So yesterday the EU's top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union, ruled that Google has to let people ask for old search results about themselves to be taken down. The case is Google Spain v AEPD and Mario Costeja Gonzalez, and it's been kicking around the courts for a couple years now. Costeja Gonzalez is a Spanish lawyer who wanted Google to stop surfacing a 1998 newspaper notice about a property he lost to debt collection, decades-old news that had nothing to do with who he is now. The court basically said: Google, you're a "data controller," and if someone asks nicely (and has a reasonable case), you have to weigh their privacy against the public's interest in finding that info, and sometimes you have to make it disappear from search.
Not from the internet, to be clear. The newspaper article stays right where it is. It's just that Google can't point at it anymore, which is a weird kind of removal when you think about it. The information still exists, it's just harder to stumble into. Everyone's already calling this the "right to be forgotten," which is a much catchier name than "the right to make Google's index slightly less complete about you specifically."
I keep going back and forth on how I feel about this. On one level, sure, I get why a guy doesn't want a sixteen-year-old debt notice to be the first thing that comes up when someone Googles his name before a job interview. That seems like a reasonable thing to be annoyed about. But it also puts Google (a private company, running an algorithm, not a court) in the position of deciding what's "no longer relevant" about a person's past, which is an enormous amount of power to hand a search box. And it only applies if you're in the EU, so this whole thing is going to produce some genuinely strange results, like a story being findable if you search google.com from the US but vanished if you search google.es from Madrid. Google's own statement called the ruling "disappointing," which, yeah, I bet.
Anyway. This got me thinking about my own archive here, which by now goes back almost three years. I went and poked through some old posts from early 2012 while I was supposed to be doing actual work, and there is stuff in there I would absolutely erase if a button existed. Not anything scandalous, just embarrassing in the specific way that only your own past enthusiasm can be embarrassing. There's a post from January 2012 where I spent four paragraphs defending Path's contact-uploading thing before it turned into a full privacy scandal a couple weeks later, and I never went back and updated it, so it just sits there being wrong forever. There's another one where I called Windows Phone "basically solved" as a platform. It was not, in fact, basically solved.
But here's the thing, none of that is really what the ruling is about, because I'm not a search engine, I'm just a guy with a blog and an RSS feed and maybe forty regular readers if I'm being generous. Nobody's filing a legal request with me. If I want to delete that Path post I can just delete it, no European court required, and I'm not going to, because it's a useful record of being wrong about something in public, which I think is actually a healthy thing to leave up. I'd rather have the receipts than pretend I've always had good takes.
What I keep landing on is that this ruling is really a story about search, not about publishing, and those are different jobs even though it's easy to blur them together. A newspaper gets to keep its own archive intact because it's not the thing indexing the whole internet and putting itself between you and every fact about a person. Google is, so Google gets treated differently, whether that seems fair to Google or not. I don't think this is going to be the last we hear of this either, this feels like the kind of ruling that's going to spawn a thousand messy edge cases over the next few years, and some request form somewhere at Google is about to get very, very busy.