As has been widely reported the European Court of Justice ruled against Google yesterday, saying a Spanish man had the right to have links to certain events in his past removed from its search engine results. As the Guardian report notes:
The European judges made clear that in their view the EU data protection directive already established a "right to be forgotten".
The judges said they had found that the inclusion of links in the Google results related to an individual who wanted them removed "on the grounds that he wishes the information appearing on those pages relating to him personally to be 'forgotten' after a certain time" was incompatible with the existing data protection law.
They said the data that had to be erased could "appear to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant or excessive … in the light of the time that had elapsed". They added that even accurate data that had been lawfully published initially could "in the course of time become incompatible with the directive".
I find this very worrying indeed. I suspect everyone has done something they'd rather forget and some of it will be mentioned on the web, but when the web is becoming the main, and even sole, archive of choice this is not just a 'right to be forgotten', it represents the editing of history and a right to be unaccountable. Neither can be acceptable in a liberal democracy.
The ethical issues are well considered in the FT (and 30 articles a month can be read, free).
For once I stand beside the UK government on this one: I do not think there is a right to be forgotten.
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Excellent article. Hilariously though, your Government DOESN’T agree with you.
Our Glorious Leaders are an inspiration to all.
Their very existence humbles me+ makes me want to be a better man…
Well, I disagree. Employers routinely scour the internet before making job offers. The teenager who posts something ill advised while drunk, the person who responds to something ironically and is then quoted out of context, the person who simply changes his mind.
My concern is that, if it does not already exist, within a few years you will be able to photograph a stranger in the street and an app will be able to show you how wealthy he is (after all, the EU has ruled that all details of beneficial ownership of companies should be in the public domain), how much he earns, what pseudonyms he uses on the internet, what his beliefs appear to be, his sexuality, possibly whether he has been unfaithful to his partner, his criminal record, his internet browsing record, his family and friends and probably what illnesses he has or may be genetically prone to. For many people, that will be a frightening prospect, and I do not think it is scaremongering.
Jobs will go not to the competent but to the bland, those who have done nothing rather than those who have, those who express no opinions rather than those that do, and we know from experience with politicians that isn’t a good thing.
I should think some Jersey people will be very worried about exposure of their pseudonyms
Ha ha ha!
Or another example. The UK has rehabilitation of offenders laws that allow people convicted of crimes to regard the slate as being wiped clean after a period of time so they don’t need to disclose offences to potential employers.
And yet the employers will be able to find out anyway through a google search, and the offender will probably not be employer, because the HR department have delegated the task of sifting out offenders to a junior and the applicant had an offence for possessing cannabis 15 years ago when he was 18.
I agree on that point
On the other hand we have plenty of evidence of politicians lying (IDS and his University of perugia ‘degree’; Mandelson’s property wheeling and dealings, Osborn’es links with a hedge fund beneficiary of the Royal Mail sale; abuses of the spirit of expense claims) yet it doesn’t seem to affect their positions at all!
Roger makes some good points – i immediately thought of the power of the state to intrude on the affairs of the individual but the reality is the power of the corporate world to act against the individual is a much more nefarious and dangerous power that we don’t yet fully understand.
On the flipside you can imagine a scenario where a politician (lets call him Michael Green) can remove any online history relating to a previous life where perhaps he had a different name or was involved in a business that was questionable from an ethical or moral perspective. It would be convenient for him to make his history disappear…
Precisely
I think it is rather bizarre to say that something can stay in the public domain but can’t appear in search results. I could understand the conclusion reached by the court if it was difficult or impossible to remove the source and the court thought it should be removed, but to leave the source and remove links is nonsense.
If Google is sensored other search engines will simply fill that void and people will rapidly know which search engine to use instead. I can’t see any possible situation where the EU will be able to force Google to remove things on a global basis, if they can China will give Google a list of their own as well.
I don’t expect Google to take this lying down. It is a ruling that simply can’t be applied in the real world.
This will apply to all search engines
We all have a right to privacy. The more this is removed by Google and the others, then the more the fine and difficult line between hacking and privacy.
That right is not absolute, and we know it
With respect to the rehab of offenders act. It does not apply to DBS applications relating to an employee applying for a job working with children or vulnerable adults; in England. Employers are circumventing that by using umbrella companies in Scotland, even for jobs in supermarkets not involving any unsupervised contact.
Employers commonly ask for access to facebook accounts.
You demand that google info be kept freely available, but google is only a link between the user and any data.
More interesting is medical data held by the HSCIC, which is now available to police on senior officer request. Since google servers have had most NHS data stored on them, I wonder how long before all info is freely available?
Then there is the thorny subject of illegally held data being sold….that of construction workers….the database is supposed to have been destroyed….but in the digital world destroyed doesn’t exist!
No matter what google decides…the data will be available via other routes.
The ruling seems pretty bland to me…..
“However, [removal] would not be the case if it appeared, for particular reasons, such as the role played by the data subject in public life, that the interference with his fundamental rights is justified by the preponderant interest of the general public in having, on account of inclusion in the list of results, access to the information in question”