Dear Editor,
It was good to see the Journal considering the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling on ‘the right to be forgotten’ (‘Don’t erase history’, May 27, 2014). However the editorial made some common mistakes on the ruling and its potential impact.
The first was to miss the point that links are already routinely sorted and selected by search engines. Their algorithms do a whole range of work that we don’t see and to suggest that they will be ‘altered’ after this decision from some ‘normal’ state now is only testimony to our unthinking reliance on search engines.
The second is to suggest that this is about ‘erasing history’. It it not. No original online or offline records of courts or newspapers are being erased. We are all still free to make the effort to consult those public records in the ways we always did before search engines.
The court’s view was simple that there are good social reasons to limit comprehensive and effortless search of those records when it comes to the personal history of private individuals. Forgiveness and forgetting of minor transgressions are very important social values in almost all countries, and we should not let what can be done with technology decide what should be done socially.
Third, the case will not be a slippery slope. The judge was very careful to limit its applicability and the decision does not overturn the long-standing principle of the ‘public interest.’ Many decisions about what can be published and publicized are already based on this principle. In that sense the basis of the ECJ judgement is not new and it is alarmist to imply that this might mean a drift towards “the actions of Nazi war criminals and child molesters” being removed from public view.
Finally, where the editorial is correct is to argue that the decision will likely mean thousands of future requests. However there is no reason why this should be a problem. Google and other websites already receive and handle thousands of copyright takedown requests every day. They willingly dedicate the resources to deal with corporate rights, so how much more important are human rights in comparison?
David Murakami Wood
Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Surveillance Studies
Department of Sociology
Queen’s University
All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s)-in-Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be contacted, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to journal_editors@ams.queensu.ca.
