Right to be Forgotten

The right to be forgotten, also commonly known as the right to erasure, is the idea that an individual should have the ability to erase parts of their online identity in which the information is no longer needed for its original processing purpose. This idea arose from individuals who believed that they should be able to control whether or not their information persists online. In the European Union (EU) and Argentina this right has already been implemented with the creation of a law which allows citizens to request that their information is removed from google's search results. The right to be forgotten brings up a number of issues concerning the relationship between internet censorship and the right to privacy, as well as online anonymity problems.

History

Before the expansion of the internet and search engines such as Google and Yahoo, the right to be forgotten didn't come into conception until recently. In the Pre-internet era, data was not as easily accessible due to its physical nature and public records were difficult to obtain which lead to "practical obscurity" of people's data. This means that the data is effectively protected due to the practical difficulty to access it. Following the digitization of records as well as the expansion of digital libraries for search engines, data became more easily accessible and the right to be forgotten began to come into conception. In 2014, a landmark case of Google vs. Costeja made the right to be forgotten a well known concept.

Google v. Costeja

In March of 2010, a resident of Spain named Mario Costeja González filed a complaint against La Vanguardia newspaper due to articles which they had published online from 1998 which contained sensitive information of his. When googling his name, Costeja obtained links to two articles from La Vanguardia which contained information about his forced sale of property in order to pay off social security debts. Costeja requested that La Vanguardia remove this information from their site and also requested that Google remove these links from their search results. In July of 2010, the Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD) ruled that La Vanguardia legally had the right to publish this information about Costeja and therefore didn't have to remove it. However, the AEPD upheld the complaint which was directed at Google and ruled that the search engine had the obligation to remove the links to the newspapers from their indexes without necessarily erasing the data. Following this ruling, Google took up claims against the Audiencia Nacional(National High Court of Spain) on the basis that Costeja didn't have the right to erase legally published material. Finally in 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that search engines such as google must uphold the right to erasure. This landmark case resulted in publication of a form by Google which would allow citizens in the EU to request for removal of links that are no longer relevant to their original processing purpose.

Argentina

In Argentina, the lawyer Adolfo Martín Leguizamón Peña was filing similar cases for many celebrities against the search engines Google and Yahoo. These celebrities demanded the removal of certain search results that were linking to photographs of theirs. Most notably, the case of Da Cuhna v. Yahoo and Google in 2009. In her lawsuit with the lower court, Virginia Da Cuhna of Argentina claimed that search results for her name resulted in links to pornographic websites which were using photographs of her without her permission. Judge Virginia Simari of Buenos Aires ruled in favor of Da Cuhna and claimed that she had a right to control her personal image online and Google and Yahoo were violating that right with their search results and therefore needed to remove links to pornographic sites which contained Da Cuhna's pictures. On appeal a three judge court reversed the lower courts decision on the claim that the search engines could not be held accountable for linking to Da Cuhna's images as Da Cuhna had published them herself on her personal website. Although the judges reversed the decision, Judge Ana María R. Brilla de Serrat argued for the importance of the right to be forgotten along with the right to control information about oneself.

Case Studies

Nikki Catsouras

In 2006, a girl named Nikki Catsouras from the United States was decapitated in a rather gruesome car accident. Highway patrol officers who arrived on the scene took photos of the incident as standard procedure calls for, however two of those workers later shared the disturbing photos online. Due to the rapid spread of information online, some of these photographs were eventually discovered by some of the family members of Nikki Catsouras. Nikki's father, Christos Catsouras, attempted to have these images removed from the internet but failed to do so. Since the United States has no law in place for the right to be forgotten, Nikki's photographs will remain on the internet indefinitely.

Google Transparency Report

Google gathered and categorized data about all of the delisting requests which Europeans made from 2014-2017. The infographic below shows in detail the summary of the people who exercised their right to be forgotten as well as the information requested for delisting.

Google Transparency Report

Ethical Issues

According to Moor's Law: "As technological revolutions increase their social impact, ethical problems increase." Due to the availability and ease of access that the internet has provided, the right to be forgotten has arisen as an ethical issue. While the European Union and Argentina have laws set in place protecting the right to be forgotten, the United States and many other countries have no such protections. These differences spark the debate over whether or not each country should create a law for the right to be forgotten. The main ethical issue concerning the right to be forgotten is the clash between the freedom of expression and the right to privacy.

Freedom of Expression v. Right to Privacy

Advocates for the freedom of expression believe that subjects invoke the right to be forgotten simply when their content no longer suits their needs. Furthermore, they claim that citizens who request the removal of information that was lawfully published by a website are directly violating the freedom of expression of that website. When a user removes information about themselves which could hurt their reputation, they are restricting the access of information for the public. In opposition, advocates for the right to privacy believe that data divulged privately which is made public in some way should be removed immediately as the subject has the right to privacy of their information. Moore defines the right to privacy as “a right to control access to and uses of places, bodies, and personal information.” Thus they believe that the publication of this information is a violation of the right to privacy and therefore subject at hand should have the right to be forgotten without violating the freedom of expression. Due to the case by case nature of the right to be forgotten, the line between the freedom of expression and right to privacy varies with each decision the search engine makes.