From the “right to be forgotten” to collective amnesia
In the aftermath of the European Court of Justice’s colossal mistake yesterday in obliging search engines to remove material anybody thinks might be detrimental to them from the internet, I have had the opportunity to speak at length on Spanish state television, the EFE news agency, and the Spanish-language edition of the Huffington Post about the issue. This is a subject that I have written about extensively, what’s more, I am an easy quote, given my position as an academic with no axe to grind.
Debate on this matter is taking place within the wrong framework: of course we would all like to protect our rights, and nobody wants to see something about themselves on the internet that might damage their reputation or breach their privacy. The “right to be forgotten” brings to mind the idea of a clean slate, or starting over, or having paid one’s dues. Fine. But as soon as you raise this topic, the automatic response from most people seems to be protecting our rights. The problem is that these rights are not going to be protected by shooting the messenger. If you want something about yourself removed from the internet, talk to the people who have posted it.
For many people, Google is the internet. It is the door to all the information in the world. There are still a lot of people out there who think that the Google search box is the same as their navigator bar. But the EU’s decision is not a problem for Google; it is a problem for anybody who wants to provide an internet search facility, now or in the future. It is a problem for the social networks, for Facebook, for Twitter, for anybody who attempts to offer information, and who will now have to establish some kind of idiotic exclusion system that will mean in effect that the internet will no longer be able to be indexed.
The idea of criminalizing tools is problematic for two reasons: one, because of the temptation to do so by people who don’t understand them; and two, because IT IS ALWAYS A MISTAKE. There is no middle ground here. Whenever you see a tool being criminalized, you are looking at a mistake. It’s an axiom that we should all learn.
If you really believe that you have a right to be forgotten, you believe that the rest of society can somehow be obliged to enter into a collective amnesia. Aside from not being a good idea, it is also impossible. Let’s get this straight: once something has entered the public domain, NOBODY AND NOTHING can force us to forget it, and removing it from a search engine doesn’t address the real issue; as said, it is simply killing the messenger.
If you support the idea of the right to be forgotten, you should also ask yourself how this so-called right is likely to be used, in how it will be used to hide information from us. Think about the fact that the information is already out there, and trying to then hide it is a dangerous game. If a newspaper publishes something from its archives, nobody raises the issue. So why shouldn’t a search engine enjoy the same right? By what reasoning is it a search engine’s job to guarantee somebody’s privacy, when a newspaper doesn’t have to? If a newspaper reports on a crime you committed 30 years ago and nothing happens, why should it be any more offensive if that same information appears on a search engine? Quite simply, it makes no sense.
To get another idea of how absurd this ruling is, have a look at the US and UK media’s response: people simply cannot understand what has possessed the European Court of Justice to make such a blunder. The very idea of removing information from the internet because somebody doesn’t like it is offensive, dangerous, and absurd. Our rights are not best defended by going against common sense and creating loopholes that the rich and powerful will be able to take advantage of to erase their pasts. In short, there is no possible justification for this decision, and no right that can possibly counter balance it, and the European Court of Justice has just made a very serious mistake.
(En español, aquí)
