I think we've all heard the term “the web never forgets”, but what does that statement really mean. Well I think it's safe to say that at one point in our lives we've all "Googled" ourselves (and if you haven't you probably are now), what would you do if something you thought no one else knew about came up, or that old news paper article that doesn't paint you the way you are today?
Some of you might have heard of Stacy Snyder’s, for those who haven't she is known for an image posted online to MySpace captioned the “Drunken Pirate” with the consequence of her teaching degree being denied. This is an example of people’s private life interfering with their work and study. There are many other cases where similar things to this have occurred. This has sparked a series of court cases around the world for people to have the right to be forgotten.
With the recent upward trends in mobile technology and the widespread availability on mobile networks and Wi-Fi, more and more of your data is being stored online. This can be seen as both a pro and a con. Your data is stored for longer with this trend, meaning that once was lost with human memory is now never forgotten, an interesting read is Rosen's "Free Speech, Privacy, and the Web that never forgets". Paper presented at the Information Privacy conference in 2011, where he discusses this idea of society using the limits of human memory to right people’s wrongs.
This "right to be forgotten" can come in many forms from people being able to compel organisations to delete or de-identify information held about them. There are many countries around the world where this is becoming a basic right for people. With Google, getting more than 145,000 people asking for about 500,000 links to be removed.
People should have a basic right to be forgotten overtime. This would see society return to the way it was originally where people would eventually have things they have done forgotten. Currently there is no right to be forgotten in Australia, I believe that there should be cases where after a given amount of time this data is permanently deleted from the Web, allowing for people to have things forgotten.
I would like to leave you with these words from Mayer-Schönberger's 2009 book "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age"
“…forgetting performs an important function in human decision-making. It permits us to generalize and abstract from human experiences. It enables us to accept that humans, like all life, change over time.”
Do you think we need the right to be forgotten?
