This episode was produced by UIC communication students Shawn Rizvi ’15, Mark Bissonnette ’15, Alyssa Lopez ’15, Kris Fuentes Cortes ’15, and Stephanie Espinoza ’15. It discusses privacy delved into concepts of remembering and “the right to be forgotten” in the digital age. Professor Viktor Mayer Schönberger (Oxford Internet Institute) was the guest on the show.
This podcast is a class exercise and it does not represent the views and opinions of the University of Illinois at Chicago or any of its departments.
Produced: Spring 2015
While working on this project Kris Fuentes Cortes’ op-ed on this topic was published in UIC News.
Transcript
[MUSIC: InfoNation theme music and intro] Welcome to InfoNation, UIC’s very own podcast created by students, for students. At InfoNation we discover how media, information and communication are created, governed, and used. Produced by upper level students in the department of Communication, InfoNation brings academic research to help make sense of our increasingly mediated society. We go to the library so you don’t have to!
[STEPHANIE ESPINOZA] Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Infonation! Have you ever wondered how something that you posted online could haunt you later on in life? Interested in learning about the issues of having personal data removed from Google and other search engines? Then stick around!
Today our topic will be about “The Right to be Forgotten”. To help us discuss this topic we will speak with Professor Viktor Mayer Schönberger from the University of Oxford who will give some insight from a legal and scholarly perspective.
[KRIS FUENTES] Our group’s interest in Privacy peaked when we came across the piece written by JeanFrancois Blanchette, a current professor at UCLA. He wrote this with his coauthor Debra G. Johnson. Their piece was entitled, “Data Retention and the Panoptic Society: The social benefits of forgetfulness.” In this piece, Blanchette introduces the term called social forgetfulness and this really has us curious. Within this article, Blanchette talks about the second chance that social forgetfulness can open up for some of us. With data retention in our society, and how our society sells information, and democratic base as well, he finds of when and where social forgetfulness can be applicable, and he demonstrates this by bringing in three main cases. So, this term social forgetfulness, really had us intrigued. So we decided to do some further research and down the road came across the book, “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” and that is where our group decided to do our main research. The ‘right to be forgotten’ is something not many people know about. So, we decided to prove that point and ask random people on the streets to see if they knew what it was, and also get their opinion whether they believe ‘the right to be forgotten’ is something that will benefit or hurt society. This is what we got:
[ANONYMOUS] I do not know what ‘the right to be forgotten’ is. I think it’s kind of like a double edged sword. For example, I think everyone has the right to take down what they write down on the web. But on the other hand, for example, businesses they want to hire you or they are looking into your character after you write something racist or sexist online but then you take it down, how do they know you won’t do that again? Or how do they even know that you would make such comments that would reflect badly on the company if you took them down? But I would say I lean more towards people being able to take down what they write. My friend was telling me about Budweiser, and they were running a campaign that said “ Removing No from your vocabulary” and they didn’t understand how that promoted like rape culture cause alcohol is the influence in that and they didn’t understand what a negative, like what negative connotations that had towards that cause they just were blinded to that. So I think sometimes we rate things that we don’t realize can be seen negatively or can have a very bad impact on society. So I think we definitely do have the right to take that down. But as I was saying earlier, the doubleedged sword, so I do understand both sides. But yeah, I think it is a controversial topic.
[SE] For those who may not be familiar with this term, “The Right to be Forgotten” is the right for an individual to request all personal data to be removed from all search engines. In other words, an individual has the right to maintain their privacy and have all of their personal information deleted from the Web. To continue with this interesting topic, we also have Professor Viktor Mayer Schönberger from the University of Oxford who is going to give us some more insight on the “Right to Be Forgotten”
[MARK BISSONNETTE] What are the consequences society experiences when remembering becomes the default and forgetting the exception?
[VIKTOR MAYERSCHÖENBERGER] Right. So, as your question already implies, in the digital age the default has shifted from a default of forgetting to a default of remembering. Because remembering now is easy, and straightforward, and cheap, and doesn’t come at great cost. See in the past, if you wanted to remember something you needed to know how to write, you need to buy paper, which often times in past centuries was relatively expensive. And you needed to sit down, you needed to have the luxury of a candle in the evening after work to actually write down your thoughts. And the result can actually be, both stark and challenging not just for individuals, but for society at large. The most obvious challenge is that if everything we have said or done in the past is being remembered, and not just remembered by us, but digitally remembered and accessible to others than they may be able to remember stuff about us that we already forgot ourselves. That creates a strong concentration of informational power among those that have access to these digital memories and that gives them power far beyond what they have had in the past. For example, Google knows every single search and search query that I sent to them the last nine months or so.
