The Right to Be Forgotten

Like a maddening multilingual elephant, the Internet doesn’t forget. Youthful political musings are recorded for posterity along with love-sick Facebook posts, mortifying photos, college-police blotters and announcements of ill-fated weddings. That’s inspired the formulation of a new fundamental right, one no Enlightenment philosopher ever dreamed of: A right to be forgotten. The European Union’s top court became the first legal body to make it more than an interesting idea: In May, it ruled that search-engine companies like Google must remove links to posts about citizens of the European Union who request it if they are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” — even ones that are lawful and true and still on the Web if you know where to look. Failure to comply could result in fines, thousands of requests have flooded in and unintended consequences are piling up.

In the EU, Googling for most names now yields this notice: “Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe.” By Nov. 25, Google had received 174,226 requests to remove links, covering 602,479 Web pages. They included appeals from a doctor who received negative reviews, a man convicted of possessing images of child abuse and a former politician seeking re-election. The court said search companies should find a “fair balance” between privacy rights and the public interest, but offered little guidance for doing so. Several British newspapers have had links to articles redacted from search results then later reinstated. Robert Peston of the BBC lamented that his writing had been cast “into oblivion” after links to a blog post he’d written about Stanley O’Neal, the former head of Merrill Lynch, disappeared. And now privacy regulators are pushing search engines to apply the right to their websites outside the European Union.