Three days ago the EU's top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union, ruled that Google has to entertain requests from ordinary people who want links about themselves taken out of search results. Everyone is calling it the "right to be forgotten," which is a nice tidy phrase and also, I think, kind of a lie about what's actually happening.
The case that kicked this off is worth knowing because it's such a specific, small thing. A Spanish guy named Mario Costeja Gonzalez had a 1998 newspaper notice about a house of his that got repossessed over unpaid debts. Old news, debt long settled, whatever, normal life stuff. Except for sixteen years that notice kept turning up whenever anyone Googled his name, because the newspaper had digitized its archive and Google indexed it like it indexes everything. He complained to Spain's data protection agency, it went all the way up, and now there's a continent-wide ruling with his name on it forever, which is a little funny if you think about it too long.
Here's my complaint, and it's not a small one: nothing about this actually deletes anything. The newspaper article is still going to exist. It'll still be on the newspaper's own website, still findable if you go looking, still there for anyone who searches the newspaper directly instead of searching a name. What the ruling does is let people ask Google specifically to drop certain links from the results page when you search their name. That's it. Thats a "right to be a little harder to find on one particular search engine," and somebody decided "right to be forgotten" tested better, and I get why, but it bugs me every time I see the phrase repeated uncritically, which today is constantly.
I went and Googled my own name after reading about this, the way I assume half the internet did yesterday. Nothing scandalous came up, mostly old comments on other people's blogs and a mention in a 2009 conference roundup I'd forgotten I was even at. There's a Facebook photo from a Halloween party in 2007 that a friend tagged and that I have never once been able to get removed from search results, but it's not indexed under my name specifically so this ruling wouldn't touch it anyway even if I lived in the EU, which I dont. Small mercies.
What actually worries me is who gets to use this and for what. The standard is that the information has to be "inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant," which sounds reasonable until you imagine a city council member asking to delist a five-year-old news story about a zoning scandal because its "no longer relevant" to who they are today. Or a business owner scrubbing an old lawsuit. The ruling puts Google in the position of being the judge on millions of individual cases about what counts as stale personal history versus stuff the public still has a legitimate reason to find, and Google is a search company, not a court, not a newspaper editor, not anybody who signed up to make those calls at scale. I don't envy whoever ends up building that review process, because there isn't one yet as far as I can tell. The ruling just landed. Nobody's announced a form or a process or anything, so right now it's mostly lawyers and bloggers like me speculating about how this is going to work in practice once the actual mechanics show up.
Something that keeps nagging at me is how differently this plays out depending on where you are, because the ruling only reaches Google's European domains for now, so a French citizen removed from google.fr results is still one lazy click on google.com away from the exact same links, assuming anyone bothers to switch. It's less a wall and more a speed bump for anyone who isn't already curious enough to look twice, and I have a hard time deciding whether that makes it a reasonable, human-scaled compromise or just theater that lets everyone feel like something got fixed.
Anyway. I've had this blog going since late 2011 now, coming up on three years in November, and somewhere in the archive there's a post I wrote at 1am about a startup that no longer exists complaining in a way that reads pretty unfair in hindsight. Nobody's asked me to take it down. I'm not going to preemptively do it either. Some embarrassing stuff should probably just sit there.