Not everyone may have a glorious past. But why spoil the present by brooding over it? Well, you may succeed in forgetting some past events and decide to move on in life, but what if others around you do not forget your past and keep reminding the same to you and to the world?
The problem can be really acute in the digital age, as information is aplenty on all matters. A person may find several information about himself available on the Internet, which he would wish not to see at all – such information may emanate from social media posts, newspaper reports, court rulings, government publications, university records and so on. At the click of a button search engines collate all the relevant information and faithfully present the same. Whether a person likes it or not, his ‘not-so-glorious-past’ may keep haunting him. It is true that some of this information may have lost relevance over time and in some cases, the context may have changed completely.
Think about the greatest saint Valmiki, who authored the epic Ramayana. He had a notorious past of being a hunter and a dacoit. An incident, as the legend goes, changed his life as he made the best use of the second chance that came in his way. Valmiki’s notorious past and the transformation in his character are cited today as lessons for others – the lesser mortals in the present day world may not, however, be as fortunate. They would wish their past not to overhang on the present, especially if it is not perceived to be too good.
In 2010 the above problem came to the fore when a Spanish individual complained against a newspaper for having retained a report on the auction of his house several years ago, even though the dispute had long been settled and against Google, the search engine, for having made the information available through normal Internet searches. The courts upheld that an individual has the right, under certain conditions, to request a search engine to remove links containing personal information about him, especially when the information is inadequate, inaccurate, irrelevant or excessive for the purpose. This is referred to as the ‘right to be forgotten’.
The ‘right to be forgotten’ seems to be a great comfort to millions of individuals. This right will help a criminal under rehabilitation to quickly get back to a normal social life. It will also prevent misuse of old and irrelevant information and avoid damage to one’s reputation. Courts in more than one jurisdiction have recently found merits in upholding the right to be forgotten. The mighty US, however, is yet to grant this right.
But this right, if granted, may cause some collateral and perhaps unintentional damage to the cause of right to information. There have been thousands of applications from individuals to Google to delete links to past information about them. All requests have not been honored, but the question remains, how can Google exercise consistent and acceptable judgment about whether a particular past information has indeed become ‘irrelevant’ or ‘inadequate’? There could be a tendency on the part of a search engine to accept and honor requests (for deletion of links to past information) rather than face litigation later! In that case, information available in the public domain could be less credible. In a way, it is a sort of censored information, which would henceforth be available.
The advocates of ‘right to be forgotten’ argue that the information is actually not deleted from the Internet; the link to such information is only disabled. So the ‘censorship’ allegation is overblown. However, in the world of Internet, disabling the link to information is as good as erasing it from public memory.
Before Internet became all-pervasive, people had little control over information associated with their past. Though public memory is always short-lived, no one could stop the neighbourhood gossip about a person’s dubious past even during those times. Sometimes, a person’s reputation was prone to such gossips founded on false anecdotes and exaggerated interpretations. The age of Internet has made past information about a person easily accessible and has thereby provided legitimacy and authenticity to the so-called neighbourhood gossips. Thanks to search engines, a person’s reputation is no more controlled by exaggerated public gossip. However, by granting the ‘right to be forgotten’ and allowing censorship of information at the initiative of the person himself, we would dilute the power of Internet to help us form informed opinion about the person. With the ‘right to be forgotten’ are we trying to provide primacy to mundane public gossips and rumours once again?
The society must keep pace with the advent of Internet and people must mature to live with the plethora of information without censors. May be, the Internet will be able to discipline a probable errant in the society just as the threat of a bad credit history is able to enforce credit discipline in many. I find a lot of wrong in the right to be forgotten!
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Manoranjan Mishra 