The European Court of Justice’s ruling last month on the “right to be forgotten” on the Internet has sparked a backlash. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales called it “terribly dangerous” in an interview with TechCrunch earlier this month. “There is no ‘right to be forgotten’ – it seems that in Europe there is a right to censor information you don’t like,” said Wales, who will be one of the members of an advisory panel that will help Google deal with the flood of requests to delete results that followed the court’s ruling.
Speaking to the Financial Times in late May, Google's Larry Page revealed that in the first two weeks after the ruling was made public, 31% of delisting requests involved people involved in fraud, 20% involved arrests or convictions for violent or other serious crimes, and 12% involved arrests for child pornography. According to the company, by last Monday the number of requests had reached 41,000.
Critics of the decision tell "K" that it forces Google to take on the role of a mega-editor-in-chief, which is inconsistent with the type of service it provides and imposes disproportionate costs on it. Furthermore, they claim, it contradicts the 2000 e-commerce directive, which grants immunity to online service platforms for the content posted on them (the directive, however, does not cover search engines).
"K" spoke about these issues via email with Victor Mayer-Schonberger, professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford and author – among others – of the book "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age".
“I don’t see how the court’s verdict threatens freedom of speech,” notes the Austrian academic and businessman. As he explains, referring to the case of the Spanish plaintiff who filed a lawsuit against both Google and the website that posted the information in question: “Even the Spanish data protection authority rejected the appeal against the news website, because news providers are expressly excluded from the right to be forgotten. The protection of freedom of speech does not cover Google because the company expressly refused to characterize its actions as expression of speech. It claimed that it was purely processing data, by means of computers and without human intervention. So the European Court had no choice but to apply the provisions of the Data Protection Directive.”.
Last week, Google announced that it intends to mark on its search pages posts that are deleted due to the right to be forgotten. “K” asks Professor Mayer-Schonberger whether this undermines the logic of the European Court of Justice’s verdict. “I don’t think so,” he replies. “The decision does not require absolute deletion – nor did the directive envisage such a thing. What is sought is something like a saddle – an obstacle that requires additional effort. So it will not discourage those who are actively looking for information, it will simply hide it from those who are leisurely looking for something. And I think that is the right balance.”.
For the Austrian, “the moral foundation” of the right to be forgotten is “that the processing of personal data is linked to informational self-determination, that is, the right for everyone to decide for themselves when, how and for what purpose their data is processed.” More broadly, “forgetting serves other, important purposes for humans. It allows us to focus on the present and the future and to accept that we evolve and grow over time, that we are not the person we were in the past today. Furthermore, it allows us to see the forest and not just the trees, to learn through abstraction (which requires us to forget details).”.
Without it, it's as if he's saying, we'll end up almost like Borges's memory-stealer Funes, who "remembered every leaf of every tree of every forest, but also every time he had seen it or imagined it," but was surprised every time he saw himself in the mirror.
Source: kathimerini.gr
