The “right to be forgotten” takes a new and sinister turn

I warned about it at the time and have written extensively about it: inventing absurd and non-existent rights never produces good outcomes.

The so-called “right to be forgotten” is a legal aberration that supposedly enshrines the right to delete (only for EU citizens or for those who do not know how to use a VPN) information that speaks ill of a person (as long as they are not famous), and that authorizes people to figuratively walk around Europe removing pages from newspaper archives.

For many centuries, people who appeared in the news understood that, once published, they could only request a rectification if what had been written or said about them was false or erroneous. Often, these rectifications were useless anyway, because they were buried among the news of the day and what the collective imagination remembered was the original news, even if it was false or erroneous.

Since the advent of the Internet, which allows these corrections to be anchored to the original news so that they can be seen whenever they are read, the courts of justice of the European Union decided to force search engines not to index news that the individual concerned does not like. In the physical world this isn’t possible, but in the virtual world it is, so they decided o see what would happen. In other words, if you make someone look bad by telling the truth about what they have done, they can ask the courts to force the search engine not to index that item.

Why? Simply, “because they can.” While going to all the newspaper archives and old copies of newspapers to cut out offending news items and eliminate them is physically impossible, a series of judges who do not understand the internet, at the behest of a certain Mario Costeja who has not done anything productive in his life other than screwing the way the internet works, decided that this could be done on the internet, and without worrying about the obvious consequences, they passed it into law.

Now, Google says it has stopped notifying web sites that a news item has been removed from its index, because apparently that violates the privacy of the person who requested the removal. The issue was obvious: when a media outlet saw that a news item was removed from the search engine’s index, it usually turned that same thing into news, and republished on the subject, or generated a list with the item that had suffered that fate, which became a kind of “list of shame”. That, of course, did not sit well with those who demanded the removal in the first place, so they have protested against it. In other words, now, in addition to being absurd and unjustifiable, the process now lacks any transparency: the search engine tells you that it has removed a news item from your pages, but does not tell you which one.

I can’t say it often enough: THERE IS NO RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN. Forgetting is a physiological process by which the brain stops remembering something, and it is something that happens involuntarily. You cannot use the law to force someone, a person or a group of people to forget something. This supposed right to be forgotten simply does not exist; it is an entelechy created by irresponsible judges. The only thing that would be justified to mitigate the effects of the publication of false or erroneous news about a person would be to force the publication of a link to the correction in the news itself, something that can be easily carried out on the internet, but never eliminated. Justice is never achieved by obscuring or hindering access to information, and to try do so makes no sense. And inventing nonsensical rights only ends up producing negative outcomes.

It’s going to be fun when everything on the internet is linked to a blockchain… good luck removing things then!

(En español, aquí)