Back when I was 17/18 and I was making my big life plans, it was human rights which made me decide to pursue a career in law, and in particular to apply to Exeter College, Oxford where the tutors specialized in criminal and family, and human rights law. Now I know I work in a large London commercial law firm, but I still follow news articles and campaigns run by groups such as Liberty and am fascinated by the hugely ethical debates such as the acceptable period for detaining a suspected terrorist or whether free movement of people, and in particularly asylum seekers, should necessarily mean no/minimal border control or regulation. I find the relationship between the law and 'fundamental' human rights so interesting (I say 'fundamental' because you could write 2000 words on what that means in this context). I know, call me a geek.
Therefore, it will come as no surprise that the recent decision in the European Court between a Spanish man and Google grabbed my attention when it came up on BBC News as I was flicking through on my lunch break. If you aren't familiar with the ruling, it was a Spanish man who complained, and thus applied to the court for a ruling, because an auction notice for his repossessed home came up in the search results on Google. He argued that this was an infringement of his privacy, and thus these results should be deleted from the search engine. In essence, what he argued for was a 'right to be forgotten.' And he won.
Now as I write this, I have to admit I am completely undecided as to how I feel about it. As with any human rights debate, and particularly any concerning privacy and a right to privacy, there are two sides to weigh up, and I don't genuinely believe that any person can outright decide that one outweighs the other. On the one hand, we all have the right to be able to control what information is out there on the internet for other people to read. We all have a right to a private life, and to certain aspects of our life being private, even celebrities (although that's a debate for another day.) However, don't we also have a right to know the full facts/picture about something/someone before making our mind up about it? Surely that's what the internet is for. I don't want to go on TripAdvisor and only see positive reviews about a hotel which actually has awful food, is in the middle of nowhere and has a cockroach infestation. I want the truth.
Let's take three scenarios which this decision could potentially impact:
A school are looking for a new dinner lady. A previous reformed sex offender wants to apply for the job, and thus wants all traces of the news stories covering their conviction deleted.
An ex-politician is running again for election. He wants all news stories relating to his scandalous affair with his secretary and his misuse of illegal substances deleted.
A doctor has received many bad reviews on the NHS website because he has previously mistreated and misdiagnosed patients. He wants all those reviews deleted.
I'm sure after reading and thinking about those examples for two seconds you have become even more confused. I certainly did. If we are to believe that people can change and be reformed (as our punishment regime within the UK advocates) then we must also believe that people should be allowed a fresh start, free from their past. However, on the other hand, do you want to be the couple who allow a previous sex offender into your home to look after your child, only to find out later that it happened because the stories about their offences were deleted from the web?
On a train at the weekend, I happened to end up sat opposite to a man who worked on coding for Google, based in California. The inner geek in me couldn't help but ask what his opinion was on the case and the impact it would have. His response was simply to say that it will just become another automated thing that Google will set up, and ultimately he didn't think it would affect the Google business too much. I pressed him to give me his opinion on the ethical debate rather than the pragmatic, but he didn't really offer one. He did say that Google are already having to create complex systems to deal with complaints all the time, so this was just another example. I have to say, I'm much less bothered about knowing exactly how Google are going to implement the case outcome than their view on whether the decision is actually right or wrong, but there you go. It was still interesting.
Ultimately, I have to say that I err on the side of believing that this judgement was wrong, because when you look at examples like the ones I have given above I think it becomes more difficult to being able to justify the potential dangerous outcomes that could result from a 'right to be forgotten.' Furthermore, is this 'right to be forgotten' going to form part of the European Convention of Human Rights? How will it develop; will it extend to ensuring that there is absolutely NO way of tracing past information about a place/thing/person? There's no denying that it's a slippery slope. What started off as a Spanish man wanting information about his repossessed home being deleted could easily become much bigger. In my opinion, everyone has a right to be 'forgiven' but not 'forgotten.' People must accept that when they do things that society deems morally wrong, they will suffer as a result. We may accept their behaviour and allow them to move forward, but we cannot allow their immoral acts to be forgotten.
No comments:
Post a Comment