"The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"

A section of O’Hara’s article, which I found rather interesting, was the discussion surrounding the ability of search engines to cope after the introduction of “the right to be forgotten” (O’Hara, 2015, p.73). O’Hara mentions how certain individuals believe that since removal of links from search engines must be evaluated separately for each individual case, this could cause such a workload and burden on search engines that their ability to make proper decisions regarding these cases could be impacted. O’Hara questions the legitimacy behind these individuals’ beliefs. While O’Hara asserts that search engine’s workloads are surely to rise as they continue to receive requests for the removal of links, he doesn’t believe that these requests will cause any greater of a burden than other requests that search engines already deal with, such as those concerning copyright. I feel that O’Hara brings up a really great point. In my opinion, the ability of massive search engines, such as Google, to make sound judgments in regards to individual cases for erasure of links, will not be influenced simply by the large amount of these cases. These search engines have plenty of experience dealing with other similar requests from the public. Furthermore, it is likely that these search engines possess the financial resources to have entire departments dedicated to the proper management of these requests for removal of links. It is interesting to me how individuals are concerned for these big search engines, which are able to manage just fine, instead of being concerned for individuals’ rights to personal data protection.   

References

O'Hara, Kieron (2015). The right to be forgotten: The good, the bad, and the ugly. IEEE Internet Computing 19(4): 73-79

- Alicja