Who’s Right?

Who’s Right?

Maintaining ‘Rights’ and Privacy in the Age of the internet

The Scenario

Joe is hanging out with his friend, Samantha, for the evening. He snaps a picture of her in her new dress and shares it on Facebook. As she was a young teenager, her dad saw it and thought the picture was inappropriate for social media and asked Joe to take it down. Joe, however, thought that was ridiculous, and promptly refused.

Personal ‘Rights’ at Play

Father: Right to protect his daughter’s public image and privacy

Joe: Right to share pictures in memory of fun times. Right to respect other’s wishes and concerns more than being technically correct about an issue.

Who was right?

Privacy

Both Joe and the Dad thought they had an implicitly understood right to privacy

Without fully considering each person’s individual privacy ideals, they saw past each other. Joe thought the dad was over controlling, and the dad thought Joe was whiny and rude

Small picture of the wider concern of internet privacy

Empathy

“Society and human fellowship will be best served if we confer the most kindness on those with whom we are most closely associated.” ~ Cicero

Loyalty, generosity, and gratitude should never be set aside when dealing with privacy or personal conflict

Forgiveness

“

willingness to

abandon one’s

right to resentment, negative judgment, and indifferent

behavior toward

one who unjustly injured us, while fostering the

undeserved qualities

of compassion, generosity, and even love toward him

or her

,” by psychology professor and pioneer of the scientific study

of forgiveness,

Robert Enright.

On the Internet??

“The digital cloud rarely wipes our slates clean, and the keepers of the cloud are sometimes less forgiving than their all-powerful divine predecessor.” – Jeffery Rosen

Ashley Payne 

was forced to resign

 from her teaching job after posting this picture to Facebook. She is currently fighting to get her job back.

The Right to Be Forgotten

European Commission establishing the idea of forgetting on the internet as a Right

could

make Facebook and Google, for example, liable for up to two percent of their global income if they fail to remove photos that people post about themselves and later regret, even if the photos have been widely distributed already

.

Forgive and Forget? Can It Work?

Person to Person Contact: Apologies and Forgiveness have a certain magic about them that need to be preserved.

Internet: People need to remember that they deal with real people on the internet and thus empathy in the form of forgiving and forgetting is just as important

Questions?

(Ambrose) Jones, Meg

Leta

and

Friess

, Nicole and Van

Matre

, Jill, Seeking Digital Redemption: The Future of Forgiveness in the Internet Age (2012). Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal, Vol. 29, 2012. Available at SSRN: 

http://ssrn.com/abstract=2154365

Asma

, S. (2014). The Myth of Universal Love. In Focused Inquiry: Evolving Ideas (2014-2015 ed., pp. 12-16). Hayden-McNeil Publishing.

De

Cremer, David

; 

Schouten, Barbara C.

When apologies for injustice matter: The role of respect European Psychologist,

Vol

13(4), 2008, 239-247. 

http://

dx.doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040.13.4.239

Rosen

, J. (2012, February 13). The Right to Be Forgotten. Retrieved April 22, 2015, from http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox/right-to-be-forgotten?em_x=22

Rosen

, J. (2014). The Web Means The End Of Forgetting. In Focused Inquiry: Evolving Ideas (2014-2015 ed., pp. 307-317). Hayden-McNeil Publishing.