Page 127 - Privacy in a Cyber Age Policy and Practice

THE RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN 115

States due to its level of technological development and strong protections
of free speech.
These developments disturb privacy advocates and anyone who is keen
to ensure that people have the opportunity for a new start. Beth Givens,
director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, says that Internet databases
cause a “loss of ‘social forgiveness.’” For instance, a person’s “conviction
of graffiti vandalism at age 19 will still be there at age 29 when [he’s] a
solid citizen trying to get a job and raise a family”—and the conviction
7
will be there for anyone to see. Furthermore, as companies “rely on back-
ground checks to screen workers, [they] risk imposing unfair barriers to
rehabilitated criminals,” wrote reporters Ann Zimmerman and Kortney
Stringer in The Wall Street Journal. Eric Posner argues that “privacy allows
us to experiment, make mistakes, and start afresh if we mess up . . . [it] is
this potential for rehabilitation, for second chances, that is under assault
8
from Google.” In short, as journalist Brad Stone wrote in The New York
Times, by allowing database producers to remove “the obstacles to getting
criminal information,” Americans are losing “a valuable, ignorance-fueled
civil peace.” Moreover, many arrestees “who have never faced charges, or
have had charges dropped, find that a lingering arrest record can ruin their
chance to secure employment, loans and housing.” 9
In response to this dilemma, some have advocated a “right to be forgot-
ten,” which entails allowing a person to delete or otherwise remove from
public view information relating to them on the Internet. One of the leading
intellectual advocates of online “forgiving and forgetting” is Viktor Mayer-
Schönberger, a professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford
University. In his 2009 book Wired: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,
Mayer-Schönberger notes that Europeans have greater concern for privacy
than have Americans; this characteristic dates back to World War II, when
Nazi Germany used the Netherlands’ comprehensive population registry
to facilitate the Holocaust, as well as to the East German surveillance state
during the cold war. Yet he argues that privacy fares even worse in the digi-
tal age than under the Stasi, because online storage and transfer is far more
efficient than paper records. According to him, society has traditionally
accepted “that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to
learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior,” with the fallibility of
human memory and limits of record-keeping techniques allowing “societal
forgetting.” However, the Internet, which may “forever tether us to all our
past actions,” threatens to make it “impossible, in practice, to escape them,”
with the result that, “without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes
a difficult undertaking.” For example, Mayer-Schönberger notes that, for a
woman who had spent time in prison a decade ago, having her mug shot
posted online effectively renewed her punishment, as her neighbors began