It might seem that the Internet doesn’t lose track of anything that has been published online. The alleged permanence of tweets, blogs, snapshots, and instant messages worries many privacy activists and policymakers such as Viviane Reding, justice commissioner of the European Union and vice president of the European Commission. She has proposed that Europe adopt a “right to be forgotten”—a proposal that is now working its way through the EU legal process and could be law within two years.
Reding’s proposal would grant EU citizens the right to withdraw their consent from online information services after the fact—allowing people to redact embarrassing things from the global information commons, even after the data had been copied to other websites. It’s a controversial proposal: George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen wrote in the Stanford Law Review that such a right could have deeply negative implications for both free speech and journalism and could ultimately fragment the Internet. Rosen pointed out that companies like Google would need to suppress from European search queries information that had been deemed “forgotten” on the continent, even as such information would still be perfectly allowable in the United States.
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