Should you be allowed to erase yourself from Google?
(This article first appeared in The Washington Examiner. For more, subscribe to their newsletter or follow them on Facebook.)
It began innocently enough: Mario Costeja González, a 58-year old lawyer and calligrapher from northwestern Spain, Googled himself.
Somewhere in the search results, he found something disturbing: an 11-year-old issue of the newspaper La Vanguardia republished online, which contained an unflattering moment from his past. In 1998, La Vanguardia and other papers were ordered to advertise property auctions, the proceeds of which would pay back taxes owed by the owners. On page 23 of the Jan. 19, 1998, issue of La Vanguardia, Mario Costeja González was listed among other debtors whose property was available to the highest bidder.
There was a time when the page with his name on it would have ended up at the bottom of a landfill — but today, thanks to Google, embarrassment is forever. It didn’t matter to Costeja González that his name was one of several buried in a 36-word sidebar. It didn’t matter that he only found the link because a friend alerted him to its existence. It didn’t matter that “Mario Costeja González” wasn’t exactly a trending term on Google. What mattered to him was the fact that the debts in question had been settled long ago. Why did their memory have to linger online?
Costeja González complained to La Vanguardia. The paper threw up its hands and claimed that a government edict required publication in the first place. Then Costeja González contacted Google. Nothing changed. So he lodged a complaint with the Spanish Data Protection Agency (Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, AEPD). At last his protests found the right audience: the AEPD ruled that Google was required to remove the links in question — that Costeja González, in other words, had a “right to be forgotten.” After appeals, the case made its way to the European Union’s highest court, which sided with the AEPD and Costeja González: All search engines would have to consider user requests to take down links.
In May 2014, Google designed a system to field such inquiries, and they, along with Bing and Yahoo, began to limit search results deemed “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed.” But Google applied one important caveat: Links would only be erased for search engines within European internet domains. It is, depending on your perspective, either a perfectly tailored application of the EU’s ruling — or a clever dodge. What it means in practice is that European users could easily find their way to any and all search results simply by using Google.com.
And perhaps it was the too-clever-by-half response, or the general hostility toward Google among European politicians, or Google’s pesky habit of leaking which links it has been asked to remove, but EU privacy watchdogs came down hard on the search giant last week. “Under EU law, everyone has a right to data protection,” European regulators declared. Their new guidelines will request that Google remove offending links from the main Google.com search results as well.
Yet the guidelines are non-binding — so what punishment does Google face if it fails to comply? Even if Google tried to meet the requirement, how would the search engine manage it? Would there be two functional Google.com sites — one for Europeans, one for everyone else? Or would these guidelines apply the “right to be forgotten” to non-Europeans as well?
To Americans accustomed to a certain degree of deference to the private sector, this whole affair can seem comic. A European citizen wakes up one day and decides to erase himself from Google — they can’t really enforce that, can they? But they can, and they have. Google’s struggles with privacy in Europe have real costs and consequences. It has had to hire a phalanx of lawyers and lobbyists, change its products, and build compliance services. Yet as exasperating as this regulatory flurry must look from Google’s perspective, it has at least one value for the rest of us: forcing us to think long and hard about the online panopticon that gives every embarrassing news story, every ridiculous photo and every injudicious comment a permanence and accessibility that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. It forces us, too, to consider the incentives shaping the behavior of companies with massive financial stakes in accumulating as much information about us as possible.
If a “right to be forgotten” sounds laughable to certain ears, perhaps that’s because the right didn’t need a name until very recently: Not too long ago, it was taken entirely for granted.
Of course, that’s no guarantee that the EU’s notoriously sprawling bureaucracy will get this right. But while we wait to find out, we can at least appreciate the ironic fact that the man who had set out to make himself invisible on Google is now unavoidable on it. Mario Costeja González’s name populates search pages by the hundreds, and depending on the source, he’s either a benevolent “internet warrior” or a buffoon.
For his part, he’s thrilled at how the case has played out — and his response may speak to a public that both loves Google and fears for its privacy: “I’ve been saying to people, if Google was good before, now it’s perfect.”
Originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com on December 8, 2014.
