Please forget me, Google!

I hope you know what you’re asking for!

Very well. In this Age of the Web, where your online existence complements and even compensates your offline life, asking Google to erase you from its memory is near suicidal. But trust me, there are people who think that way.

Really? And why?

Google has received more than 6,50,000 such requests from people who want it to forget (remove) certain search results on them from certain websites since 2014. That year, if you recall, a court in Europe had asked Google to allow people in the continent the ‘right to be forgotten’. And just a few days ago, Google lost a landmark case against a businessman who had sought his ‘right’ to be forgotten.

Interesting, am all ears...

The petitioner — who everyone refers to NT2 — had served a six-month jail term over decade ago. His crime was to “intercept communications”. He had asked Google to remove search results mentioning this particular side of his past, especially the references to the case in which he was convicted. These references included some media reports and some other online references. His point was he paid the price and was reformed. So, he has a right to remove that instance from his past, which he wants to forget and move on.

Ah! What did Google say then?

Google, obviously, refused the request. Soon the man moved court, which finally ruled in his favour. But there is caveat here. The London court rejected a similar petition from another man who had served four years in prison for a more serious crime. So the judgment cannot be seen as a blanket call on all such cases.

How does Google decide if a request is genuine or not?

The London court has stressed the word “remorse”. Also in this case it considered the argument that the businessman’s conviction did not “concern actions taken by him in relation to consumers, customers or investors”.

Now there will be an avalanche of such requests....

Indeed. In fact, after the May 2014 ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union, Google alone received demands to remove nearly 2.9 million URLs (website addresses). To be fair, it has acted on about 43 per cent of them. About 90 per cent of such requests came from private individuals who want references to their lives removed from social media sites, online directories, news and government page.

Obviously, awareness on privacy seems quite higher in those geographies.

Yes. All thanks to individuals and organisations there campaigning for our right to have an imperfect past and not let that determine our future. At the crux of this debate is the idea that humans err and they make up for their bad actions. People reform. Punishments are not exactly meant for penalising people for their actions, rather they help individuals evolve better. So a reformed individual has the right to demand that his bad past should not influence his future.

Can’t agree more. This was much easier in the less-connected old world I guess.

Yes. We have seen many who don’t want to discuss certain episodes of their life as they have moved on. Societies allowed them such fair treatment, respecting their choice to ‘be forgotten’. In the digital era, social media and online archives make such experiences extremely difficult given their reach and influence.

So data companies should not determine our past, right?

Yes. We own our life — past, especially. Search companies may say they have an obligation to respect public interest and users’ right to know. But activists and policy-makers feel a private company may not be capable of determining what public interest is. It has to go by social mores, and laws.

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