By Kim Jae-won
While many people want to be remembered by others, some badly yearn to be forgotten.
Popular actor Lee Kyung-young, 52, is one of the latter. After being accused of having sex with a minor 10 years ago, he was cleared of the charge by the Supreme Court in 2004, but he can’t shake off the accusation as articles and comments about the incident remain in cyber space.
Appearing on a TV program, Lee once said he wants to erase all the wrong information on the Internet, but there is no way to do so because it is protected by law, even if it is false.
To help those who want to erase information they themselves have written in cyberspace, a group of lawmakers are seeking to guarantee a “right to be forgotten.”
They are looking to set the legal grounds for a person to ask Internet service providers (ISPs), such as portals and social networking service companies, to erase such information.
In its 2011 report, the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), an in-house agency of the European Union, defined a similar plan, that “data subjects should have the right that their personal data are erased and no longer processed, where the data are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which the data are collected or otherwise processed.”
Seventeen lawmakers, led by Rep. Lee No-keun of the ruling Saenuri Party, submitted an amendment to revise the Internet Network Law by injecting a clause which guarantees the right to be forgotten.
The bill calls for portals and ISPs to erase information and writing upon the authors’ request.
Je Bang-hun, an aide to Rep. Lee, said that the revised bill also aims to protect people’s privacy. Once targeted by cyber bullies, a person’s personal information collected from blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter messages can be made public relentlessly.
Internet users have often targeted female celebrities by uncovering private photos, from those in intimate situations to mug shots from high school graduation albums prior to having plastic surgery.
Singer IU was in hot water a few months ago due to a photo in which the 19-year-old posed with an idol male singer wearing pajamas. It went viral on the Internet, severely damaging her “virgin-like” image.
“Cases of disseminating people’s private information will decrease if the bill is passed,” Je said. “Portals need to beef up their technology to erase someone’s information by request, but it is not that difficult as far as I know.”
However, officials from NHN, an ISP which runs the nation’s biggest portal Naver, maintained a reserved stance on the issue.
“There have been many discussions on the right to be forgotten, in particular in the European Union, but nothing has been decided yet due to objections from some member countries and technological problems,” said Kim Jeong-woong, an NHN spokesman.
“In terms of technology, it is not that easy to erase somebody’s information wholly. An ENISA report even said it was impossible to erase all the postings one wrote.”
According to the report “The Right to be Forgotten — between Expectations and Practice,” a purely technical and comprehensive solution to enforce the right to be forgotten on the Internet is generally impossible because there are fundamental challenges in technology to do so.
Those range from allowing a person to identify and locate all personal data stored about them to tracking all copies of the items and all copies of information derived from the data.
Kim said that the company, instead, has guaranteed the right to be forgotten by way of blocking personal accounts that have been dormant for a certain period of time. He said Naver shuts down users’ accounts that have not been logged into for more than three years to prevent their information being hacked by others.