Now that the age of the Internet has been with us for several years now, its charming novelty appears to have worn off for some, and there is a growing backlash against the ubiquitous prevalence of personal information available online. Just recently, Spain’s Data Protection Agency issued an order to Google that insists the search engine giant remove links to material on 90 of Spain’s citizens. Google is pushing back hard against the directive, as you would expect it to, but the fact that there is this increasingly popular movement to allow individuals the right to have information about themselves removed from the public domain is telling.
The right to privacy has always been a thorny issue; some countries have legislated more explicit guarantees of privacy than have others. The United States Constitution, for example, while containing language that implies privacy in certain circumstances, does not overtly express a right to privacy in the classic sense. That challenges to the ability of the Internet to retain information on citizens without restriction have come largely from European countries is not surprising, when you consider that it is those countries that have historically looked more favorably at the notion of memorializing privacy protections.
In the United States, we do not seem, as a society, to be all that concerned with the right to privacy. Sure, we squawk about it from time to time, but the truth is that we have grown accustomed to being able to get whatever information we want whenever we want it (part of the “liberty” we hold so dear), and ultimately, we seem to cherish that “right” more than we cherish the right to privacy or to otherwise remain anonymous.
I’m not overly concerned about it, personally. If I was, I wouldn’t make a good portion of my living publishing articles in the public domain. Obviously, I know that by doing so my name is “out there” frequently, and so the idea that I would all of a sudden get antsy about my lack of invisibility would be silly.
But let’s be honest – those who are stridently against a so-called right to be forgotten, as it has come to be known, are those who stand to gain from the greater transparency of citizenries, and therefore should be regarded with some suspicion. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has famously dictated that privacy is dead – is that because he genuinely feels that way, or because it is in his business interests for it to be so? Media commentators, those who make it their business to observe and comment on the words, thoughts, and actions of others, have scoffed at the idea of a right to be forgotten. Indeed, Tessa Mayes of UK’s The Guardian has gone so far as to say that “a right to be forgotten is about extreme withdrawal, and in its worse guise can be an antisocial, nihilist act. If enacted, a right to be forgotten would signify the emasculation of our power to act in the world.” So people who just want to be left alone are now representatives of a group that will ultimately bring down global society?
Admittedly, there are certain kinds of information that should remain a part of the public domain, but most of that has to do with people acting in a professional capacity…the physician who has been in trouble with state regulators, that sort of thing. I don’t know of any reasonable person who believes access to information like that should be in any way hindered in an effort to dial down the ability of one private citizen to know more than he perhaps should about another private citizen who is merely acting in the capacity of a private citizen, which I say in that way to distinguish from the private citizen who makes a concerted effort to place himself in the public domain and whose claim to the right to be forgotten is thus less compelling.
In the course of performing simple searches on the names of old friends and acquaintances, I have been directed to court documents and other legal filings which pertain to them, and have learned things about their personal lives that I cannot imagine they would want me to know (or else they would have simply told me those things directly). I have had others do the same with me. I have also had others draw the wrong conclusions about situations in my life based on information they extracted from the Internet that in no way told the whole story about what had occurred.
Here’s what makes the Internet different with respect to this discussion – much of what you can find through the Internet was previously available in more archaic forms, but one had to make a distinct, extra effort to find them, and it was that very effort, as well as the associated cost that was often required, too, that would keep voyeurs at bay. Now, a great deal of information can be learned about someone…by another random someone…in just a few minutes, and with just a few clicks, on the Internet.
More disturbingly is how this now-universal access to information seems to have changed the very expectations that people have about privacy; it’s as though the evolution of the Internet, by virtue of itself, changed the way we look at the idea of personal privacy, like we’re now saying, “Well, the Internet has arrived, so no more keeping things from one another anymore.”
In the end, I’m not that worried about it, as those around me don’t seem to be worried. But it does beckon the question…with as much as we can come to know now, are we really that far away from accessing, with just a few clicks, one another’s bank balances, the contents of investment portfolios, as well as what goes on inside the walls of their personal residences…and more ominously, are we changing as a society into a people who thinks that kind of information should be transparent?
What makes me suspicious are the people who are so strongly against the idea of a right to be forgotten, who are so mortally offended by it. Even if it is a result that’s realistically difficult to achieve, I find it a bit worrisome that so many seem so put out by the very idea. What is the great harm in remaining anonymous in society? If average citizens want to be forgotten about, what in the world is the big deal about that…unless, of course, you have an ulterior motive in having them remain as accessible as possible?
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Bob Yetman, Editor-at-Large at Christian Money.com (www.christianmoney.com), is an author of a variety of materials on personal finance and investing, as well as on topics of fitness and self defense, to include the book Investor's Passport to Hedge Fund Profits (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) and the unarmed combat training DVD Thunderstrikes - How to Develop One Shot, One Kill Striking Power (Paladin Press).
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