now a servant of the American people and some might be disappointed, but my tweets will be different.”

And we’ll look for those different tweets to get deleted every month on the month, too, I’m sure.

Filed Under: deleting tweets, erasing history, health and human services, hhs, michael caputo, tweets

Canadian Privacy Commissioner Goes To Court To Determine If Canada Can Force Google To Delete History

from the one-hopes-they-won't-get-this-wrong dept

Canada has been stumbling towards an EU-style “right to be forgotten” (RTBF) for quite some time now. There was a big case last year that not only said Google can be forced to remove links to certain information, but that it could be forced to do so globally (i.e., outside of just Canada). That was as a result of a specific lawsuit about specific information, but this year, a bigger exploration of the RTBF concept has been underway, as some have argued that Canada’s PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) meant that Google should be forced to “de-link” articles on certain people’s name searches upon request (just like the EU’s RTBF).

A report from the Canadian Privacy Commissioner earlier this year argued that PIPEDA already provided such a right and the Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien has been stumping for this ever since. Google has — for obvious reasons — been expressing its position that this is ridiculous, saying that PIPEDA does not apply to de-linking individuals’ names from news articles, and further argued that requiring such a result would be unconstitutional.

While it’s clear that the Privacy Commissioner disagrees with Google, it has now asked the Canadian federal courts to weigh in:

Google asserts that PIPEDA does not apply in this context and that, if it does apply and requires the articles to be de-indexed, it would be unconstitutional.

Following public consultations, the OPC took the view that PIPEDA provides for a right to de-indexing ? which removes links from search results without deleting the content itself ? on request in certain cases. This would generally refer to web pages that contain inaccurate, incomplete or outdated information.

However, there is some uncertainty in the interpretation of the law.

In the circumstances, the most prudent approach is to ask the Federal Court to clarify the law before the OPC investigates other complaints into issues over which the office may not have jurisdiction if the court were to disagree with the OPC?s interpretation of the legislation.

A Notice of Application, filed today in Federal Court, seeks a determination on the preliminary issue of whether PIPEDA applies to the operation of Google?s search engine. In particular, the reference asks whether Google?s search engine service collects, uses or discloses personal information in the course of commercial activities and is therefore subject to PIPEDA. It also asks whether Google is exempt from PIPEDA because its purposes are exclusively journalistic or literary.

The thing that still baffles me about this is that anyone could possibly consider news reporting to be subject to “data protection” laws. This is unfathomable if you believe in concepts like freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Data protection is supposed to be about things like databases of information on someone, not news articles about someone. Yet, the EU mucked this up years ago, and now it’s spreading. From the way the Privacy Commissioner has framed the question, it seems like there’s a decent chance the court will rule against Google’s view on this, meaning that censorship of news articles on public individuals, and the blatant rewriting of history will be enabled across Canada.

And, even worse, because of the Canadian rulings saying that the RTBF rulings in Canada should be applied globally, Canada may soon be the place to go to literally try to delete history. What a shame.

Filed Under: canada, data protection, erasing history, free speech, jurisdiction, pipeda, privacy, right to be forgotten
Companies: google

from the so-that's-great dept

Just recently we wrote about how a guy in France, Michael Francois Bujaldon, who had been sued in the US and accused of securities and real estate fraud, had apparently been using the GDPR’s right to be forgotten features to get the court docket about this lawsuit deleted from the web (in at least one case) or have his name removed from it (in the other). Our story focused on the situation with the website PlainSite, which is run by Aaron Greenspan and hosts tons of public court dockets. In our comments, it was interesting to note that at least one person seemed hellbent on trashing Greenspan. Greenspan and I have had our own differences throughout the years, and he has been a vocal critic of the way I’ve covered him in the past, but these comments seemed to go way over the line.

And now, Greenspan informs me that someone is trying to get his original tweet — which alerted me to this abuse of the GDPR to delete public documents — disappeared from the internet as well. On Wednesday morning Greenspan discovered that both his PlainSite Twitter account and his personal Twitter account were “limited” due to reports. It’s unclear why his personal account was limited, but Twitter told him that his original tweet about Bujaldon violated its rules on “posting personal information.”

It is difficult to see how a tweet that simply reads “French scam artist Michael Francois Bujaldon is using the GDPR to attempt to remove traces of his United States District Court case from the internet. He has already succeeded in compelling PacerMonitor to remove his case. We have 24 hours to respond” (and then links to the PlainSite docket) could possibly violate any Twitter rules, but the company told him he needed to delete the tweet in question:

Once again, we’re in a situation where if you hand people tools to delete content they dislike — whether it’s a DMCA takedown process, a GDPR “right to be forgotten” or a private platform’s “report abuse” button — some percentage of people are going to abuse that. And, as we’ve discussed many times, with the private platform decision making process involving overworked, underpaid workers who have to make determinations on each “report” with about 5 seconds to consider the report, many, many mistakes are going to be made. This is yet another one, and is yet another example of why we should be careful about giving people even more tools for deleting content.