In response to “The Solace of Oblivion”, Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker, September 29th, 2014.
The “Right to be Forgotten” is an unfortunate misnomer for a balanced data control measure decided by the European Court of Justice. The new rule doesn’t seek to erase the past but rather to restore some of its natural distance. Privacy is not about secrecy but moderation. Yet restraint is toxic to today’s information magnates, and the response of some to even the slightest throttling of their control of data has been shrill. Google doth protest too much when it complains that having to adjust its already very elaborate search filters makes it an unwilling censor.
The result of a multi-billion dollar R&D program, Google’s search engine is a great deal more than a latter-day microfiche. Its artificial intelligence tries to predict what users are really looking for, and as a result, its insights are all the more valuable to Google’s real clients — the advertisers. No search result is a passive reproduction of data from a “public domain”. Google makes the public domain public. So if search reveals Personal Information that was hitherto impossible to find, then Google should at least participate in helping to temper the unintended privacy consequences.
Stephen Wilson
October 1, 2014.