Mario Costeja González is now a global celebrity. He did not want to
become one. He did not even want to become famous. If anything, he
wanted to disappear into the shadows. Here is what happened. González,
the man who sued Google is a Spanish man whose name appeared in a
Spanish newspaper way back in 1998 regarding a government-ordered real
estate auction to recover the social security debts he owed. Now, he is a
changed man and in a good position financially. He had a peaceful life,
except when he Googled his name and came across those old newspaper
articles.
Incensed Google is ruining his reputation, he has sued both
the newspaper and Google Spain saying they should remove those articles
because they infringed his right to privacy. On the 13th of May, the
European Court of Justice(ECJ) ruled in his favour stating Google should
remove the links from its listings as everyone has a ‘right to be
forgotten’ which applies to any search engine, be it Google, Bing or
Yahoo. Anyone can ask the search engines to remove the listings. Four
months later, even as the shockwaves from that judgement continue to
reverberate around the internet and González and his earlier debts
gained unwanted attention all over the world, it is time to bring in the
‘right to be forgotten’ to the privacy-poor population of India.
Before
Google adorers who love the Schmidtian anti-privacy mantra ‘if you have
something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be
doing it in the first place’ and the fans of the philosophy ‘everything
that happens must be known’ start frothing at the thought of introducing
the law to India, it is important to note that the ‘right to be
forgotten’ applies only to search engines and lets us users to request
the search engines to take down the listings in our names. It means,
whatever content has been published on a website will still be there.
Only that no one will be able to find it using Google or Bing.
It
also doesn’t mean that seedy politicians, or scamsters or such lot will
be able to erase their past actions from the Internet. As the European
ruling specifically states, “if it appeared, for particular reasons,
such as the role played by the data subject in public life, that the
interference with his fundamental rights is justified by the
preponderant interest of the general public in having, on account of
inclusion in the list of results”. In plain English, if a person who
wants a listing deleted is a public figure and if that deletion is not
in the interest of public interest, then the search engine can deny the
request for deletion. On the other hand, the ‘right to be forgotten’ can
be one of the most powerful weapons that we could give our ordinary
citizens. People born in the 1980s and earlier have been lucky that
their youthful antics have not been recorded on the internet for
posterity. For ‘millenials’ who are not that fortunate, girls who have
been victims of revenge porn and many such others, the ‘right to be
forgotten’ will be the best gift.
