What Is The Right To Be Forgotten?

By Scram Software 18 March 2015

The right to be forgotten.

“The right to be forgotten is the concept that individuals have the civil right to request that personal information be removed from the Internet.”¹

Why is everybody talking about it?

Earlier this year, Spanish citizen Costeja González went up against Google in court and won.

In 1998 the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia posted two small notices about how his repossessed home was to be auctioned to pay off his debts. Although González cleared his debts and moved on with his life, the articles appeared every time someone Googled his name. In May 2014, the European Court of Justice ruled in González’s favour declaring that Google could no longer link to items that are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed.”²

Whilst the right to be forgotten has so far only being enforced in Europe by the European Union, there have been wide discussions of whether the policy should be replicated in other countries such as the US and Australia.

How is the right to be forgotten currently being enforced?

As the court case was about Google, it is Google that ensures the right to be forgotten by removing links to unwanted information from its searches. However, the information is not removed from the website itself. It’s like taking a book off the library index but still stocking it in the library.

Since the ruling, Google has received more than 250,000 requests for various links to be removed.

To determine who has the right to be forgotten, Google has hired an entire council of top paralegals, lawyers and experts to sit and evaluate each and every case. This Google council makes its decisions by considering among other things, whether the individual is a public figure, the source of the link, and whether the links relate to a “political speech or criminal charges”. Their main focus is whether the link is in the public interest or not.³

Why is it so difficult for inidivuals to be granted the right to be forgotten?

It interferes with freedom of speech and democracy. It is argued that if people have the right to delete links and erase the nastier parts of their history, then it could become censorship of the free press. For example, legitimate evidence against a public official could be fairly compiled and published online only to be erased years later.

It’s expensive. Google has had to develop the software to remove old links, create a whole administrative process to deal with the requests and appoint a reputable council to deal with individual cases. If the right to be forgotten is extended to smaller internet companies and providers, then it may simply be too expensive and cumbersome to enforce.
Enforcing the right to be forgotten is left in the hands of huge internet companies. Jules Polonetsky, executive director of the Future of Privacy Forum, delcared that whilst individuals do not want governments to enforce censorship of the internet, neither do they want large companies such as Google and Facebook to become the omnipotent “court of philosopher kings.”⁴

However, we do have and need the right to be forgotten.

The ramifications of having unwanted personal information in public can be catastrophic. The internet does not display information in order of sensitivity or historical relevance. Whilst drunken college photos, embarrassing stories and ill-concieved words were once consigned to personal photo albums and dusty newspaper archives, or simply not accessible at all, they are now easily brought up for everyone to see. Moreover, the internet is now used to determine job applications, insurance claims and even legal outcomes. A unplanned photo or catty email that was posted online more than ten years ago could prevent you from getting a job, and a sexy selfie could affect a child custody battle in court.
You can delete your own content, but you can’t delete content posted about you. On 31 October 2006, Nikki Catsouras crashed her father’s Porsche into a toll booth. 18 year old Catsouras was decapitated. Her body was so gruesome that the parents were not allowed to identify her. However, the California Highway Patrol who arrived at the scene took photos of Catsouras’ decapitated body, still strapped into her seat belt, and released the images to the internet. Despite a rigorous legal battle, the family were not legally entitled to have the images removed because they did not own the picture. Whilst it was Catsouras’ image in the photograph, the copyright of the photo still belonged to the individuals who took it. In the end the family had to settle for asking internet sites personally to take the image down.⁵ The photos can still be easily found via Google. With online sharing and the phenomenon of “tagging”, we cannot always control what is posted about us on the internet and very often that information may be misused and abused.
There is a difference between public interest and something being interesting to the public. In the case of Catsouras, it was not in the public interest for her image to be posted online. It was merely a source of morbid fascination. Whilst stories about politicians’ past indiscretions and political speeches are necessary for the democratic process, other links such as Catsouras’ are not.

To prevent slander and online harassment. Brittan Heller was a student who was automatically admitted to Yale Law School because of her high grades and test scores. She was set to have a high-flying legal career. However, she became subject of a thread entitled “Stupid Bitch to Attend Yale Law” on a site called AutoAdmit. This thread became one of the first things to show up on Google when someone searched for Heller’s name. As well as serious sexual threats, the anonymous posters wanted to ensure that all of the top law firms knew how “stupid” she was. They falsely accused her of bribing her way into Yale and having a lesbian affair with a teacher. When Brittan came to apply for jobs, every single employer turned her down which, as one legal journalist noted, is virtually unheard of for a Yale Law graduate.
There is a difference between public interest and something being interesting to the public. In the case of Catsouras, it was not in the public interest for her image to be posted online. It was merely a source of morbid fascination. Whilst stories about politicians’ past indiscretions and political speeches are necessary for the democratic process, other links such as Catsouras’ are not.
Problems with rehabilitation. In countries like the UK, people who commit relatively minor crimes such as robbery can be publicly disassociated with their criminal record after a certain time. However, the internet makes this almost impossible, thus making successful rehabilitation difficult. Equally, the internet can make it hard for individuals who have been through trauma to move on. For example, if someone was a victim in a very public sexual assault case, they may not want to be associated with what happened to them for the rest of their life.
Protection for minorities. For instance, individuals who are identified as being gay online may well find themselves the subject of ridicule and discriminated against in job applications.

The right to be forgotten is based on what happens after our data is posted on the internet. Even if you succeeded in getting an unwanted link removed on Google, the information itself would still remain on the website itself and could be available through other search engines. Moreover, as it was in the case of Nikki Catsouras, there may be such a vast number of sources and websites that it may never be possible to fully remove data.

Whilst the right to be forgotten is a step in the right direction for protecting internet users’ privacy, Ultimately the responsibility for protecting our images rests with us, the individuals before we upload and share onthe internet. Companies such as Scram Software provide a host of sophisticated and easy to use encryption tools that help you to communicate, share and store your data safely online.