Censor History: The Right To Be Forgotten Law

The Right to Censor History Would you choose to remove all traces of yourself off of the internet in order to hide your past actions? The EU’s ‘right to be forgotten law’ allows people to opt to have search engines, such as Google, to remove links to certain events in their past. The question of whether or not people have ‘the right to be forgotten’ has become an increasingly controversial topic as people's online presence and history grow. As more of people’s lives are documented online, and increasing amount of unfavorable content about them is concurrently generated. European lawmakers, and many concerned with the idea of information privacy are pushing to have a law similar to the EU’s enacted within the United States. While I believe

As more and more records are being transitioned to computer and cloud-based storage, we begin to see an increased dependence on online data for record keeping, personal information, and even history. As the internet continues to resemble a library, the erasure of data from it can almost be likened to the act of burning books: permanently removing the data within from history. This can further be likened to allowing a librarian in the Library of Congress to decide which books can be thrown away, and which should stay, entirely defeating the purpose of the library: to hold all books, regardless of content. The removal of data and results from search engines would not only affect our current generation, however, but will enormously distort the views of future historian and sociologists as well. Our generation’s mistakes, differing views, and economic behavior help to define who we are as a people at this point in time, and help us to learn from one another, and not continue to repeat the same mistakes. Removing any semblance of negative information about oneself will launch us into a cesspool of homogeneity, repetition, and false

They will argue that technology has advanced an incredible amount in every facet, and that it is time that rules regarding data privacy and security should do the same. While it is a fact that technology has, and continues to advance at an astounding rate, I disagree that this warrants a change in data and information protection policies. I would like to refer again to the comparison between the Library of Congress and the internet. Just because The Library is constantly expanding and adapting, does not mean that it is changing fundamentally, as it’s goal remains to be to strive to house every book published within the United States. Similarly, one of the primary objectives of the internet is to make accessible every piece of information published by a user, regardless of how quickly it is expanding and