Search engines give everybody in the sense of time and space access to personal information, they shouldn't.

Understandably there has been a lot of controversy around the phenomenon known as ‘the right to be forgotten’ on the internet. In short this ‘right’ would be the act of being removed from all search engine indexes, meaning any personal information about you on the internet will be much harder – if not impossible – to find. People often argue about whether a person should be able to request such information to be removed or not. Personally I think that people that have personal information posted about them online without their permission should be able to have it removed – not just request, but have that request be granted. The internet is an interesting place, where information can be stored and requested at practically any time a user desires. This can be incredibly useful for doing research, finding lost relatives, homeschooling etc. but there is a definite downside to this information being accessible by anybody. To everybody that has good intent with certain personal info, such as an address, there’s somebody that doesn’t. Burglars for example have a much easier time profiling habits because then can see when you’re home and surfing the web, maybe even read the postings saying you’re going away. But while this is mainly focussed on the social media part of the internet, I’m addressing a larger part of the while.
Let’s say somebody would google my name, not much would come up since I have most of my social media accounts hidden and I haven’t been part of anything of relevance. This means there isn’t much to find about me because I control what I show public, but let’s say –for the sake of an example- I’m wrongfully accused of a crime and arrested. I’d be easily findable in any of the search engines indexes, if people would google me then the first thing that would pop up is my name and face with a headline saying I’m a murderer or whatever. Wrongful media coverage is something that is not uncommon, especially on the internet. A prime example would be Sunil Tripathi, a man that had been missing for quite some time before the Boston Bombings occurred on April 15th 2013. (Lee, 2015) There was a Facebook-page created called “Help us find Sunil Tripathi” before the incident. Once the incident took place, a website called Reddit immediately jumped on the case and several threads were created saying that Sunil was one of the bombers. However, Sunil was innocent and his body was found a couple of days later. To this current day, the family is still receiving threats and hate because people read Reddit posts where Sunil is claimed a bomber, this is a dire issue and having a tool similar to googles ‘right to be forgotten’ would help combat these horrible misinterpretations.






Another common issue with the way the current system works is that if I do something incredibly stupid – say post a drunk photo my myself on Facebook or any other social media – that would still be indexed in the search results. 5 years from now the photo will still pop up on google image search, regardless of the fact if I deleted the post on Facebook or not. Obviously this would be partially my bad for posting the image in the first place, but the punishment for that action would be way too harsh. The negative effect of those things can drag on for an endless amount of years. When it’s a simple photo any future employer might understand it and dismiss it under the category ‘Young and fooling’ but a statement of political nature would lose its ‘distance’ in time and it would therefore look like I could’ve said it yesterday. This is one of the dangers that lie within making these statements on the internet, because people lose their sense of distance in time. If I posted about supporting a certain political party 15 years ago (which would be slight unrealistic in my case, but bear with me) it would seem to people browsing my profile as if I said that yesterday, which can be troublesome as opinions and views can drastically change overtime.
An argument against this ‘right to be forgotten’ is the so called ‘right to know’. This is the phenomenon where people should be allowed certain information about other people just because people believe they should. Not only is this a serious breach of the definition of privacy, but it’s also ridiculous to expect something from the internet that would elsewise never be publicly accessible anyways. To clear that up; many people battling the right to be forgotten start the argument about a pedophile moving into your neighbourhood, you want to able to google that person to make sure he isn’t one right? While I see the point being made here, it’s completely unfair to rely on the internet for that and battle the right to be forgotten because of it. In most western countries, released pedophiles get given a new identity by our own government, if you want to know everything about people – start fighting there, but don’t start blocking people from having a little privacy online, battle the source that blocks that information instead.



Bibliography
Lee, T. G. (2015, June 22). the Boston Bomber Who Wasn't. Opgehaald van NBC news: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/wrongly-accused-boston-bombing-sunil-tripathys-story-now-being-told-n373141