The “Right to be forgotten”

This can also be interpreted in many other different ways: a person shouldn’t be a prisoner to his/her past, you shouldn’t judge me based on my past, “allow me to evolve,” and “please represent me accurately today.” The concept also suggests that folks should be able to escape their discreditable criminal history, or “move down […]

This can also be interpreted in many other different ways: a person shouldn’t be a prisoner to his/her past, you shouldn’t judge me based on my past, “allow me to evolve,” and “please represent me accurately today.” The concept also suggests that folks should be able to escape their discreditable criminal history, or “move down to Texas to get a fresh start.” The “right to be forgotten” has been protected as part of Italy’s constitutional right to personal identity. Spain’s data protection authority also buys into a similar law, and the concept has been written into Eu’s current data protection laws which passed in 1995. Thus, in the eyes of the Europeans, when we balance the right of the public to know, freedom of speech, and privacy rights, privacy rights must win.
The Internet, with numerous companies freely collecting and sometimes marketing your personal data, has now brought the concept of the “right to be forgotten” into the fore, and Google is the apparent scapegoat. With privacy rights violation complaints coming from left and right, EU was not going to sit on the sideline. On May 13, 2014, EU passed a law that gives individuals the right to ask Google to remove the results that turn up in Internet (Google) searches for their names. The idea is that some of the data are old, obsolete, inaccurate, or otherwise inappropriate for public consumption.  
Implementing the law in a fairly unified manner within the 28 EU member countries will require some efforts. As mentioned by Lisa Fleisher and Sam Schechner in the Wall Street Journal Connect online magazine on 3 June 2014: “The task for the individual regulators is complicated by their sheer number. Each of the EU’s 28 member states has its own privacy regulator, operating under national laws as well as a common EU directive. While the court decision gives guidance, each regulator also will need to navigate cultural norms and national values across the bloc. “
Google has obliged, and last week Thursday (26 June 2014), the company started removing results from its search engine and sending emails to individuals informing them that links they had requested were being taken down. “This week, we’re starting to take action on the removals requests that we’ve received,” a Google spokesman was quoted. “This is a new process for us. Each request has to be assessed individually, and we’re working as quickly as possible to get through the queue.”
Over 40,000 takedown requests were submitted to Google within the first few weeks of the law; and probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions, so far. According to Wall Street Journal tech journalist Sam Schechner on 26 June 2014, among the first links Google removed was one to a 1998 newspaper advertisement that mentioned a long-resolved debt of Mario Costeja González, from Spain. “The result no longer appeared Thursday (26 June 2014) in searches for Mr. Costeja González’s name on Google’s European websites, such as www.google.es or www.google.co.uk.”  Mr. Costeja González’s initial 2010 complaint was among those that led to last month’s European Court of Justice’s decision establishing the right to be forgotten.
The effects of the EU law is going to be widespread, both from the perspective of regulators all over the world and the Internet companies that collect and/or peddle consumers’ personal data. There is currently no official America’s position on the issue. For one, the U.S. likes to pride itself on the right of free speech, as penned into the country’s constitution, and the U.S. is not short of free-speech advocates. They will argue that the law enhances censorship and blames the messenger (Google) instead of the source of the data. While the González’s case might have helped EU decide, free-speech folks could argue that the public is entitled to know a person’s history, even if he is currently an angel. In my opinion, the problem becomes quite insidious when the wrong information is published on people, as this can cause difficulties of all sorts for them.  Without a regulation comparable to EU’s, misleading data about people might be extremely difficult to remove. Also pertinent is the fact that most people are mentally lazy. So, once they read or hear something, it may be quite difficult to change their minds.
Other countries may be more proactive. According to Schechner, there are early signs that the ruling in Europe is rippling elsewhere. “Hong Kong’s top privacy regulator, Allen Chiang Yam-wang, said in a blog post published Thursday (26 June 2014) that he expects cases similar to the one in Europe will soon be heard in Canada and Japan and suggested that Google should apply the ruling in Europe globally.”
 Other Internet companies might be taking preemptive measures. “In light of the European Court of Justice’s decision our team is currently in the process of developing a solution for users in Europe that we believe balances the important privacy and freedom-of-expression interests,” a Yahoo spokeswoman has been quoted as saying. Furthermore, a Microsoft Corp. spokesman stated that the company was working on a process for Europeans to request items to be deleted from results from its Bing search engine.
Schechner noted that online-reputation businesses were already moving to take advantage of the ruling. “French company Reputation VIP on Tuesday launched a website that helps simplify the process of making a request via Google’s freely available removal request form. The site guides users graphically and uses one of 30 prewritten justifications for Google to remove links.”