Month: October 2023

In 2010, Mario Costeja González, a Spanish citizen, filed a complaint with the Spanish Data Protection Authority against Google and La Vanguardia Ediciones, a Spanish newspaper. González said that a Google search for his name returned classified ads showing that his house was being auctioned off in order to repay his family’s debts. González said that these ads were more than a decade out of date and argued that their appearance in a Google search violated his right to privacy. A lower court ruled in his favor; the matter was then referred to the European Union’s Court of Justice, or ECJ, which, in 2014, also sided with González. The ECJ decided that a right to be forgotten—also known as the “right of erasure”—was implied by the Data Protection Directive, a 1995 EU rule, and that this gave EU citizens a right to the rectification, erasure, or blocking of their personal data, as well as a right to object to the processing of their personal data by corporations for a number of reasons.

In 2018, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation took effect, superseding the Data Protection Directive. Article 17 of the GDPR outlines how and when the right to be forgotten should be applied, stating that people may request the removal of their personal information when the information is no longer relevant to the purpose for which it was collected, when the individual withdraws their consent to the information’s publication, and when there is no overriding legitimate interest to process the information, among other circumstances. The EU has stated that the GDPR’s right to be forgotten is “not an absolute right,” and is “much more complicated than an individual simply requesting that an organization erase their personal data”; the right might not apply, for example, in cases involving the right to freedom of expression, compliance with a legal ruling, or the public interest. But critics have argued that this kind of complexity is too great for search-engine companies to be expected—or allowed—to navigate on their own. And they have often argued that the right to be forgotten ultimately amounts to censorship.

The EU’s rules only endow citizens of EU member states with the right to be forgotten, but the duty to remove content if an EU citizen makes such a requests applies to global search engines and services, even if the data is kept on servers that are located elsewhere. Within days of the ECJ ruling, Google and Microsoft began fielding thousands of requests from users who wanted to have their personal information removed from those search engines; in March of this year, Forbes reported that Google and Bing, a search engine owned by Microsoft, received more than a million such requests between 2015 and 2021, with cases rising dramatically during the pandemic. Surfshark, a data-tracking service, told Forbes that half of these requests came from users in western Europe; France accounted for nearly a quarter of the total, while Estonia had the most per capita. German users submitted requests equivalent to 17 percent of the total, while requests from the UK made up 12 percent.

Continue reading “The EU’s right to be forgotten is migrating to other countries”

From Stephanie Clifford at Esquire: “I met Leon in the fall of 1993, when we were new sophomores at Phillips Exeter Academy, a competitive New Hampshire boarding school. He seemed instantly at ease—tall, with excellent posture, a puffed-out chest, and an easy grin. He made the soccer team and soon traveled in a pack with other sporty, handsome guys wearing white baseball caps backward and smooth-haired girls so sophisticated they knotted silk scarves at their necks. He was assured about his life plan: He was going to become a surgeon in Texas. Then I heard a piece of news so unbelievable I thought at first that I’d dreamed it. Leon had been convicted of hiring a hit man to carry out the double murder of his ex-girlfriend and his new partner’s ex-husband and had been sentenced to life in prison. As I began to dig into the wreckage of Leon’s life, a very different picture emerged that was far more complex—and deeply disturbing.”

A touching story of young love emerges from a decades-old comment on YouTube

From Mark Slutsky: “Longtime readers and friends will know that I spent several years of my life poring over YouTube comments and collecting the most poignant I could find for my project Sad YouTube. It was my impossible goal to rescue the countless personal stories I found in the comments sections of old songs. A couple of weeks ago I received an email out of the blue. The message read, “Just wondering if you knew who this 1912Universal person is?” It then quoted a comment I had posted to Sad YouTube in 2012 by a user who went by that name, which talked about how “when this song hit I was totally crazy about a girl named Irene Eckstein from Forest Hills NY.” I had no idea who 1912Universal was. So I wrote back, “Sadly, I do not! You might want to look up Irene Eckstein.” The reply came back a few hours later: “I am Irene Eckstein.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “How did my former classmate end up in jail for hiring a hit man?”

