Paulan Korenhof’s research while affiliated with Utrecht University and other places

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Publications (8)


Escaping the Panopticon Over Time: Balancing the Right To Be Forgotten and Freedom of Expression in a Technological Architecture
  • Article
  • Full-text available

October 2016

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250 Reads

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3 Citations

Philosophy & Technology

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Paulan Korenhof

The ‘right to be forgotten’ has been labelled censorship and disastrous for the freedom of expression. In this paper, we explain that effecting the ‘right to be forgotten’ with regard to search results is ‘censorship’ at the level of information retrieval. We however claim it is the least heavy yet most effective means to get the minimum amount of censorship overall, while enabling people to evolve beyond their past opinions. We argue that applying the ‘right to be forgotten’ to search results is not a question of just ‘censoring’ search engines, but that seen from a broader perspective we—as society—will inevitably have to deal with developments in information technologies and choose between three types of ‘censorship’: (1) censorship of original sources, that is on the level of information storage; (2) censorship on the level of the initial encoding of that information or (3) censorship on the level of information retrieval. These three levels at which ‘censorship’ can take place are the three basic elements of the memory process; whether biological, technological or hybrid with the use of mnemonic technologies. Applying censorship as a means of ‘forgetting’ in the collective hybrid memory of the Web enables us to counter—at least partially—the functioning of the Web as a ‘Panopticon over Time’.

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Timing the Right to Be Forgotten: A Study into 'Time' as a Factor in Deciding About Retention or Erasure of Data

May 2014

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2,275 Reads

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12 Citations

SSRN Electronic Journal

Paulan Korenhof

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Meg Ambrose

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[...]

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http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2436436 The so-called "Right to Be Forgotten or Erasure" (RTBF), article 17 of the proposed General Data Protection Regulation, provides individuals with a means to oppose the often persistent digital memory of the Web. Because digital information technologies affect the accessibility of information over time and time plays a fundamental role in biological forgetting, ‘time’ is a factor that should play a pivotal role in the RTBF. This chapter explores the roles that ‘time’ plays and could play in decisions regarding the retention or erasure of data. Two roles are identified: (1) ‘time’ as the marker of a discrete moment where the grounds for retention no longer hold and ‘forgetting’ of the data should follow and (2) ‘time’ as a factor in the balance of interests, as adding or removing weight to the request to ‘forget’ personal information or its opposing interest. The chapter elaborates on these two roles from different perspectives and highlights the importance and underdeveloped understanding of the second role.


Identity Construction and the Right to be Forgotten: the Case of Gender Identity

January 2014

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60 Reads

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7 Citations

The Internet’s World Wide Web (web) is increasingly used as people’s primary source of information (Castells, 2010: 382). The technological developments that add to and increase our capacity for data storage and transport have grown explosively in quality and quantity during the last decades (Mayer-Schönberger, 2009), resulting in the growing and generally persistent memory of the web. With the help of search engines, information can be retrieved relatively easily. This easy and long-term accessibility of information has caused, and still is causing, concern when it comes to personal information. In order to deal with such concerns and provide individuals with the means to oppose the persistent digital memory about them, Article 17 of the proposed General Data Protection Regulation hereinafter Proposal (EC European Commission, 2012) was developed. This provision entails a ‘right to be forgotten and to erasure’ (hereafter: RtbF).2


Stage ahoy!deconstruction of the “drunken pirate”case in the light of impression management

January 2014

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18 Reads

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3 Citations

Information on the Internet can sometimes damage people by interfering with offline life. A high-school teacher-in-training experienced this firsthand when a photo with the caption “drunken pirate” and a message on her MySpace website led to the end of her career as a teacher. This case received a lot of media attention and is used in academic debate as illustrating the need for a “right to be forgotten”. The question is how and to what extent the Internet contributed to the fact that the teacher-in-training’s information ended up with the wrong audience. The problems in this case did not arise due to any memory related capacities of the Internet or the Internet being a place where information can be easily copied and reproduced. The problems arose because audience segregation on the Internet is a difficult task.


Forgetting Bits and Pieces

January 2014

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12 Reads

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1 Citation

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

Technology has changed and still is changing our internal and external memory processes. The World Wide Web (Web) can function as an external transactive memory and can store and provide access to personal information for a very long time. The "right to be forgotten or erasure" (R2BFE), article 17 of the proposed General Data Protection Regulation, aims at helping individuals to control the availability of online accessible personal information. This paper takes the term "forgetting" in the article’s title seriously and reviews the manner in which the R2BFE implements "forgetting" into the transactive memory on the Web. Exploring the concept of forgetting in this context shows that there is a far broader scale of options to implement digital forgetting than is offered today by the R2BFE. The analysis shows where the R2BFE is insufficient and risks affecting other interests at stake more than is necessary by the application of too narrow a notion of forgetting. This paper suggests that the R2BFE could be transformed into a more successful implementation of "forgetting" in the online transactive memory if it were to draw more heavily on the mechanisms of human forgetting.


Timing the Right to Be Forgotten: A Study into 'Time' as a Factor in Deciding About Retention or Erasure of Data

January 2014

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97 Reads

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5 Citations

SSRN Electronic Journal

The so-called "Right to Be Forgotten or Erasure" (RTBF), article 17 of the proposed General Data Protection Regulation, provides individuals with a means to oppose the often persistent digital memory of the Web. Because digital information technologies affect the accessibility of information over time and time plays a fundamental role in biological forgetting, ‘time’ is a factor that should play a pivotal role in the RTBF. This chapter explores the roles that ‘time’ plays and could play in decisions regarding the retention or erasure of data. Two roles are identified: (1) ‘time’ as the marker of a discrete moment where the grounds for retention no longer hold and ‘forgetting’ of the data should follow and (2) ‘time’ as a factor in the balance of interests, as adding or removing weight to the request to ‘forget’ personal information or its opposing interest. The chapter elaborates on these two roles from different perspectives and highlights the importance and underdeveloped understanding of the second role.


