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European 'Right To Be Forgotten' Ruling Should Not Make People Disappear Online
Ill-chosen words now have a half-life longer than uranium. Long-forgotten misdeeds can appear as if they happened today.
It's a fact of modern life that we can't escape the far-reaching tentacles of internet search engines. They can find anything said, done and regretted since the web was born and bring it back to life, unencumbered by context.
What is generated by a name search on Google, Yahoo! or Ping has the power to embarrass you forever. A misguided political comment written at 2am on Twitter, a starstruck note on a fan forum or a photo taken with a dodgy workmate at a Christmas party can haunt you for as long as a search engine's claws can snare them.
It's even worse if that cringeworthy reference appears in a story on a reputable news website. The story in which you're named will stay close to the top of your name search while it's "live" (and you can only hope it hasn't been copied onto one or several news aggregation sites). That's the way it works.
But hope for those harbouring any skeletons came in May, when the European Court of Justice ruled that search engines must erase, on request, search results that are "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant". This followed a European Union directive that seeks to protect an individual's "right to be forgotten".
The ruling means that anyone can ask search engines to hide them in a specific search results, effectively "erasing" the reference to them.
Google said it has received more than 120,000 requests to stop its search engines linking specific names with web pages, including those on news sites. It has been forced to engage the services of hundreds of paralegals to handle the 1000 daily queries it still receives.
Google is currently holding free public forums across Europe to gather expert views to help the company decide how it should deal with the issue.
But even for those the ruling was supposed to help, it is not a perfect solution – it only affects European-based search engines and doesn't force a site to permanently delete a page, so anyone wishing to disappear can still be found.
What it does is raise the issue of whether we should be able to erase incidents in our past to protect our reputation. Do we have the right to disappear?
Similar rulings affecting search engines are not imminent in other jurisdictions, notably Australia and the United States. Australians wishing to get something taken down from the internet would need to embark on costly court action (so the reason would need to be good) or ask the site owner to take pity.
Asking for leniency may work for that unwanted Christmas party photo but not if you want your name to disappear from a news story.
The Sydney Morning Herald has always received requests to amend online stories but the number has increased markedly on the back of the European "right to be forgotten" ruling.
Requests are typically genuine, and sometimes heartbreaking. It might be someone trying to build a respectable career who is haunted by a bad decision as an 18-year-old that ended up in court. It might be a police accusation of fraud two decades ago that is hindering someone's job search, or a reference to a minor drug conviction that might be discovered by their now teenage daughter.
A take-down request can be unusual, such as the woman working with children in south-east Asia who fears for her safety because of a reference to a semi-nude photo shoot while on Big Brother.
Each situation is considered carefully but The Herald rarely agrees to delete or alter a published story. There are exceptions – a court ruling might make an article either misleading, incomplete or incorrect. There have also been cases where a story exposes someone to danger or harassment, or its appearance on search engines is having a long-term detrimental effect on someone's mental health.
The simple fact is publishers must do whatever they can to protect the integrity of the public record. Just as you can't go to the State Library and chop out a page of The Herald from the bound copies to permanently erase its existence, stories found on the website should not be amended or deleted without good reason.
The Herald regards its online archive as an important resource. It represents the collective work of our journalists who strive to get it right, every day.
It should not be an easy thing to whitewash history.
by Peter Gearin
2024 The Background Investigator. All Rights Reserved.