I can’t even recall what I searched for last week online, so there is this significant power imbalance, but then there is another potential challenge which I call the time challenge. And the time challenge has to do with the fact that forgetting actually performs a very important function, it frees our brain from stuff that is no longer relevant to us, or that we think is no longer relevant to us. If we are reminded of whatever we have done before, that might cloud our ability to act in the present. So forgetting, in a way, creates a space of ignorance that in this sense, enables us to act in the present and to look forward into the future rather than to be tethered to an ever more comprehensive past.
[MB] What kind of legislation regarding digital remembering is present within United States and the European Union? Are either particularly effective in restoring forgetting?
[VMS] Well, there is a lot of misconception out there about “The Right to be Forgotten” and similar legislative attempts in Europe and elsewhere, and what they actually do. In Europe, there is a data privacy law that has been in place since the middle of the 1990s. And that data privacy law gives the data subjects, these are the individuals, the right to rescind, to take back consent and to object to information processors processing their personal data. Thats been in place since the mid1990s, but it didn’t have much of an impact, except after Google became really prevalent. And so there was a case relatively recently where the highest court in the European Union, the European Court of Justice, ruled that this particular data privacy law applies to Google and Google searches and that individuals can request that Google take certain things off the index. Now, its really interesting to see how this plays out, because the way it plays out is as follows Google is indexing, and therefore making searchable, other websites on the web. And these individuals have been written up, they have been reported on other websites that they did something, they did something wrong, perhaps they didn’t pay their social security taxes and so So some websites listed their names and these individuals went after these news websites. But the news websites said, look what we are doing is protected by the freedom of expression, in the United States one would say by the first amendment. And so the individuals couldn’t get the news websites to delete the reports that they had on these individuals. Then these individuals went to Google and said, well we can’t get the online news sites to take the stuff off, but we can get Google, perhaps, to delist. And the European court of justice went to Google and said, Google is what you are doing, that is providing a search function online, is this a freedom of expression? And Google explicitly said no, this is not freedom of expression, we have no editorial control whatsoever, its a pure algorithm that is the core of our search application and therefore search has nothing to do with freedom of expression. And then the European Court of Justice said, well if this is not a case of freedom of expression, then you will have to abide by this data privacy law and therefore take out of the index if people request certain web links. And Google complied, screaming loud that this is an infringement upon the freedom of expression. Even though, they themselves, in the trial refused, explicitly refused to say, to accept that what they’re doing through their searching application is, in fact, an expression of free speech. They can’t have it both ways and Google unfortunately had to find out.
[MB] You also offer some potential responses to bring back forgetting. One of these proposed responses was the concept of information expiration dates. How exactly will this work?
[VMS] Right. So, in my book, Delete, I already say that I personally don’t think that “The Right to be Forgotten” will solve the problem of remembering or comprehensive digital memory. So while I think that in Europe the debate about forgetting and “The Right to be Forgotten” is an important one and the court decision has stirred up that debate. I don’t believe that “The Right to be Forgotten” is solving the problem or the challenge, addressing the challenge that we face with comprehensive digital memory. In fact, if you look at the numbers, you immediately see that its not solving the problem. Google receives about 5 billion search requests every single day and the past almost twelve months Google has received less than half a million deletion requests for “The Right to be Forgotten” throughout all of Europe. In the same time, Google received in the tens of millions, 50 or 60 million, deletion requests from intellectual property holders. Int the European Union there are about 600 million people, so 600 million people, billions and billions of search requests, a huge search index, translated into a couple of hundreds of thousand deletion requests. That tells me that very few people actually go to Google and exercise their “right to be forgotten”. So I look at this and I think that we need something better, we need something less draconian perhaps, but also more pragmatic something easy to use for people to use to bring forgetting back into their daily lives, including their daily digital lives. And one way of doing that is just to make forgetting a little easier, a little less costly, and remembering a little harder and a little more costly. And the way that I think that I have conceptualized this is through expiration dates of information. That is, whenever you store some personal data you also assign to it an expiration date, it could be in 3 months or 3 years, or 300 years. You are free to set that expiration date, but once the expiration date is met the data is deleted automatically. That way whenever we store something of personal/sensitive nature we would be reminded by setting the expiration date that no data should be out there forever, or almost no data should be out there forever. The data is always contextual and is linked to a particular time and place, and needs to be understood in that fashion. And so, I am extremely excited by the success of apps and platforms like Snapchat and others, that actually provide something very similar to an expiration date already to communications so that they bring back the ephemerality of communications, the ephemerality of a quick chat on the water cooler thats gone, even three hours later you can’t recall it anymore if it wasn’t particularly exciting or exceptional. That kind of ephemerality we can bring back and I am so excited that more and more apps, and more and more platforms, are doing that and are successful. That tells me that there is a real need there, a market need out there.
