Remember Justine Sacco, the PR exec who famously tweeted, Going to Africa. Hope I dont get AIDS. Just kidding. Im white! before hopping aboard a flight to South Africa last December? The tweet went viral while she was airborne and, by the time she landed, half the planet thought she was an insensitive racist jerk. Then she got fired.
But that wasnt the worst of it, not by a long shot. To this day, Googling her name generates hundreds of thousands of results that, near as I can tell, all reference her ill-conceived brush with infamy. Shell probably have to change her name to escape the episode and Googles web crawlers and indexers.
Unless, of course, Sacco moves to Europe. In its infinite wisdom, the European Union Court of Justice has ruled that people can demand that Google (GOOG) remove links in search results for their name, and the Silicon Valley company has to comply. And theres no appeal on such a ruling by the EUs highest court. This is a done deal.
Bet you didnt see that coming. I know I didnt. Apparently, neither did Google.
On the surface, it sounds reasonable enough. Youve done something dumb or somebody important posts something terrible about you, why shouldnt there be a recourse to set the record straight?
Someone who really wants to dig stuff up on you might still be able to find whatever it is youd like hidden (although, among the billions of online pages, without a search engine, Im not sure how). But why should one or two incidents dominate the first place everyone looks to find out about you and color your personal brand for all of eternity?
But when you stop and think about it, when you let the implications of this unassailable ruling sink in, the idea is so wrong and its implementation will have to be so subjective that it will undoubtedly threaten not just the integrity of the Internet the integrity of what used to be a free society.
Consider this: Should we erase an entry from the Library of Congress for any reason? We wouldnt burn any books Fahrenheit 451 style but just delete the references so we can make believe they dont exist that the events they chronicle never really happened and make everyone search through thousand of shelves to find them.
And which references to which books would we erase? The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Youve got to admit, that was some pretty evil stuff. Im sure there are white supremacy groups that would love to see that go away. How about Ball Four, the blockbuster that embarrassed Major League Baseball and tarnished Mickey Mantels pristine reputation? Or The Smartest Guys in the Room, about the Enron scandal? What about novels like Atlas Shrugged? I know an awful lot of people that would kill to see all references to Ayn Rands controversial and politically charged work simply vanish into thin air.
The EUs highest court says we all have the right to be forgotten, that events from the past however lawful and accurate their representations might be simply stop being relevant or become excessive, in time. We should all have the right to move on with our lives and let the past be forgotten. Let bygones be bygones.
See the article here:
EU's Google Ruling is Institutionalized Censorship