A step backward, not forward

Maswood Alam Khan from Cockeysville, Maryland, USA | Published: May 23, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00

Google seems to have been put in the soup by a Spanish lawyer named Mario Costeja González. Twelve years ago, González's adored house had been auctioned off to settle his debts and a local newspaper called La Vanguardia ran a brief article about the seemingly insignificant event. The auction that perhaps punctured his pride was a bitter memory that González wanted to forget. Whenever anybody googled his name the story of the auction archived in La Vanguardia would have come up. González was vexed. He lodged his complaints with different agencies against the newspaper and also asked Google to put an end to the auction story by snapping the link in their search engine. Google found the complaint incredulous. The Spanish authorities, by and large, also dismissed the complaints. When the issue ultimately reached the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, the highest legal authority in the European Union, via Spain's National High Court, Google was hoping the court would side with them and uphold their efforts in maintaining the largest online repository of information in the world.
But, on May 13, Google and everybody around the world were flabbergasted when the European Court of Justice affirmed an original decision taken by Spanish National High Court, concluding that a person should be able to demand that a search engine remove links "on the ground that that information may be irrelevant and prejudicial to him or that he wishes it to be 'forgotten' after a certain time." Following the court's decision people have been lining up to have unpleasant bits of their history cleansed from Google's search engines.  More than 500 million people in 28 European countries now can legally demand that Google remove from its search results links that they believe are no longer timely or relevant, even if the facts contained in those links are factually true. Thus, an unheard-of dimension has been heralded in the charters of human rights: "Right To Be Forgotten".
Mankind always wanted immortality. But when they found they are mortal they wanted to live a reasonably long and healthy life. "Right to Live" was thus enshrined in the constitutions of countries since the dawn of modern civilisation. But living for long also proved boring at one stage. "Right to die" has of late been incorporated in the law books in many countries, given the advancement in medical science to prolong life through artificial means. When one is clinically dead and just breathing with the help of a 'Life Support' system, the law says, it is better to die.
Italian priestess the Cumaean Sibyl, though she was mortal, was granted by Apollo her wish to live about a thousand years in exchange for her virginity. She lived a thousand years, but her body withered away. Her body grew smaller with age and finally was kept in a jar. Eventually only her voice was left and she longed only to die in her feeble voice. Sibyl perhaps would not have opted to die if only she was granted to live with eternal youth.
In the unending continuum of 'Wishes of mankind' the "Dream to be immortal" has been followed by the "Right to live" and then the "Right to die".  Now the latest addition in their wish-list is "Right to be forgotten". But, can we really forget? Should we now beg to be forgotten?
The ability to forget is a quality, rather a sign of good health, a gift from God, as good as the ability to remember. One must marvel at the ability of human beings to find a way to smile, even if only for a moment, in the midst of terrible tragedies. But forgetting the lessons of history is a blunder that opens the same grounds for the same kind of perpetrators to repeat the same mistakes time and again. Still, mankind's memory is short and the big lesson of history is people don't learn lessons from the history.
In Arabic, the word for human being is "insaan", and it comes from the root word that means "to forget". Humanity frequently forgets what happens in the past, especially those tragic happenings. We would have been paralysed with grief, unable to move forward even one inch, if we were constantly reminded of the horror of our past tragedies and losses. Our genes have tailored our brains to weed out those unpleasant memories that naturally wane with the passage of time, making space for pleasant memories and renewed zeal for us to move ahead with our life and do things that we need to do and to not look back.
But why on earth should we cry for the 'Right to be forgotten'? Our genes are selfish. We, for that matter any living beings, don't wish to be forgotten. Trees leave behind their seeds, birds their chicks and humans their children to preserve their footprints on the surface of this planet.
Google, the tech giant, must be reeling from the surprise judgment by the European Union's Court of Justice on the "Right to be forgotten". Such judgment is akin to marching into a library and forcing it to pulp history books that portray shameful stories like the auction of González's adored house in Spain.
The right to be forgotten addresses an urgent problem in the digital age: it is very hard to escape your past on the Internet now that every photo, status update, and tweet lives forever in the cloud.
Google has already created a humongous storehouse of information, good and bad. The Internet is, in effect, a library of unimaginable size-full, as all libraries are, of news, gossip, archive material and other stuff which may to varying degrees be irrelevant, wrong or mad. Search engines should be like library catalogues-comprehensive and neutral, and without fear or favour of what the contents may reveal, or how they may be used. Who, other than the reader, has the right to say what should be read and what discarded? It should be up to individuals, not governments or for that matter not a court, to distinguish what is right or wrong, useful or immaterial."
While it's not hard to imagine where an individual would benefit from a right to be forgotten without any harm to the public, nevertheless there is far more scope for ill than for good here. This 'right to be forgotten' may form an unholy syndicate with which anyone, particularly someone with a team of lawyers, can beat up on gatekeepers to censor access to what would otherwise be publicly available information. The danger is the asymmetry of value in information access. It can be highly valuable for an individual to hide information about himself. There is essentially no benefit to Google to fight requests to hide particular pieces of information, so if it is forced to respond to requests at all, Google will tend to rubberstamp all requests. Then who is there to gain? Who will fight against censorship? Who will fight for the public's right to information? This ruling on the 'Right to be forgotten' will greatly enhance the ability of powerful individuals and bad guys to hide information about themselves, reversing the increased openness that the Internet has helped to bring. That's a step backward, not forward.
If a law on forgetting information has to be passed, better put the onus on the repository of information, not the intermediary. If a person can prove that there is incorrect information posted about him, he should have the right to demand that information be removed from public access to the original source like a newspaper or a blog, even if it was believed accurate when first posted. This is just an extension on libel laws. And it should also include inaccurate journalism. But why on earth Google, merely an intermediary, should be dragged to join the fray?
The tech giant could face enormous costs on account of litigations to keep old links in its search database and implementing a system that allows it to comb through thousands of takedown requests. Yahoo search and Microsoft's Bing will also be affected. Of course, that is the story in Europe. Because of First Amendment protections of free speech and Google's large political clout, experts believe it is highly unlikely that the "right to be forgotten" will ever be adopted as law in the United States. In Europe, the intellectual roots of the right to be forgotten can be found in French law, which recognises le droit à l'oubli - or the "right of oblivion" - a right that allows a convicted criminal who has served his time and been rehabilitated to object to the publication of the facts of his conviction and incarceration. In America, by contrast, publication of someone's criminal history is protected by the First Amendment, leading Wikipedia to resist the efforts by two Germans convicted of murdering a famous actor to remove their criminal history from the actor's Wikipedia page.
When death is a painful truth we try to conflate the veracity of death with an idealism of immortality. So, to hide our frailty under an imaginary mantle, we like to pose behind a piece of art or a chapter of history to look, though albeit artificially, everlasting to our posterity. Lest we are forgotten we leave behind our children and grandchildren to remember their ancestors. All these attempts are perhaps to redefine the purpose of our life and to defy the defeatism that mortality wrought by our fallibility brings in. Our life at times seems to be neither rhyme nor reason.
At a time, what is done cannot be undone we still try to undo the done, mostly in vain. At a time, when we are certain we all will have to pass away and friends, fans, well-wishers and relations will eventually forget us one thing still at the bottom of our heart we do not want is to be forgotten.
We do not wish to die nor do we want to be forgotten. But die we all must. And much as we wish to be unforgotten, at the end of the day we will be forgotten once we are gone with the wind. But, history books, shelved in the brick and mortar libraries or uploaded in the cloud via the Internet, are the eternal abodes the passing generations will go on taking refuge in, no matter Google removes some of their links to some of the events or not.
maswood@hotmail.com