The right to be forgotten: time to forget it?
It’s been more than six months since the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled in favor of Spaniard Mario Costeja and the Spanish Data Protection Agency and against Google, ordering the search engine to respect a supposed “right to be forgotten”.
The sentence required Google to create a mechanism to handle requests from individuals to be removed from its index within EU member states, putting the company in the unwanted position of having to decide on matters based on a principle (the right to be forgotten) that doesn’t exist in reality, and that it should never have been asked to do.
From the moment the court made the ruling, one that is as absurd as it is confusing, we have seen one problematic case after another, each worse than its predecessor. Let’s start with the attack on the freedom of the press and the right to information that the “right to be forgotten” supposes: it has prompted institutions such as the Wikimedia Foundation to vow to fight the ruling, as have The Guardian and the BBC, which have released lists of articles they have seen retired from the Google search results because of it. At the same time the EU has said it expects Google to apply the right to be forgotten to the rest of the world. Besides that, Google demonstrates that many requests for information to be removed from the search engine are bogus, while there have been any number of absurdities such as musicians asking for poor reviews to be removed, along with demands from pedophiles, convicted terrorists and other criminals all asking for references to them to be eliminated. In Spain recently, one newspaper saw removed three news items relating to a 2008 trial of three members of Basque terrorist group ETA.
Six months after the ECJ overruled one of its senior advisors, it is abundantly clear that the supposed “right to be forgotten” has solved nothing that actually needed solving, and that it is likely to cause a great deal of damage in areas where it should have kept out. In short, it has been a disaster, a major judicial mistake, and an illustration of a failure to adapt to the technology of our times. Trying to fix things that aren’t broken is not just a waste of time, but is also a fine way to compromise other, more important rights and mechanisms. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice comes to mind, albeit the Mickey Mouse version.
How many more cases will be required to prove once and for all that this whole thing was a mistake and that it is creating more problems than it is resolving and needs to be revised post haste? Just how slow does the machine of justice move at this level when it comes to correcting its own mistakes?
(En español, aquí)