[SE] Once again thanks to Viktor Mayer Schöenberger for providing us with valuable information about “The Right to be Forgotten.” Now to continue with this topic, we want to touch basis on the difference of “The Right to be Forgotten” between then and now. This controversy began in the European Union with the case of Mr. Costeja Gonzales who had been in debt back in 1998. Ten years later, he decided to Google himself and found out that his information was still out in the internet. He contacted both Google and the newspaper that posted the article about him and requested for his information to be removed. In 2010, with the help of the European Union he was able to accomplish his goal of having his past removed from the internet. Now we have Alyssa Shawn, and Kris, all Communication majors at UIC who will talk more about “The Right to be Forgotten.” Welcome guys! So tell us a little bit more about this right and its controversies.
[KF] Well, just as our narrator was talking about, there was a case of Gonzalez. Now more recently, there’s been another case brought up for ‘The Right to be forgotten,” and that was over in the U.K. and it had to do with Craig Brittain, and he was pretty much trying to erase his history and the past he was trying to erase, was the fact that he ran a revenge porn site. Obviously, this might be a clear determinant of what should not be forgotten on the internet, but he’s still fighting that case. You look at these two scenarios of Gonzalez where he’s just trying to erase his bankruptcy, as he’s trying to come back and probably try to build a future for himself, and then you have Brittain, who’s pretty much trying to hide this dark past. So, trounce is obvious, let alone, legal stance, its hard to determine what should be forgotten. But you know, we don’t really think about this, but think of memes, and Alyssa, I believe you had that to talk about.
[ALYSSA LOPEZ] Ya I mean, memes are all over the internet, they’re viral, they spread out like wild fire, but the issue is, that some people don’t want those memes out there because now this meme defines who they are and now they have become a public figure and they feel that this is not benefiting them in any way, rather its causing them damage. But in the sense, because they are a public figure, they’re allowed to be ridiculed and flaunted around almost like a celebrity. So, in that case, its also a really big debate whether or not these should be still on the internet or they should be able to be removed. I mean, some people put them out there because they see themselves “oh that was really funny of me,” or others are maybe taken out of context and just put out there against the persons will. So, I mean, even there, there’s a very blurred line whether or not it should be there or not. So, it makes it even more complicated to answer whether these kinds of memes should be forgotten or not.
[KF] Precisely, and there’s a lot of misconceptions that go with this legislation as well, Shawn you were talking about that earlier.
[SHAWN RIZVI]: Alyssa, Kris, have you heard about the right to be forgotten before researching for this podcast?
[AL & KF] No
[SR] Exactly, if not many people know about this legislation should there be more enforcement in place that dissolve the misconceptions that follow and I know Kris had a specific example that relate to the misconceptions.
[KF] Ya one misconception that was brought up to me is that well with the right to be forgotten, does this mean, that we can rewrite history? Can we rewrite what things are put out there? And is this considered a way of censorship on the internet, if we are allowed to erase history? This misconception was brought up to me by an individual who is actually a student researcher at a top university here in the U.S. And he actually refused to be a part of this podcast, just because he was being recorded. Just for the fact that it is so easy and inexpensive to be recorded and you can give off two different personas when you are not being recorded versus when you are. But it’s understandable, because, once you put that information out there, what can people do with it? People can take his point of view into a different sort of context like you were talking about with memes. And you know, he’s a researcher and so that means that he does not want anything to interfere when his name actually does get out there and his work is getting published. That’s something to keep in mind as well.
[AL] I think overall, we can agree there’s no exact clear definition of who qualifies to be forgotten, and I mean in trial cases, there’s only a handful of people who have actually taken that step to try to be forgotten. So really it’s a case by case basis to see who qualifies for it or not. So there’s no , yes or no answer that we can really give out but I think over the decades this subject is going to continue because again, there is not going to be a clear concise answer. So, hopefully, more clarification on what can qualify for it, but until then, its going to be up in the air for all of us
[PODCAST OUTRO AND THEME MUSIC] Thanks for listening to InfoNation! Coming to you from the University of Illinois at Chicago Department of Communication. Our theme music was created by Shawn Rizvi, a 2015 graduate. We hope we picked your interest and you learned something new today. Please feel free to engage by rating, commenting or sharing our episodes.