The “Right to Be Forgotten”

In first sentences of Guardian articles that sound like George Saunders stories:

The top European court has backed the “right to be forgotten.”

The ruling comes in a case brought against Google Spain by a man who tried and failed to get a 1988 home auction notice removed from his personal search results. The matter, he said, “had been resolved and should no longer be linked to him,” and he told the Guardian he was “fighting for the elimination of data that adversely affects people’s honor, dignity and exposes their private lives.”

The judges said they had found that the inclusion of links in the Google results related to an individual who wanted them removed “on the grounds that he wishes the information appearing on those pages relating to him personally to be ‘forgotten’ after a certain time” was incompatible with the existing data protection law.

They said the data that had to be erased could “appear to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant or excessive … in the light of the time that had elapsed”. They added that even accurate data that had been lawfully published initially could “in the course of time become incompatible with the directive”.

This seems so beautiful and radical to me, which is disturbing. The Washington Post has more about the ruling’s potential consequences (“U.S. technology companies are at best going to be very unhappy”). [Guardian]