From Joaquim Salles for Atlas Obscura: “Just off the coast of Astoria, Queens, at the confluence of the Harlem and East Rivers, is a narrow tidal channel. Hell Gate. Its fast currents change multiple times a day and it used to be riddled with rocks just beneath the surface. Visitors to Randall’s Island Park can see the swirling churn and watch pleasure boaters struggle through. American author Washington Irving wrote an essay about it: “Woe to the unlucky vessel that ventures into its clutches.” But many a vessel did venture into those clutches over the centuries. Traversing it could save sailors navigating between New York Harbor and Southern New England days of travel around Long Island. This expediency often came at a cost. Hell Gate is the final resting place of literally hundreds of ships. Most of them are forgotten but one continues to captivate. Because down there, under the minor maelstroms, is the promise of gold.”

Famous naturalist Alfred Wallace owed some of his fame to a Sarawak teenager

From Matthew Wills for JSTOR Daily: “This year marks the bicentennial of the birth of Alfred Russel Wallace, explorer, naturalist, and co-developer of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Sarawak teenager Ali was initially hired by Wallace as a servant and cook. For seven of the eight years between 1854 and 1862 that Wallace traveled around the Malay Archipelago, Ali ended up being the actual collector of most of the birds (approximately 5,000 of the total 8,000) in Wallace’s collection of 125,000 natural history specimens, many of them new to science. Ali was Muslim, about fifteen years old when hired, and had “grown up on and around boats,” write van Wyhe and Drawhorn in their biography. Together, Ali and Wallace braved fevers, pirates, monsoon downpours, ant invasions, at least one tiger, giant snakes, and the threat of head-hunters.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Is there sunken treasure under the churning water of Hell Gate?”

From Tom Donaghy for The Atavist: “In the early 1960s, Harry had a string of Copper Kettle Fudge shops up and down the Shore. So revered were his stores that Harry was known far and wide as the Fudge King. He was even in talks to build a fudge factory—something that would’ve taken his Willy Wonka–ness to the next level—when he was savagely beaten to death on Labor Day 1964. His body was stuffed under the dashboard of his Lincoln Continental, parked at an after-hours nightclub called the Dunes. The case was never solved. I spent the next two years sorting through a trove of whispers and accusations around the murder. At first I was just curious, but the more I learned about Harry—a figure beloved by friends and strangers alike—the more intent I was to identify his killer.”

Researchers who became famous for studying honesty are accused of making up data

From Gideon Lewis-Kraus for The New Yorker: “Honesty researchers have found that fewer people lie about a coin flip—a binary outcome—than exaggerate the number on a die roll, reporting that they rolled a four when they actually rolled a three, especially if a four had come up on a test roll. Ariely has long used conclusions like these to maintain that most people lie a bit. Other researchers argue that the averages are misleading: most people don’t really lie much, but some people are prone to lie a lot. It now seems as though the “fudge factor” was less of an explanation of a phenomenon than a license for it—yet another just-so story about why a little deceit isn’t so bad after all. “I’ll tell you what the research on dishonesty says, but all that came from Dan and Francesca!” the former senior researcher said. “It’s like everything we know about this situation comes from the data that might have been fabricated.”

Continue reading “Who killed the Jersey Shore’s famous Fudge King?”

From Andreas Babst for Neue Zircher Zeitung: “In 1969, the Intercontinental Hotel, Afghanistan’s first luxury hotel, opened. It was built in a time that feels much further away than the year suggests. Afghanistan was at war for more than forty years. Rulers came and went, and every one of them was here, at the Intercontinental. Its former luxury has faded, but the Intercontinental has remained a symbol: Those who rule Kabul rule Afghanistan, and those who rule Kabul rule the Intercontinental. Today, the hotel is run by the Taliban. The new government is forcing Taliban and non-Taliban to work together – in the administration and in government-related businesses. Young men share an office with young fighters they once feared, and young fighters sit next to young men they once despised. A lot depends on this experiment.”

The first algorithmically generated music was developed in the seventeenth century

From Amelia Soth for JSTOR Daily: “The first device for algorithmically composing music comes to us surprisingly early: in the 1600s. Looking something like an overcomplicated and miniaturized chest of drawers, it allowed even complete amateurs to compose four-part church music. They could start with a text in verse to set to music, choose whether they wanted music in a simple or florid style, and the rest was achieved by mixing and matching the entries carved into the device’s many little wooden tablets, ultimately converting the results into musical notes. Only a few examples of the device, known as the Arca musarithmica or “Musical Ark,” remain today. The famous diarist Samuel Pepys owned one, as did Ferdinand III of the Holy Roman Empire. The idea for the device came from polymath and all-around oddball Athanasius Kircher.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Inside a luxury hotel in Afghanistan run by the Taliban”