Week Eleven: The Right to be Forgotten

In a previous spoke, I touched on the fact that with the introduction of new technologies also comes a struggle to set new laws and protocols. This week Muze Fazlioglu’s article spoke to this struggle in relation to the European Union’s move to enact “The Right to be Forgotten” (TRTBF). Before reading this article, I’d never considered the fact that TRTBF would prevent the public from pursuing their public rights to access information of interest. Recently, I’ve been inclined to see the internet as this big black hole where information can be thrown into, but never retrieved. It’s a frightening thought. With this in mind, I am concerned when I think of the growing number of children and teenagers attached to technology and posting on social media platforms - many of whom are probably unaware that twenty years down the road when they regret that post, they won’t be able to permanently retrieve and delete that information. So I find myself in a bind, one less serious but similar to the one that the European Union is facing: do we empower users to control the information they share and who they share it with? Or do we protect the rights of an individual to access public information of interest to them? Fazlioglu states that people are less likely to remember information but can remember where to find it. Do laws such as TRTBF threaten the individual’s ability to find information they need? There is a constant conflict between the desire to exist online and the protection of personal data and neither side (technology or the individual) is ready to state their responsibilities in the debate. So again, this course has continuously proved to me that there will never be no questions asked over any issue related to knowledge and information in society.

Source used: Fazlioglu, Muge (2013). Forget me not: the clash of the right to be forgotten and freedom of expression on the Internet. International Data Privacy Law 3(3): 149-157.