As it is reading week at KLS I thought I would reflect on a topic that I have been reading about recently.
Everyone has said or done something that they wish they could ‘take back’. Most of the time people do forget and the information does not follow you around. However, the way that we communicate has irreversibly changed in the digital age. Our photos are no longer safely tucked away in an album in the loft. They are online and they are tagged with your name and your location. Our inner thoughts are no longer contained in diaries, they are on blogs that are visible to everyone. To find a newspaper article we no longer have to trawl through archives in our local library. Newspapers publish their articles online – we do not even have to leave the house. On the one hand we should celebrate these changes. ‘The Family Encyclopaedia of Medicine and Health’ remains on my family’s bookshelf but this process of disseminating information has largely been eradicated. With a simple click of a button we have access to more information than we could have ever envisaged in the pre-digital age. Is there such a thing as too much information?
In May of this year, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) sought to clarify whether an individual had a ‘right to be forgotten’. They stated that individuals have the right to request that search engines remove links upon searching their name if the information linked to is inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive. This right must be balanced against the public’s right to access information and all decisions require a case-by-case assessment. Is this a victory for the individual’s right to privacy? Or is it a form of censorship with damaging consequences for our right to access information? These are not easy questions and it is not my intention to answer them. Instead I want to ask, what is in a name? I googled myself and found links to information about the university I went to, my involvement in local church events and my address. I do not mind if people know this, but what if I had a previous criminal conviction? What if I had been the victim of a crime? What if I had financial difficulties in the past?
It is one thing to say that the public has a right to know this information. It is another to say that this is the first thing that they should know about me or that they should be able to find it out within a second of clicking a button. I would not think to introduce myself to potential friends or employers as “Hi, I’m Jess and six years ago I bit my ex partner’s ear off.” As a result of the role of search engines in disseminating information this is the reality for some people. We no longer have to ask people questions to find information out about them, we just google them. Indeed, it says a lot about the power of search engines that ‘google’ is now a recognised verb in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Our information now does follow us around wherever we go and it will remain in the public eye forever. Society’s right to remember has never been stronger and it has having severe consequences for individuals who want to forget. We do not want Google to become the Ministry of Truth but are we willing to sacrifice our right to privacy? Does the CJEU ruling have a chilling effect on the freedom of expression or is it more chilling that the digital age is eroding the individual’s right to privacy and control of personal information?