The "Right to be Forgotten", misguided and misleading.
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com.
The so-called right to be forgotten is
something that was codified by the European Union in, I think 2014.
What they ruled was that search engines on request were required to remove
information about individuals if they requested it.
So for example, it said theoretically I could go to Google and say, Hey,
this piece of information about me is wrong or remove it from the search engine.
The problem is that, yeah, it works.
But not in the way most people want it
to work and not in the way most people expect it to work.
And I really want to dive into exactly why
it's such a misguided and misleading concept.
First of all, we have to understand what search engines do.
The best way to think of search engines is that they are a referral service.
In other words,
when you look for something like say the word Tesla,
when you get the results from, say, Google or Bing or whomever,
what it's doing is it's saying, okay, fine, I know about Tesla.
They're over here on Tesla motors dot com.
They're on wikipedia.org.
There are all these other Internet sites
out on the Internet and this is where you'll find that information.
When you remove something from the search engine.
All that really means is that the search engine no longer has that information.
So, for example, if if somehow for some reason, Tesla was to be removed
from the search engine because of the right to be forgotten,
then when you ask the search engine, show me stuff related to Tesla,
they might come back and say, nope, don't know the guy, never heard of them, which.
Is again, misleading because
it didn't actually remove anything from the Internet.
All it did was remove the references
to that, something from that specific search engine.
Now, there are two really huge problems with this.
One is that the information is still out there.
Just because you told Google to forget that Tesla was referenced on Teslamotors.com
doesn't mean that teslamotors.com went away.
It's still there.
That information is still there.
Talking about Tesla.
Same for any other websites that the search engine might have pointed to.
The other problem.
Is that we think of maybe one, two, three search engines at the most.
Most of the time we think of Google.
It's certainly the biggest search engine.
We might also consider YouTube.
YouTube is, by many people, considered the second biggest search engine,
although since it's owned by Google, things get kind of confusing.
There's Bing.
There's DuckDuckGo.
So if you go through and you ask each of those to remove information about X,
they presumably would no longer point to the information about X.
The information about X is still out there.
It's still out there on the Internet.
Guess what?
There are hundreds, if not thousands of other search engines
and archives that may also have information about X in their indices.
They don't actually contain the pages,
the data, but they might point to all those other sites that talks about X.
So great using Tesla as my bad example here.
If we suddenly are able to remove Tesla
from Google and from Bing and from DuckDuckGo, great.
That means people that use those search engines won't get pointed at the sites
that contain information about Tesla, but other search engines still do.
Other archiving sites still do.
And anybody who's really interested in diving deep and trying to find
information about this topic will know to go try those other search
engines, to go try Internet Archive, to go try any number of other things.
The information has not been removed from the Internet.
All you've done with Right to be Forgotten
is made things harder to find, but not impossible to find.
Now, here's the other interesting side
effect that a lot of people kind of missed the point on this one.
It's called the Streisand effect.
And what it boils down to is that many, many years ago, when
digital photography and the Internet were basically coming into bloom,
there was a picture posted of Barbra Streisand's house in California.
Like, it's a house.
She attempted to say, I don't want that picture posted anywhere publicly.
It just, no, this is my house.
It's private.
It is not something that I want.
Here's the thing.
Her action actually ended up drawing more attention to that photo.
Given that hers was the first, we now have this effect
called the Streisand effect that talks about drawing attention
to something by trying to hide it, especially on the Internet.
And yeah, that photo, it's there in Wikipedia.
Under the Streisand effect,
she had exactly the opposite effect that she intended.
When you attempt or when you call out to the search engines to remove something,
that fact the fact that you made this request may itself be made public.
That then tells people who happened to be watching, you're trying to hide something,
you're trying to remove something from the Internet.
It's still out there.
Might not be in the search engine, but it's still out there.
And we know what it is.
You asked to be removed.
Let's go look at it some more.
Let's go find some other search engines that locate it.
Let's dive more deeply.
Let's make our own copies.
Let's make sure that this information
that you're trying to hide is never fully removed from the Internet.
It's like I said, it's a dilemma. I get it.
There are situations where you desperately
want information to be removed from the Internet.
But one of the reasons we say the Internet is forever is exactly this.
It is so trivial to make copies, to show up in search engines,
to show up in archives, to have individuals create copies of things.
I mean, we've all seen this with deleted tweets on Twitter.
They come back because somebody took
a screenshot at the time the tweet was still available.
Well, that tweet isn't going away anymore.
The Internet really is forever.
And yet there are scenarios where you
really do have very legitimate reason to have something removed.
Unfortunately, it may be totally valid and totally right to do so.
It's also ultimately impractical.
The important thing to realize is whenever you post something
on the Internet, you really do need to think of it as being there forever.
And if you ever want to hide something
from others, the very act of doing so might just draw more attention to it.
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i'm Leo Notenboom and this is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.