Thanks very much Mario Costeja, but we won’t be forgetting you any time soon…

Sometimes the courts get it wrong. And when they do, they create absurd laws and precedents that then oblige us to examine what we all stand to lose when they are applied. In this case we’re dealing with something very serious, something that could change the nature of the internet as we know it: the right to obtain true information that has not been filtered.

There is probably information out there attributed to every one of us, or about us, which is factually incorrect. I would like very much to get rid of quite a few pages that I don’t think do me justice, published either in error or maliciously. Some of it could probably even be reported to the police. But I am not prepared to pursue the matter, because I understand that what a search engine needs to do is search. If the information should not be there, I can go to the source and get them to remove it, but what I would never do is go to whoever indexes the material, because all they are doing is indexing what already exists.

As a search engine user myself, what I value is being able to find whatever is out there on the internet, the whole of the internet, about this or that subject, or this or that person. The value proposal of that search engine is severely reduced if all it can offer me is what somebody else has decided should be out there. The idea of ripping pages out of the books in a library because the information contained therein is wrong seems to me to be straight out of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in Nineteen eighty-four.

The European Court of Justice’s decision to back Mario Costeja, a Spanish man who complained the presence online of an auction notice of his repossessed home invaded his privacy, effectively kills the value proposal of one of the most important tools that humanity has ever created: something that allows us to access all information.

Costeja’s dogged pursuit of the case has created a precedent that now means we cannot trust search engines to provide us with unfiltered information. This starts with “remove this because it isn’t true” and is followed by, “I don’t want this published about me because it discredits me”, and ends up with, “remove links to this photo because it doesn’t show my best side”. In short, this is a stupid ruling, an attempt to supposedly defend the rights of the individual, exaggerated to the point of hyperbole, and damaging our collective right to access information. What will happen from now on is not that information that bothers certain people will disappear, but that we will have to use tools that put a kind of blindfold on, allowing us to see only what certain people want us to see. That is not a right; that is an aberration.

Being forgotten is not a right. Forgetting is a physiological process that takes place in the brain of the person that forgets, it is not something that happens because we want it to. We do not forget when or because somebody else wants us to forget, we forget for other reasons. We cannot be obliged to forget, and to even suggest so is outrageous. Granting somebody the supposed right to “erase their past” makes no sense, and much less so if in doing we eliminate not the source of that memory, but the machine that indexes it. What we now have to think about is what will happen when this supposed right to be forgotten falls into the hands of the powerful, of governments, and those who really have an interest in “modifying” their past and the way it appears on the internet.

Wait and see what happens when the internet is filled with information that has been eliminated because a company doesn’t like what somebody has said about it and has succeeded in getting it removed from a search engine. It’s going to be very interesting. And terribly sad.

There will be an avalanche of orders to have millions of links removed, and before long, there will be a parallel internet that nobody can index. Thanks Mario Costeja, I hope you enjoy your “right to be forgotten”.

Over time, we will learn to hate Mario Costeja’s supposed right. Welcome to a world that is going to be infinitely less transparent, a world in which information will mysteriously disappear based on all sorts of “preferences”. Let’s see just what kind of rights are protected, and whose. It’s going to be a lovely, rose-tinted world from now on, whether we like it or not.

(En español, aquí)