Opinion Forget it
The Net remembers everything. But should we press the delete button?
It’s been four years in the making, but Europe now has a working model of the right to be forgotten. Or to be disremembered, as George W. Bush put it. The EU has tried to excise one problematic part — mass murderers could have sought to exercise the right, along with the idiots who can’t find a job because social media is awash with their incautious tweets and ribald pictures. Now, the public’s right to know is counterpoised against the individual’s right to privacy. This means that mass murderers cannot get incriminating content pulled down — but just who can remains murky.
This effort had started as a legislative process in 2010, when Europe perceived the need to overhaul privacy laws since, for instance, embarrassing but irrelevant personal data was being used by employers to turn away prospective employees who were otherwise capable. The next year, an exasperated Spaniard, Mario Costeja Gonzalez, slapped Google with a lawsuit for refusing to pull down a 1998 news report of a bad patch in his life. He had recovered from the embarrassment but could not leave it behind, because the Net never forgets.
But after the European High Court ruled against Google, the search giant is facing a series of takedown requests. The ruling may set off sympathetic vibrations in other continents. Everywhere, the internet’s photographic memory interferes with the right to edit the past, to reinvent yourself by leaving the less pleasant bits behind. To want to display only the best parts of yourself is natural. Yet, the elimination of all unsavoury but factual information imposes a huge burden on search engines — not only would it necessitate human intervention in what is an entirely algorithmic exercise, it could also force them to black out large chunks of the Net.
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