By Caitlyn Holmstedt
In today’s digital age, lives can be traced through the web. But when things go up, they stay up. Insensitive tweets, explicit photos, and videos of teens drinking underage are all par to prevent individuals from getting college scholarships and job opportunities. Decades-old data is harmful, but the European Union has come up with a solution. In 2014 they passed a Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF) law, giving individuals the power to remove their private data from search engines like Google.
While this law can be beneficial to individuals who want to remove their digital footprint, especially children, revenge porn victims, and public figures trying to maintain an image, the implementation of this law has serious implications for the United States and in many cases can be an infringement on freedom of expression and journalistic integrity.
RTBF is essentially an extension of the right to oblivion, a French law letting ex-convicts remove their public criminal record so they can rebuild their lives and get jobs more easily. Based on this, RTBF expands the right to privacy to all individuals with digital footprints. On its face it is vague, but the European Court of Justice defined it in the Google vs. AEPD case as securing individuals’ right to delete their own data, remove their data from search engines, and erase their data from third parties if the information is defamatory, untrue, or out of date.
Their definition stoked harsh critics, especially in the United States, who feared losing free speech, journalistic integrity, and small government. If data can be taken down from third parties, journalist articles are at risk of being removed from search engines, and even though the data is not being permanently deleted, it makes it harder to find, censoring digital public forums. This was exacerbated when the court decided that the law would not be implemented by governing bodies, but by the tech corporations being regulated. It is up to search engine companies like Google to address delinking data claims made by individuals and decide what is taken down.
In a region like the EU where privacy is valued in tandem with expression, a law like this is supported and acceptable, but those values do not necessarily translate to the US. Since passing the Right to Be Forgotten, the EU has pushed implementation companies, like Google, to extend RTBF across all domains. They reason that if data is delinked in the EU but not internationally, the potential for harm is still present and anyone could use a VPN tool within the EU to access it. As of now, Google and other companies have been resistant to international implementation, but as long as the potential stands, Americans’ data and journalistic work is exposed to corporations and foreign governments.
To prevent international or private overstep, the United States needs to take initiative and legislate limited power of outside actors in domestic internet spaces. The national government should make a law setting guidelines to keep Google from expanding the scope of EU Right to Be Forgotten Law into the United States. Congress has attempted and failed to regulate Google, Facebook, and other internet companies in the past, but it is time to put barriers in place to protect American journalism and freedom of speech.
Additionally, the broader United States should develop a limited internet privacy law. Without question, there are benefits to such a law, especially for minors, who mistakenly post detrimental information online or may be victims of over sharing and exploitation by their influencer parents. California has already addressed this in policy with a much narrower online erasure law protecting the right of minors to delete data that they have posted. A law like this even has majority support among Americans. While the US already censors things such as explicit child content, it can do more to protect its children, from themselves and their parents, by providing them with resources to remove harmful personal data.
Right to Be Forgotten law is not the problem, it is conceptually a good idea, the concern is letting businesses or alternative governments influence US internet, especially since foes of the US, like Russia, have passed their own versions of RTBF. The European Union’s Right to Be Forgotten law presents a threat to US values of free expression and journalism so legislative actions must be taken to protect against its spread. As of now, the US is vulnerable to policy decisions made abroad and by private actors so protective policy is a wise choice. That being said, RTBF can protect criminals, public figures, and children especially, from mistaken past decisions. By modeling a law after the California law, which ensures that minors can remove their personal data from the internet, the United States government can make the internet a more secure and private place.
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