Found on www.switched.com and brought to you by Lawyer Salinas
by Terrence O'Brien on March 10, 2011 at 01:45 PM
Peter Fleishcher, Google's global privacy counsel, took to his personal blog to address a push by several European countries to grant a "right to oblivion" or "right to be forgotten" to their netizens. There are several different ideas at issue, but one of the most controversial is that people have a right to remove information about themselves from the Web if they feel that data is out-of-date or inaccurate. Before launching into his lengthy and interesting argument, Fleishcher makes it clear that he is speaking only for himself and not for Google. But ultimately he says that "more and more, privacy is being used to justify censorship."
A ton of interesting and important questions are raised, such as "who should decide what should be remembered or forgotten?" and "if someone else posts something about me, should I have a right to delete it?" Fleishcher doesn't claim to have all the answers, but he does offer an compelling personal anecdote:"[T]he web is littered with references to my criminal conviction in Italy, but I respect the right of journalists and others to write about it, with no illusion that I should I have a "right" to delete all references to it at some point in the future. But all of my empathy for wanting to let people edit-out some of the bad things of their past doesn't change my conviction that history should be remembered, not forgotten, even if it's painful. Culture is memory."
The struggle with what constitutes a reasonable expectation of privacy in the digital age will continue. And nobody, including Fleishcher, claims to know for sure where we should draw the line. We all want control over what people say about us and what information about us is available for public consumption, but a fact of life in the 21st century (as uncomfortable as it may be) is that we must give up at least some of that control.
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