The Internet has memory, a lot of memory.
But the user is not helpless in the face of this observation: the right to be forgotten makes it possible to remove or make less visible personal data from the past. Three things to know about this often little-known and misunderstood right.
The concept of the right to be forgotten encompasses two very distinct elements: the “right to de-referencing”, which we are talking about here, and the “right to erasure”, allowing an organization to be asked to erase personal data.
European citizens can submit a request to search engines to remove a link from their results. If the request is accepted, the article is not removed from the Internet, but it is made less visible since it is no longer accessible by search engines with a nominative query.
This often concerns press articles. The BBC publishes a list of all its dereferenced articles and there are a very large number of them! Example: a 2003 paper detailing how “Joseph X, 26, and Michael Y, 28, from east London, were charged with possession of cocaine.” No one knows what happened to Joseph and Michael, but if they have since reintegrated, there is no doubt that these old items can haunt their nights.
While search engines have become a personal showcase and the majority of recruiters today use the web to get an idea of candidates, a simple article visible on the first page of results can be a considerable handicap. The right to de-referencing applies in particular to anonymous persons who have been the subject of a degrading article (road accident, court convictions, etc.). It can also concern, more simply, people wishing to have their name removed from an online directory.
However, this right to be forgotten is not absolute: due to the “overriding interest of the public”, some results cannot be removed from search engines. This is the case when it comes to a personality or an event of importance in the public debate. For example, a priest who was convicted of possessing paedophile images was denied his right to de-reference articles detailing his banishment from the Church.
To understand, you have to go back. In 2014, during a dispute between Google and the Spanish CNIL, the Court of Justice of the European Union rendered a decision that appeared technical but which had important consequences. The Court established that Internet users can ask search engines to remove from their results, personal information “inappropriate, irrelevant or no longer appears relevant”. Thus is born at the turn of a court judgment this famous “right to be forgotten”. It will be enshrined by the European Union in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016.
The right to be forgotten now seems obvious to users. However, the law is not the same everywhere. In the United States, the right to be forgotten is not enshrined by the legislator. Freedom of expression is considered superior to the right to privacy, while Europe balances these two imperatives. In 2015, an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal virulently denounced “the last European export: Internet censorship”. The object of wrath? The desire of the CNIL to impose the right to be forgotten on search engine results in the United States.
In 2019, the European justice ruled in favour of Google against the CNIL on this issue of the geographical limit of the right to be forgotten. This only applies in Europe, i.e. search engines are only required to delist obsolete links about a European citizen on their European versions, and not worldwide. This geographical constraint shows the limits of the right to be forgotten that no longer takes effect when the user connects from another with a VPN.
Without resorting to delisting, it is possible to avoid possible future problems by cleaning your own social networks. Who thinks of deleting their old MySpace or Skyblog accounts, their tweets written 10 years ago, their first Facebook statuses when there were not yet the parents and colleagues of the office? Yet these are all contents that could one day resurface at the worst of times – for example when signing a lease.
There are many tools to delete old content on networks. On Facebook, on its profile page, the “manage publications” button allows you to delete messages that have reached their expiry dates relatively quickly. On Instagram, it is possible to delete or archive your content: go to your profile page, click at the top right then select “Your activity” and finally “Photos and videos”. For Twitter, on the other hand, it is recommended to go through tools like TweetDelete or TweetWipe. To go further and tackle the entire spectrum of personal data, two services make it possible to make disappear in a few clicks its data scattered on the Internet, used in particular for advertising purposes: Mine and Incognito.
To leave as few traces as possible on the Internet, browser extensions that block most cookies and trackers, such as QwantVIP are available. They limit the collection of digital personal data and keep your privacy.
Now it’s time to take back control of your digital story. To exercise your right to be forgotten at Qwant, it’s here: https://help.qwant.com/docs/vue-densemble/comment-exercer-mon-droit-a-loubli/
