So the European Court of Justice - the EU's highest court of law - has ruled
that we all have a "right to be forgotten", and consequently Google
must delete from its search results any data that is "inadequate,
irrelevant or no longer relevant".
In making this ruling, the ECJ sought to give relief to a Spanish man who argued that Google
should not direct people to a 1998 auction notice of his repossessed
home, as published on the website of a mass circulation newspaper.
As
Lumbergh might have put it, "Uh, yeah." I think I see where the ECJ is
trying to go with this - we've all posted things we later regret, or
others upload our own personal data without permission, and then the
hosting corporate retains the data; Facebook, I'm looking in your
direction - but I still feel uneasy with this judgment.
Before you read on, believe me when I write that I take my own privacy very seriously. (I seem to spend most of my Facebook
time detagging myself from photos that others have uploaded.) And I
claim no rights for myself that I do not award to others.
Nevertheless...
The first source of my unease is my
sense that this is a case of The Wrong Problem. I don't understand why
Google is the target here. Google - like every other search engine in
cyberspace - only points people to other websites. There is where the
data in question resides. It seems intrinsically misguided to me that,
if information is deemed to be offensive, it is not the person
displaying the offensive information that the ECJ would call to account -
but the person highlighting that the offensive information exists. In
such a situation, is Google not actually doing us all a great service?
After all, once we've decided that there is offensive information out
there, it surely helps us to know where that offensive information is,
that we may erase it once and for all. Amen.
(To
say nothing of the delightful absurdity that the information in question
in this court case was being broadcast through a widescale
communications medium - a newspaper - before Google even got involved.)
Which
brings me to the second - and biggest - source of my unease. Who
determines which information is offensive, and to what degree? And,
more widely, can information - assuming that it is true; factually
correct - ever even be offensive? This is verging uncomfortably close
to a blanket fatwa of servitude and poverty: I deny thee the right to
gain knowledge about the world. This seems to me like a useful tool for
anybody who wants to prevent others from bettering themselves; an
instrument of subjugation.
I give no person the right
to tell me what I can and can't learn. And I certainly don't give that
right to a corporation either. And yet the ECJ would have private
corporates play censor; the gatekeepers to our knowledge; the arbiters
of what history we can remember. Oh well, better than having
governments do it. Right?
Chilling.
Happily,
the ECJ has offered some guidelines on when/what/why to censor: the
concepts of Inadequacy, Irrelevance, and That Which Is No Longer
Relevant. Hmmm. Here's my take on those:
1.
Inadequacy feels relatively straightforward if we're talking about
something that is factually incorrect. But what if somebody - perhaps
acting entirely speciously - argues that the information presented is
incomplete? Now we're stepping onto the slippery slope of a value
judgement.
2. Ditto Irrelevance. The problem with
value judgements is that they are subject to different interpretations
and thresholds - when considering the same information, two people could
easily formulate two different opinions on adequacy and relevance. If
that happens, who's right?
3. Call me a pedant, but I query the distinction between data that is Irrelevant, and data that is No Longer
Relevant. No doubt there's an important - dare I say relevant? -
semantic meaning in there for the learned Justices of the ECJ. But it's tautologous in its look, feel and read, and then the whole
rationale of the ECJ's judgment starts to feel a lot less lucid. I would argue that all factually correct information is
relevant at some point, in some way, in some context.
Moreover, if history is the study of why the world is the way it is today, then it feels problematic to discard aged information, simply because it is aged. Those who ignore the lessons of history are damned to repeat it, or somesuch.
When
it comes to determining "relevance" and "adequacy" in an argument, I'd
argue that this is an exercise in holistic
thinking. One gathers all the available data and makes a decision,
based on a valid argument. As part of this process one discards
whatever data is felt not to be useful or valid, but you need as much
data as possible to
understand the contextual meaning of Relevance, Utility and Validity.
And you need to see that data yourself, to analyse and synthesise it,
before you can decide whether to keep or discard it. I'd argue that, by
seeking to eliminate data from this process, the ECJ's judgment will
actually make valid and useful decision-making less likely.
With
that in mind, my third big problem: whenever a Google search throws up a
result, it's only because somebody requested the data in the first
place. Does one person's right to be forgotten trump another's right to
remember?
This is where it all starts to become really
insidious for me. Would the ECJ really force me, or you, to forget
stuff? "You are not allowed to remember that." It's a heinous
concept. A right can only exist to the extent that it is enforceable
against someone else. So if Señor Costeja González has a right to be
forgotten, then everybody else has a duty to forget about him.
Unfortunately, he'll go down in history as the person who petitioned for
this absurd ruling, and his motivations will remain part of that
record. Somehow, I don't think he's going to be forgotten during his
own lifetime (absent a mass "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" type
experiment on the world's population). Qué ironía, hombre.
You can't legislate for the myriad intricacies of the human mind. Some of us have phenomenal powers of recall. If technology is meant to enhance humanity's interaction with the world, then why pass technology laws that can't keep pace with basic human performance?
And
so, ultimately, this begins to feel like a rather quixotic - pun
intended; this whole thing emanated from the land of the Man of La
Mancha, after all - kicking against the tide of scientific advance. We're all cyborg now:
we outsource increasing proportions of our daily existence to
technology. The web is our external memory, and Google is our most
efficient (as far as I'm aware) external memory synapse. I think we
should be celebrating our technological advantages, not muddlingly
denying them.
This is the genesis of humanity's
progress to the stars. It is widely accepted that communities that
share knowledge freely are the most resilient, the most adaptable, the
most successful. Sharing of information can only ever be a good thing.
Let us not inhibit it.