Stage Ahoy! Deconstruction of the 'Drunken Pirate' Case in the Light of Impression Management

February 2013

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38 Reads

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1 Citation

SSRN Electronic Journal

Information on the Internet can sometimes damage people by interfering with offline life. A high-school teacher-in-training experienced this firsthand when a photo with the caption "drunken pirate" and a message on her MySpace website led to the end of her career as a teacher. This case received a lot of media attention and is used in academic debate as illustrating the need for a "right to be forgotten". The question is how and to what extent the Internet contributed to the fact that the teacher-in-training's information ended up with the wrong audience. The problems in this case did not arise due to any memory related capacities of the Internet or the Internet being a place where information can be easily copied and reproduced. The problems arose because audience segregation on the Internet is a difficult task.


Gender Identity and Privacy: Could a Right to Be Forgotten Help Andrew Agnes Online?

January 2012

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21 Reads

SSRN Electronic Journal

The ‘right to be forgotten’ (R2BF) aims at helping individuals to control the availability of (outdated, incorrect, or embarrassing) personal information roaming around the Internet. Such informational control is important for privacy and identity-building. Identity-building takes place in social interactions between individuals and people base the social identity they assign to an individual on the information they have. Sometimes individuals need a clean slate to realise certain identity-changes. Ideally, therefore, the R2BF should assist people by preventing past personal information from affecting the present. Identity-change is very fundamental for people who want to change the gender that was legally and/or socially assigned to them at birth. Being categorised as male or female has a huge impact on their ability to construct their identity. If at some point, they have a gender identity that differs from the gender assigned to them at birth, they can have a need not to be confronted with this past, in order to build their current social identity. This raises the question whether and how the R2BF can help people to control data on the Web that include outdated gender references. Can the R2BF cover such a fundamental thing as having their gender that was assigned at birth forgotten? After briefly analysing the role of information in identity construction, the characteristics of the Web, and the possibilities for people to request erasure of past gender-related information, the paper concludes that the R2BF cannot control the extensive data flows relating to the core characteristics of a person’s identity. The R2BF may be suited for having single actions, utterances, or events forgotten, but it will hardly help to have core identity-related characteristics, such as gender, religion, or race ‘forgotten’. Achieving a significant identity change is not served by a R2BF when the change relates to the most fundamental aspects of one’s identity, such as gender.

Citations (5)


... En efecto, basta con que su nombre esté conectado a dichos materiales a través de motores de búsqueda web y similares para causar significativa vergüenza, estigma o daño. Korenhof, Ausloos et al. (2014) afirman que los seres humanos siempre han usado memorias externas, pero con la adopción de la tecnología de la información, los mecanismos de "recordar" y "olvidar" en los procesos de la memoria externa parecen haber cambiado drásticamente. El olvido en el cerebro humano surge por la combinación de varios factores. ...

Reference:

MEMORIA VERSUS OLVIDO: LA PARADOJA DE INTERNET
Timing the Right to Be Forgotten: A Study into 'Time' as a Factor in Deciding About Retention or Erasure of Data
  • Citing Article
  • January 2014

SSRN Electronic Journal

... We also did not explore the prism of considering RTBF as a form of withholding knowledge (Gonçalves et al., 2023). Another issue that we did not cover, but may become more pertinent as the gender debate in academia widens, is RTBF in the context of gender transition (Correia et al., 2021;Korenhof & Koops, 2014). Finally, considering that generative artificial intelligence, for example ChatGPT, is able to generate fictitious citations (Day, 2023), which is a form of misinformation, authors whose names might appear in such fabricated citations might want to have the Right to retract false citations. ...

Identity Construction and the Right to be Forgotten: the Case of Gender Identity
  • Citing Chapter
  • January 2014

... Nowadays, due to the abundance of digital data storage and accessible online information, we face a situation that can be described as "forgetting by choice" and moved to "remembering by default" (KORENHOF, 2014); where remembering has become the norm, while forgetting is the exception. ...

Stage ahoy!deconstruction of the “drunken pirate”case in the light of impression management
  • Citing Chapter
  • January 2014

... The term 'right to be forgotten' has been floated as an appealing ideal for doing something about the persistence of embarrassing data on the Internet, but it is pretty obviously a misnomer: not only is it very difficult to have all copies of data removed from the Internet, but removing content from the Internet also cannot be equated to people actually forgetting what they have already read. 45 The error is being corrected in the amended GDPR (the LIBE version now calls Article 17 only the 'right to erasure'), but the damage has been done: the label sticks, and the expanded (but by no means absolutely effective) right to erasure will be discussed for a long time in the frame of 'being forgotten', raising expectations that the right could not deliver in the first place. ...

Forgetting Bits and Pieces
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • January 2014

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

... 36 This is the reason, as Mantelero notices in [56], why the idea of fixing a general time limit for mandatory erasure has been correctly avoided in the GDPR. Time, however, has been identified as a critical factor for introducing forgetting by many scholars, like Korenhof et al. [57] who argued that we should not overlook or disregard the importance of time in weighting the opposing interests when we are shaping policy mechanisms like the RtbF. Having this in mind, Korean researchers patented and sold a technique called Digital Aging System (DAS) which attaches "aging timer" to digital personal data [58], whereas the company Xpire 37 developed a smartphone app that enables the creation of self-destructing social posts in Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. ...

Timing the Right to Be Forgotten: A Study into 'Time' as a Factor in Deciding About Retention or Erasure of Data

SSRN Electronic Journal