[re-search] right to be forgotten

Geert Lovink geert at desk.nl
Wed May 14 13:35:36 CEST 2014


> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/13/omission-of-search-results-no-right-to-be-forgotten
> 
> Millions of deletion requests are handled for copyright violations, so a few insisting individuals won't make a difference
> 	• Viktor Mayer-Schönberger
> 	• The Guardian, Tuesday 13 May 2014 23.30 BST
> The decision by the European court of justice that in some cases Google may have to omit search results if an affected individual requests so, is alternatively hailed as the dawn of an effective "right to be forgotten", or condemned as the end of search engines or even the freedom of the press. Frankly it is neither.
> 
> In part this has to do with how the decision is phrased. For starters, the court made clear that news media are exempt from such deletion requests; Google is only on the hook because it argued it is not media (to avoid having to comply with media regulation in Europe).
> 
> The court also clarified that individuals cannot simply request links to be deleted, and Google has to comply. Instead what's necessary is a careful balancing, the court said, of all the rights involved, including the public's right to have access to information. This limits the application to rather a small number of cases, in which for instance the information to be deleted is both damning and irrelevant. And it requires that individuals vigorously pursue their complaint before data protection agencies and courts, not shying away from cost and time.
> 
> Such a deletion right has existed for 20 years, and very few of us have used it. There is little reason to believe that will change. Moreover, search engines don't have to redesign themselves to comply. Google is already handling millions of deletion requests for copyright violations every month, so even a couple of hundred insisting individuals won't make much of a difference.
> 
> This may be reassuring to the internet industry, but unfortunately it does not solve the challenge of comprehensive digital remembering we face. All through human history, forgetting has been easy for humans, and remembering was hard.
> 
> That helped us to accept that people evolve and change, and that the person we were many years ago is not the person we are today.
> 
> With digital memory, almost global access, and easy retrieval through search engines such as Google, we essentially have undone forgetting. The past has begun to follow us, and all of our misdeeds remain remembered. But it is not just that we find ourselves in a straitjacket of the past that we cannot shake. When we Google someone, we get a mosaic of information that straddles decades of our existence, creating an image that is both incomplete and strangely devoid of time.
> 
> Without forgetting we also risk misjudgment. As psychologists remind us, forgetting also is intimately linked to forgiving. If we can no longer forget, we may turn into an unforgiving society.
> 
> Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at the University of Oxford's Internet Institute and author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age




More information about the re-search mailing list