(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Meg Leta:
Ctrl + Z – The Right to Be Forgotten
NYU Press, 2016
An older woman is employed as a dance teacher at a boys' school in the United States. She is proficient and committed and the students love her energetic teaching. One day, some of the boys happen to come across a movie on the internet in which the older dance teacher participates. The movie is from the 1960s, and is probably a bit cross-border in its content – but neither the boys nor the dance teacher take any more notice of it. Until a day soon after, when a firing note lands in the teacher's inbox. She is dismissed because the film she starred in does not match the school's moral code. The film contradicts what the school would like to connect with. The teacher must pack his bag and leave the school immediately.
The example comes from the recently published book Ctrl + Z – The Right to Be Forgotten by Meg Leta Jones, who works as a researcher in communications and technology at American Georgetown University. Leta Jones believes that the example illustrates the need for us to discuss and decide which rights should be associated with the newer digital capabilities:
«I'm not saying that you should not be responsible for the actions you take throughout life, but in the case of the dance teacher we are dealing with a movie that was created long before, someone knew something about digital media and the coming of the Internet . The movie is from a completely different context, ”explains Meg Leta Jones as I catch her on a Skype connection. "That a peripheral leisure production would later be digitized and made freely and publicly available, the dance teacher could not possibly have known anything when, back in the 1960s, she decided to co-star in the film. That's why I think it should be in her right to have that kind of material removed. "
Especially in the United States there are a large number of voices who find the whole idea of a right to be forgotten deeply problematic.
The right to be forgotten seems to be a more urgent discussion than ever. Technological developments, and in particular the emergence of the Internet and platforms such as social media, have particularly highlighted the need to discuss both cultural and legal perspectives. According to Leta Jones, we are in recent years witnessing what she calls an increased "discoverability", meaning that we can be discovered and examined to a greater and greater degree. "The right to be forgotten is roughly about the possibility of being able to go back and change some of the decisions you have made in the past or some of the decisions that have been made about you," says Meg Leta Jones.
To edit the story. But where is the line between removing material that may not be appropriate for you and has no interest in the public – and material that you would like to see removed, but which could have some value for others, either in the present or in the future ? Especially in the United States, there are a large number of voices that find the whole idea of a right to be forgotten deeply problematic. They argue that if such a right to be forgotten is given legal viability, it would be tantamount to editing in history. We can never in the present know what the future may need of information, and if we begin to remove information, the historians of the future will not be able to get a true picture of the past they would like to study. Therefore, it is better not to delete anything at all.
However, it is a simplification, says Leta Jones: "We can never have all the information available. Something will always be lost. We also do not have all the information about the past that we look at in our time. So I do not think it can be an argument for not deleting anything at all, "says Leta Jones. She interprets the two dissenting camps in the debate as an expression of a marked lack of knowledge about the newer media. “We do not know the values of information in the long run. It has to do with the fact that we do not really understand digital media yet. With analog media such as a shopping list or a personal letter, we had a better sense of what is important to store. We do not have that knowledge in the same way with digital media, 'the researcher points out.
Are search results speech protected? Interesting in the debate about a right to be forgotten is also to look at the differences that occur between countries. While Europe seems to be more receptive to the idea, there is a long way to go in the American political system. This is partly due to American culture, where a feeling that one has a right to know something about the people one acts with is far stronger than in Europe. At the same time, the right to be forgotten conflicts with several key paragraphs of US law. For example, according to US law, it is not possible to hold search engines and technological platforms responsible for the content they pass on – just as key parts of the US Constitution, which revolve around freedom of expression in particular, can be problematic to reconcile with the idea of a right to be forgotten. In American legal circles, there is still a debate about whether a search engine result is comparable to "protected speech" – and if this is the case, it will be freedom of speech that weighs heavier than the need to remove information. Precisely legal and cultural differences are essential to understand if one is to try to approach a set of rules. According to Meg Leta Jones, a solution to the problem can never be a general solution that applies to everyone:
“I think every culture has to make their own rules. A concept like forgiveness is also different from culture to culture, and therefore I do not believe that one can make a universal right to be forgotten, which can work all over the world. The right to be forgotten must be developed within the distinctive cultures and legal traditions. "
