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The Right to Be Forgotten (RtbF).
Humans Forget but Machines Remember!!
What happened to The Right to Be Forgotten (RtbF)?
It was once considered to be a breakthrough in the preservation of personal information online but it seems no longer adequate, if it ever was.
In the EU General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR) article 17 gives a person the right to have their personal data deleted in certain circumstances.
But in the AI era, it is difficult to imagine an effective form of a right to be forgotten.
This is owing to the ambiguous status of ownership of digital content, including that which has been published or shared on public platforms with a limited grasp of consent for or the nature of its future use and in the feeding of AI’s memory.
Are we on our way to an anti-autobiographical future where it is impossible to extract yourself from the chatbot of you and the chatbots of others?
Our current worldwide laws appear to treat human and machine memory alike by supporting a fictitious understanding of memory and forgetting that does not comport with reality.
So let’s take a look at how the failures of current privacy law do not align with or reflect the realities of AI technology.