On May 13, 2016, the European Union court made a decision on a case where a citizen from Spain sued Google Inc. that Google’s search result was an infringement of privacy, giving all of the citizens in the European Union “the right to be forgotten”.(fact sheet) The right to be forgotten is a new concept that emerges as the cumulation of personal data online and the development of more and more powerful search engine algorithms. Many people had the concern that their personal rights and privacy might be violated if there are false or outdated information on the internet. No matter if you are a politician, a businessman, a student or a private citizen, there are inevitably pieces of information on the internet that we might not appreciate. Essentially the right to be forgotten gives people the right to request search engines like Google to remove unwanted web pages from its index. In my opinion, the right to be forgotten is a law that fits into the legal environment of European countries. However, I do not believe that it is a good idea to adopt the law into the American legal system.
The issue of “the right to be forgotten” is significant partly because of the multiple stakeholders that make this issue even more complicated. For one, there are the companies like Google, that holds all of the information about an individual and its indexing system that include most part of the internet. Also, there are individuals who have some information which they want to get rid of on the internet, and there are individuals who wish to find out more information about a particular person due to either personal or business interests. For companies like Google, they are reluctant to follow this law because doing this will make them lose some credibility. Google’s argument is that it indexes the entire internet with the same method, which involves a computer algorithm that calculates which website will show up at which search result. This means that their search result is really objective. However, if they allow people to modify that result, they might lose some credibility. For people who want to hide information on the internet, they like this rule because this means that they can hide information on the internet based on their personal interest. They might gain some personal interest because they will be able to delete some of the things that they have done, which might help them get a job in the future, free of unwanted information. For people who want to find out more information about other individuals, they will not like this rule because this law means that they will not be able to generate a complete profile of someone, which might hurt their own interest. Or they will distrust the result that they get from researching others on the internet because they might suspect that individual removed some unwanted information on the internet, thus losing the ability to create a complete profile for someone based on their research on the internet. (NPR)
The introduction of the right to be forgotten also sparked a new debate on the internet. John and Andrew had a heated debate over this topic on NPR. They represented both side of the aisle: Some people argue, like John, that this law protect people’s privacy, because it protects people from being scrutinized by some of the small mistakes that they have made in the past, and sometimes even from since they were a teenager not knowing what the consequences are. But other people, like Andrew, argued that the essence of this rule is actually censorship. It prevents other people from knowing the truth about what had happened to someone in the past, thus violating everyone else’s right to information. (NPR) Others also raised concerns about how this law might disproportionately affect the powerful individual and the regular private citizen. For example, if submitted a complaint and Google rejected, the more powerful and resourceful individuals are more likely be able to hire lawyers to fight against Google’s decision, which many private citizens might not be able to hire an attorney to force Google to remove that webpage. This means that this new rule might end up becoming a tool for powerful individuals to remove unwanted information about themselves. And even though this law is designed for everybody in mind, many of the private citizens are less likely to receive the benefit from this law when comparing to people who are resourceful and powerful. This also raises concerns over powerful individuals using this rule to change the history, thus making themselves more powerful while others might not be able to do so.
These stakeholders make this ruling from the European Union Court was novel. However, this ruling was not unprecedented. According to the Guardian, there has already been similar laws in the UK, called the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, that allows its citizens to request removal of outdated information about themselves from the internet. The way they looked at it is that if the government choose to allow the past record of “spent” criminal, which means that their criminal record does not need to be mentioned when they apply for jobs or getting insurance, It would be really difficult for them to fit back into the society again after serving their time. Because people can just look up information about them on the internet, and that might expose their past records, even though they are “spent” criminal. They introduced that law to reduce the discrimination that they might encounter when they live their life after serving time. (the Guardian) Also, there are similar laws in Europe that achieve the same goals. In both the United States and Europe, there is a consensus that what people do as a child should not affect what they do as an adult. This prevents outdated information from haunting the rest of someone’s life just because of some minor offense as a kid. (the Guardian) The effect of these laws is that people are much less likely to be punished for what they have done for the rest of their lives. In the United Kingdom, former inmates who have served their time and paid their debt to the society for their crime are less likely to be discriminated when applying for a job, thus making it much easier for them to fit into the society after serving time. In the United States, many of people who had a criminal background as a kid were able to live on with their lives. Laws like these already exist in many parts of the world, thus making the right to be forgotten unnecessary in terms of protecting people who have criminal offenses to fit back into the society.
However, the implication of the right to be forgotten is much larger than helping “spent” criminal to get a job or protect people from their childhood offenses. This law might also pose a threat to free speech. Because at the core of this law, it is censorship. It helped people to cover up facts that happened in the past, and this might infringe upon people’s right to information. Granting individuals the right to remove certain posts from the search engine results gives them the power to potentially alter the history. This is like opening a Pandora’s box. If we grant individual this right, it is like granting them the right to change the history. If individuals can use that right to change the personal history of their own, there is nothing preventing powerful individuals from using this rule to change the history, thus manipulating the public into believing their version of history. Another thing is that since Google is going to be the company receiving those requests and choosing which ones to process, it would give Google a huge amount of power in deciding which case to process and which case not to process. Also, all of those decisions are made by humans since there is no AI application powerful enough to understand the reasons why people submit those requests, it means that those decisions might sometimes be made because of the personal preferences of those Google employees. Giving them this power will make Google less of a transparent company, but a search giant that can alter history.
All of these arguments shows that European Union court granting its citizen “the right to be forgotten” is largely a result of the European view on censorship. Censorship is something that has been part of the European culture for decades. Even though free speech is protected in Europe, but there are certain speeches that will be censored by the government. Hate speech, for example, is one of them. In Germany, the Hitler salute is censored by the government because it’s seen as hate speech. In the United Kingdom, hate speech against homosexuality is also prohibited. In Germany, the German government has been working with Facebook, Twitter, and Google to “remove hateful posts that violate German law”, and the minister is “proposing a new law in fulfillment of the threat” (Bloomberg) However, in America, hate speech is only regulated if “it is intended to incite imminent violence and is actually likely to do so” (Bloomberg) This difference in attitude towards freedom of speech proves that in Europe, unlike American counterparts, freedom of speech is not absolute, but regulated closely by the government. This means that it makes more sense that the right to be forgotten fits into the European legislative system, but it does not fit in the American legislative system because, at its core, the right to be forgotten is a form of censorship that prevents people from learning about something that has happened in the past. Which means that it will not fit into American legal system, which emphasizes liberal freedom of speech.
The right to be forgotten is a reasonable addition to the European law because of the history of limited freedom of speech in the European culture but will not fit into the American legal system because of the emphasis on freedom of speech. Even though the right to be forgotten poses many benefits like protecting people who committed a crime when they were a kid and protecting former criminals and give them a fresh start, many of these rights are already ensured by other laws in many countries. Adopting the right to be forgotten into the American legal system is inappropriate because it poses a threat to the absolute freedom of speech that many of the Americans deeply believe in, and it might also infringe upon people’s right of information.
Originally published 15.10.2019