29/10/2018
Understand. Forgive.
Ethical questions on The Right to Be Forgotten concept.
The rapid development of technology in recent years deeply affects the scheme of international law. The scientific revolution led to the rapid development of communication technologies that allow access to many information resources through the Internet. In addition, social and political changes of the 21st century have led to the need for change and significant objective of legal evidence, a change needed to cope with technological changes taking place almost on a daily basis.
Identifying characteristic of today's digital technologies is the ability to transcend territorial boundaries, thereby challenging the jurisdiction of any nation state and complicate the implementation and enforcement of existing legal rules. Whenever national laws are not completely aligned, or there is a contradiction between the legal principles that do not necessarily lead its choice of a single jurisdiction, governments, and private parties find themselves under pressure to develop new international mechanisms and create shortcuts that evoke complex disputes digital technologies.
Human society has plunged into a new digital information environment. Despite the fact that such a medium is created by man, on the technical side, it is the realm of machines, which, unlike a person, do not forget anything… never…It's really a very tough environment.
On the one hand, a person is, first of all, a social being, it is a question of behavioural errors committed by us as individuals. On the other hand, a person, being a biological being, has such a functional property as memory, which is inherent in the phenomenon of forgetting. We are annoyed at our forgetfulness.
Thinking as such is impossible without the process of analysis, manifested in the identification of priorities based on forgetting. Let's pay attention to the important property of consciousness, which has an ethical portion: people tend to forget bad things that happened to them, but also tend to remember the good things. This phenomenon brings us back to the social aspect of human nature: it is believed that understanding someone means almost forgiving him.
The Internet remembers everything. For example, your potential employer, before starting to communicate with you, will look at the Internet, look for information about you, whether there is anything that characterises you not only as an employee but also as a person. If there are any negative traces left on the Internet from the past, which, perhaps, to you today are almost non-existing, a potential employer might take this information into consideration.
But Internet- information, your every mistake is stored forever - the Internet cannot forget, and it is not able to forgive.
The digital environment from a technical point of view remembers everything. Forever. Data, being appearing once on the Internet, will stay. It does not disappear and cannot be forgotten or erased. However, it is possible to technically stop the search engine from providing links that allow access to the requested information published on the Internet.
Therefore, it is not necessary to erase information from an Internet resource as such. Needless to say, that is technically not feasible since information is constantly copied from one resource to another. But for oblivion, it is enough to remove meta-tags from information systems of search engines, and access to information becomes difficult.
In view of the fact that the right to oblivion allows you to remove from the search engines not only information that is distributed in violation of the law or inaccurate information, but also information that corresponds to reality, but for some reason regarded by the subject of information as undesirable is raising a question: if the Right to Be Forgotten makes it actually possible to "re-write the history."?
What are the chances that individual, by applying The Right to Be Forgotten concept, will receive a legitimate advantage over the public interest in free access to information, which will practically lead to a distortion of information?
Of particular concern is the fact that who may decide how reliable the information is? What information is now considered to be irrelevant? What has lost it importance, due to subsequent events or actions of the petitioner to be forgotten? Aren’t those question should not be left to the consideration of the person operating the search system?
It is easy to predict that in the absence of clear criteria for assessing these conditions and under the threat of significant sanctions, people will automatically remove the references indicated by themselves as “undesirable”.
Should people be allowed to be forgotten, or should they bear the burden of being imperfect?
