Wednesday, August 6, 2014

The Right To Be Forgotten

When I wrote an article for a journal a couple years ago about the loss of the "right to be forgotten", this was not my desired outcome. I doubt my article was ever viewed in this endeavor as many others were written previously. If it had been read, then the court would have put into place time limits and notoriety standards for the information. Actually, the court would have done no such thing as I advocated companies to implement these features. I also advocated that items should degrade on the search results page over time and not be completely eliminated until a significant amount of time had passed based on the notoriety of the topic. It would then be the responsibility of private industry to back these items up on searchable databases, but not through normal search methods. I suggested that it could become like old newspapers at the library. The theory my coauthors and I posited was that prior to the Internet, we were able to move somewhere new and start again or the memory of an event would fade from the minds of those around us over time. Or we would be able to perform some offsetting action that would overshadow the previous negative events. This is simply no longer true. One misstep in life can permanently damage a reputation forever. This is a theory worthy of discussion within our society, but not worthy of government involvement.

This post is in reference to this article: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/02/wikipedia-page-google-link-hidden-right-to-be-forgotten

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