Posted by Leonard Steinberg on May 15th, 2014

Could the Court of Justice of the European Union’s decision requiring internet search engines such as GOOGLE to remove information deemed inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant be coming to the USA? In real estate land when we want to know something about someone, the word ‘google’ has been the adjective of choice. What if you could erase certain ‘uncomfortable’ details about your past? Is this a war on transparency?

Since the ruling in Europe on Tuesday which affects 500 million citizens, Google is already getting requests to remove objectionable personal information from its search engine. Now comes the question: what exactly is ‘objectionable’? Removing valuable insights into a persons past could take us back in time surely? Granted, forgiveness is a wonderful thing, but knowing what bad (or good)things someone has done in the past should be transparent. Some very wealthy individuals have been able to ‘scrub’ certain details of their history from the web already. Some people are virtually un-google-able already.

This is an important moment in the history of the Web, a collision between a right to be forgotten and a right to know. There are abuses from all sides for sure, and so much that appears on the web is automatically deemed as fact. Maybe it would be better to start removing all non-factual claims on the web first, but I guess that could take centuries to un-do……