Most people spend their lives trying to remove every trace of negativity from their souls. Other people just try to remove proof of their negativity from Google, like this pianist from Europe.
Would you put this much effort into removing your negativity from Google?
Dejan Lazic was reviewed somewhat poorly in a 201o edition of the Washington Post, and he’s trying to have Google take down that review now so the world can only see him as somewhere between mediocre and pretty decent. The EU has a law allowing the “right to be forgotten” where totally false, public declarations about a person or company may be taken off Google or de-ranked. Now, this is great for a politician who is falsely accused of something, or for general slander– but what if a genuine news source writes an opinion column, should that be stripped?
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For example, most people would agree that Michael Jackson was an incredible artist, but if he was alive to request that his court battles be stripped from Google– would you think that was appropriate or fair?
Whose truth is right: the composer’s or the critic’s? And more critically, who gets to decide?
It’s a question that goes far beyond law or ethics, frankly — it’s also baldly metaphysical, a struggle with the very concept of reality and its determinants. Lazic (and to some extent, the European court) seem to believe that the individual has the power to determine what is true about himself, as mediated by the search engines that process his complaints.
Accordingly, in the three months after the “right to be forgotten” ruling went into effect, Google approved 53 percent of take-down requests on first application, and an additional 15 percent upon further review.
Those removals included articles from the Guardian about a former Scottish soccer referee who lied about granting a penalty kick, a BBC article that discussed a Merrill Lynch banker’s role in the financial crisis, and a report in the Daily Mail about an airline that had been accused of racism by a Muslim job applicant. And they proceeded despite the fact that, as Google complained in a filing to regulators, “in many cases we lack the larger factual context for a request, without which it is difficult to balance competing interests.”
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