Right to be forgotten

The internet does not discriminate between what is intended for a good or bad cause and cares less about what you intend to keep private or public.

It saves them all and leaves a trail behind; a digital footprint. Once you post it, the world will roast it.

Years after you have clicked, posted, tweeted, shared, uploaded or downloaded, records of all that you thought you were doing in the privacy of your home would remain as digital footprints viewable and accessible by anyone on the World Wide Web.

If you doubt it, take this simple test of typing your name in any search engine and tell me what and how much the internet knows about you.

In today’s digital economy, your reputation is inextricably linked with your digital reputation. The internet has become an inseparable part of our daily lives. Lives are intricately woven into and literally lived on and off social media.

Distance and language are no longer barriers to our interconnectedness, as the internet has availed a community of ‘Netizens’, who know everything about everyone, are deeply involved in the lives of everyone and yet care next to nothing about anyone.

Do not delude yourself into thinking that your online activities are private to you. How many times have you not heard Netizens say this is my private wall, I have the right to say whatever I want to, if you disagree get off my wall or I will block you? I am sorry to disappoint you, if you are minded to stay private, do not get online.

Once you interact with the internet, your activities are stored, saved, archived and engraved in locations, and data centres completely outside your control.

Knowing how little control a Netizen has over the outcome of what he clicks should cause you to ponder on the need to be responsible and careful with what you put in the digital space.

In 2015, Ashley Madison, an anonymised online dating service suffered a massive security breach which exposed 300GB of user data, including user’s real names, banking data, credit card transactions and secret sexual fantasies.

Imagine a user’s nightmare of having their most private information available over the internet, even though Ashley Madison claimed that users could have their personal accounts completely deleted with the click of a button.

Hackers proved Ashley wrong by exposing huge amounts of data which supposedly had been deleted but were still traceable.

You wish that you could wipe out or keep a clean track with no trace of your digital footprints, isn’t it?

This could involve a task as simple as using the delete button or as difficult as requesting the online platform to erase or forget about you.

What you may miss is that your post was quickly screenshot by someone who took your post and saved it locally or uploaded it to the cloud, beyond your reach.

Digital Reputation

Admittedly, profiling people based on their online activities might be a biased way of judging them. Inescapably, however, our public personae are inseparable from who we are offline.

Particularly, in a world where the job market is competitive and employers adopt various metrics to streamline prospective employees, something as negligible as a sarcastic social media post can turn out to be what ruins the chances of a bright and qualified person.

Tolu Oniru (Toolz), a Nigerian on-air personality, shared the story of how an unrefined YouTube video cost her a potential job when it was embarrassingly brought up during an interview.

Kevin Hart, a popular American comedian and actor, lost the chance to host the 2018 Oscars when a decade-old homophobic tweet was resurrected, despite having deleted it with an apology.

How often have we not seen persons seeking political office double-speak or chicken out apologetically when confronted with their previous social media posts?

Remember that what you thought was simply a jovial, anecdotal post, tweet or video might have long-term negative effects.

The world does not forgive even when users’ mindsets change with time, and no amount of explaining will suffice to address the error in judgment made at the point of putting out the content. Beware!

Right to be forgotten

The “right to be forgotten” online, however, is not available as of right. The European Court of Justice in deciding a case brought by a Spanish national against Google, ruled that search engine operators faced no obligation to remove information outside the 28-country zone.

Mario Costeja Gonzalez sued Google Spain at the European Court after he failed to secure the deletion of an auction notice of his repossessed home dating back to 1998 on the website of a mass circulation newspaper in Catalonia.

He argued that the matter in which his house had been auctioned to recover his social security debts had been resolved and should no longer be linked to him whenever his name was searched on Google.

However, when his name was put in the search engine, results on Google linked him to two pages on La Vanguardia’s website on the auction of his property.

The European judges observed that the EU data protection directive already established a “right to be forgotten”.

They found that the inclusion of links in the Google results related to an individual who wanted them removed “on the grounds that he wishes the information appearing on those pages relating to him personally to be ‘forgotten’ after a certain time” was incompatible with the existing EU data protection directives.

Hence, data which “appear to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant or excessive … in the light of the time that had elapsed”, had to be deleted. They added that even accurate data that had been lawfully published initially could, “in the course of time, become incompatible with the directive”.

The ruling was emphatic that a search engine such as Google has to take responsibility as a “data controller” for the content it hyperlinks and may be required to purge its results even if the material was previously published legally.

Data protection lawyers said the ruling meant that Google could no longer be regarded legally as a “neutral intermediary”

Public interest

The EU Court of Justice was quick to raise “public interest” as a defence against deletion, especially if the individual is involved in public life.

This a position the Italian Supreme Court agreed with in the case of Manni v Camera di Commercio Lecce when it held that the protection of an individual’s fundamental right cannot prevail over the collective dimension of public good and the existence of a related obligation; that the principle of solidarity acted as the necessary balance between idiosyncratic positions and society through duties that are imposed for the safeguard and protection of interests and values of the community as a whole.

Thus, individuals enjoy rights not as nomads, but in their relations with social groups to which they belong. Before you post, pause; for the internet never forgets.

The writer is a Legal Practitioner in the Telecommunications Industry.
E-mail: yawberhene@yahoo.com