How is this rush to give people the right to remove themselves from databases going to intersect with corpuses of data that are immutably recorded in blockchain?
Aren't there bad things already encoded in the block chain, I thought I read that? How would a court order on an international open source software base be affected? You could order people in the us under court threat to alter the block chain to remove that information. People in other countries could have confusing legal implications. We already have this with us companies who stored info in other countries so the us govt would have a difficult time compelling them to give up info.
IIUC you only need to semantically "delete" it, ie. record the fact that it is deleted, and then not use it.
Consider an analogy to a filesystem. If I delete a file, the bits aren't actually gone and are recoverable (at least for a while). But no-one (as far as I know) is saying we need to scrub or smash hard drives to pieces on customer request. We simply tell our storage system not to present this information to us anymore.
Similarly, in any immutable log based system (like many databases), you wouldn't delete a record by actually removing the information - instead you write a tombstone that says "this information was deleted", and then queries will not return it.
If you're using the blockchain to store information, then you simply need to teach your system that retrieves that information to recognise some kind of tombstone, and you need to honor that tombstone. It's besides the point whether anyone else continues to use the information, similarly to if you'd published it on your website then someone had copied it - even if you delete it, other people are under no obligation to also delete it.
I'm unsure what will happen if a company stores their data in the blockchain then receives a deletion request, but any attempt to remove data from the blockchain itself would be inherently unenforceable - by design, as any blockchain that could be modified or censored via judicial or financial pressure would be critically compromised.
If I remember correctly, there is some legal principle in the United States that no law can require anyone to do something that is impossible for them to do.
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How is this rush to give people the right to remove themselves from databases going to intersect with corpuses of data that are immutably recorded in blockchain?
Aren't there bad things already encoded in the block chain, I thought I read that? How would a court order on an international open source software base be affected? You could order people in the us under court threat to alter the block chain to remove that information. People in other countries could have confusing legal implications. We already have this with us companies who stored info in other countries so the us govt would have a difficult time compelling them to give up info.
Publishing the block chain in question or running a node then becomes a civil and/or criminal transgression. Similar to how torrents were/are handled.
Whack a mole, with whomever has the most force winning (usually a nation state).
IIUC you only need to semantically "delete" it, ie. record the fact that it is deleted, and then not use it.
Consider an analogy to a filesystem. If I delete a file, the bits aren't actually gone and are recoverable (at least for a while). But no-one (as far as I know) is saying we need to scrub or smash hard drives to pieces on customer request. We simply tell our storage system not to present this information to us anymore.
Similarly, in any immutable log based system (like many databases), you wouldn't delete a record by actually removing the information - instead you write a tombstone that says "this information was deleted", and then queries will not return it.
If you're using the blockchain to store information, then you simply need to teach your system that retrieves that information to recognise some kind of tombstone, and you need to honor that tombstone. It's besides the point whether anyone else continues to use the information, similarly to if you'd published it on your website then someone had copied it - even if you delete it, other people are under no obligation to also delete it.
I'm unsure what will happen if a company stores their data in the blockchain then receives a deletion request, but any attempt to remove data from the blockchain itself would be inherently unenforceable - by design, as any blockchain that could be modified or censored via judicial or financial pressure would be critically compromised.
Did you forget about the DAO?
If I remember correctly, there is some legal principle in the United States that no law can require anyone to do something that is impossible for them to do.
Nothing is immutable. Bye-bye blockchain.