Right to Be Forgotten: Scrubbing Search Results?

When you look for yourself online, are you happy with what the Web reflects back?

Unlike your real reflection, there’s very little you can do directly to control how the Web, and especially search which displays you.

The fallout from the recent European court of justice ruling on the “right to be forgotten” has reached far and wide in the past week, prompting an international discussion about how personal information is used online.

The top European court has backed the “right to be forgotten” and said Google must delete “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” data from its results when a member of the public requests it.

In 2010, Mario Costeja González of Spain sued Google and the Spanish daily newspaper La Vanguardia for displaying in the search results for his name “an announcement for a real estate auction organized following attachment proceedings for the recovery of social security debts owed by Mr. Costeja González,” according to a report released by the court. He wanted either Google or the paper to remove the record. He wanted to start over.

The court is trying to address a transpicuous, self-evident problem, the Internet’s ability to preserve indefinitely all the information about you. Privacy allows us to experiment, make mistakes, and start afresh if we mess up, but is this the only way out to narrow down the vast amount of data available over the Internet?

The Right to Be Forgotten may affect how privacy, transparency, and open data interact and has a direct relation with growing discussion about the “right to be forgotten”. The organizations which publish information may be obliged to “take down” and remove information when an individual requests that removal even when the information is true and is a matter of “public record”.

Search engines generally doesn’t discriminate between the personal names and the data i.e, personal name in a search bar is simply a data to be searched for and the wake of internet privacy is forcing them to devise out a new method.

This ‘censorship’ gives rise to a compelling point to balance rights to privacy and personal data against freedom of expression and information and Google, Bing, Yahoo should devote their resources to find a solution to this problem. If not, in the game of what to and what not to, the winner will always be the ‘’Lawyers”.