The internet age has brought many complexities, not least
the search engine results following us around all our
lives. To help us understand this issue and ask what will
happen in the future, Meg Leta Jones of Georgetown
University has written CTRL + Z: THE RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN.
A gentleman in Spain asked a newspaper to take down a
mention that a property had been sold due to his
insolvency. In 2010 the paper refused, so he asked Google
to stop showing a search result linking to that article.
Google refused. In 2014 the European Union's Court of
Justice ordered Google to remove the link, as the article
was no longer relevant. On the same day in the US, a court
dismissed internet defamation actions by two people, on the
grounds that the truth is not defamation, and a case would
have to be started within a year of publication.
I can add that in 2015 a young lady gaining a job as
community police officer in Britain - on probation within
the police for the first three years - had to resign after
social media posts she had made a couple of years earlier
were reposted by others, showing an immature and
thoughtless side of her as a teen. She did have the support
of the police, but it still seemed a shame that she was not
allowed to say she had grown up and was getting on with her
life.
Young people can be bullied on the net, with personal
photos displayed by others and mocking messages sent to and
about them. Don't they have a right to have the photos
taken down? This is the kind of question that we need to
be asking. Some people think the net allows them to be
anonymous. A site called Jezebel removed racist tweets
after complaints, but the names of the posters had become
known. Jezebel explained that it allowed the right to free
expression, but could not protect people from the
consequences of expressing themselves. Meg Leta Jones tells
us that 80 percent of employers search for applicants
online, providing a few salutary stories. A drama teacher's
fifteen years at a school ended after her exotic movie work
of fifty years previously came to light.
As more and more data services are linked, and a phone
hosts a search engine as well as a fitness record stored in
the cloud, the whole area of data privacy is becoming
increasingly fuzzy. Sites record who visits them and why,
and may sell the data. Search engines record what users
search for and which sites they then visit. All this data
is compiled and sold to marketers. Some sites post your
purchases openly on a Facebook feed, as one man found when
he bought an engagement ring before proposing. But look at
it the other way - computers and files can degrade, old
storage discs can be superseded, languages fall out of
favour. The net is only as permanent as its structure. Web
pages are understood to be ephemeral in nature, and they
are being replaced or archived more swiftly. If someone
digitises census records, great for genealogists. If your
old photos, whether on paper or floppy discs, get burnt in
a house fire, they are gone forever. Mass storage of data
includes incorrect data, by its nature, and nobody is
trawling through it testing every link and spelling.
Forgetting can be part of forgiveness, says the author Meg
Leta Jones, alluding to some of the twentieth century's
worst conflicts. Much of her book however contains examples
from courtrooms and libel cases, from early twentieth
century onwards. Courts are now being asked to interpret
law as relevant to new ways of living. I believe this book
CTRL + Z: THE RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN will be of great
interest to media lawyers, to those developing media
courses or studying civil law, or to those creating
policies for firms storing customers' data or working under
the Data Protection Directive. Also, to ordinary folks
wishing to remind themselves to think before hitting send.
“This is going on your permanent record!” is a threat that
has never held more weight than it does in the Internet Age,
when information lasts indefinitely. The ability to make
good on that threat is as democratized as posting a Tweet or
making blog. Data about us is created, shared, collected,
analyzed, and processed at an overwhelming scale. The damage
caused can be severe, affecting relationships, employment,
academic success, and any number of other opportunities—and
it can also be long lasting.
One possible solution to this threat? A digital right to be
forgotten, which would in turn create a legal duty to
delete, hide, or anonymize information at the request of
another user. The highly controversial right has been
criticized as a repugnant affront to principles of
expression and access, as unworkable as a technical measure,
and as effective as trying to put the cat back in the bag.
Ctrl+Z breaks down the debate and provides guidance for a
way forward. It argues that the existing perspectives are
too limited, offering easy forgetting or none at all. By
looking at new theories of privacy and organizing the many
potential applications of the right, law and technology
scholar Meg Leta Jones offers a set of nuanced choices. To
help us choose, she provides a digital information life
cycle, reflects on particular legal cultures, and analyzes
international interoperability. In the end, the right to be
forgotten can be innovative, liberating, and globally
viable.
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