The Right to be Forgotten in the Media: A Data-Driven Study

Xue, Minhui; Magno, Gabriel; Cunha, Evandro; Almeida, Virgílio A. F.; Ross, Keith W.

doi:10.1515/popets-2016-0046

Cited by 39 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…This has lead to the development of a set of proposed best practices from Data Protection Authorities for handling delisting requests [4]. In parallel, researchers have examined de-anonymization risks surrounding the RTBF [29].…”

Section: Originmentioning

confidence: 99%

Five Years of the Right to be Forgotten

Bertram

Bursztein

Caro

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

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The "Right to be Forgotten" is a privacy ruling that enables Europeans to delist certain URLs appearing in search results related to their name. In order to illuminate the effect this ruling has on information access, we conducted a retrospective measurement study of 3.2 million URLs that were requested for delisting from Google Search over five years. Our analysis reveals the countries and anonymized parties generating the largest volume of requests (just 1,000 requesters generated 16% of requests); the news, government, social media, and directory sites most frequently targeted for delisting (17% of removals relate to a requester's legal history including crimes and wrongdoing); and the prevalence of extraterritorial requests. Our results dramatically increase transparency around the Right to be Forgotten and reveal the complexity of weighing personal privacy against public interest when resolving multi-party privacy conflicts that occur across the Internet. The results of our investigation have since been added to Google's transparency report. CCS CONCEPTS• Security and privacy → Human and societal aspects of security and privacy;

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Section: Originmentioning

confidence: 99%

Five Years of the Right to be Forgotten

Bertram

Bursztein

Caro

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

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“…They wish to enable users to remove historical data about themselves from multiple systems, including removing results from leading search engines. Nevertheless, as we already suggest, those deleted content attract unwanted attention [42].…”

Section: Context and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 78%

“…Recent studies [16], [33] have shown that users extensively use this mechanism to protect the privacy of their past content-users delete around 35% of posts within six years of posting them. The European Union (EU) regulation of "Right to be forgotten" [41], [42] which is part of EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [4] is also trying to accomplish exactly this same, albeit at a much more elaborate scale. They wish to enable users to remove historical data about themselves from multiple systems, including removing results from leading search engines.…”

Section: Context and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In another case, an SNL cast member's deletion of racist tweets back in September 2016 [6] were tracked by third parties and subsequently publicized. Not only celebrities but normal users also fell prey to this phenomenon when links delisted by Google in Europe (to honor Right to be Forgotten requests) were identified, publicized and scrutinized by media [42]. In general, the users today are extremely vulnerable due to the fact that, whatever content they delete (ironically, to protect their privacy) will possibly be identified, dissected and abused.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Lethe: Conceal Content Deletion from Persistent Observers

Minaei

Mondal

Loiseau

et al. 2018

Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies

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Most social platforms offer mechanisms allowing users to delete their posts, and a significant fraction of users exercise this right to be forgotten. However, ironically, users' attempt to reduce attention to sensitive posts via deletion, in practice, attracts unwanted attention from stalkers specifically to those (deleted) posts. Thus, deletions may leave users more vulnerable to attacks on their privacy in general. Users hoping to make their posts forgotten face a "damned if I do, damned if I don't" dilemma. Many are shifting towards ephemeral social platform like Snapchat, which will deprive us of important user-data archival. In the form of intermittent withdrawals, we present, Lethe, a novel solution to this problem of (really) forgetting the forgotten. If the next-generation social platforms are willing to give up the uninterrupted availability of non-deleted posts by a very small fraction, Lethe provides privacy to the deleted posts over long durations. In presence of Lethe, an adversarial observer becomes unsure if some posts are permanently deleted or just temporarily withdrawn by Lethe; at the same time, the adversarial observer is overwhelmed by a large number of falsely flagged undeleted posts. To demonstrate the feasibility and performance of Lethe, we analyze large-scale real data about users' deletion over Twitter and thoroughly investigate how to choose time duration distributions for alternating between temporary withdrawals and resurrections of non-deleted posts. We find a favorable trade-off between privacy, availability and adversarial overhead in different settings for users exercising their right to delete. We show that, even against an ultimate adversary with an uninterrupted access to the entire platform, Lethe offers deletion privacy for up to 3 months from the time of deletion, while maintaining content availability as high as 95% and keeping the adversarial precision to 20%.

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“…Consumers have different levels of privacy concerns for different types of information [48,49]. Consequently, it is not surprising that there is some evidence that European consumers' requests to apply the EU's recently established RTBF to have Google delist search engine results focus on some types of information more than others [50]. However, there are many other relevant forms of information that consumers may want deleted besides that which Google indexes (e.g., private social media posts restricted to friends, Internet of things data, mobile device sensory data, etc.).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Privacy Concern and the Right to Be Forgotten

Steinbart¹,

Keith²,

Babb³

2017

Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2017)

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The 'right to be forgotten' (RTBF) is an emerging concept that refers to an individual's ability to have data collected about themselves permanently deleted or "destroyed"-the final stage of the information life cycle. However, we do not yet understand where RTBF fits into existing theory and models of privacy concerns. This is due, at least in part, to the lack of validated instruments to assess RTBF. Therefore, following the methodology detailed by MacKenzie et al.[1], this paper develops scales to measure individuals' concerns about the RTBF. We validate the scale and show that the RTBF represents a separate dimension of privacy concerns that is not reflected in existing privacy concerns instruments.

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The Right to be Forgotten in the Media: A Data-Driven Study

Cited by 39 publications

References 12 publications

Five Years of the Right to be Forgotten

Five Years of the Right to be Forgotten

Lethe: Conceal Content Deletion from Persistent Observers

Measuring Privacy Concern and the Right to Be Forgotten

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