The Case for Scrubbing Search Results

In Luxembourg, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on May 13 that individuals have the “right to be forgotten,” meaning they have the right to ask Google to remove information about them from its search index. In America, where the right to free speech trumps the right to privacy, commentators such as City University of New York journalism professor Jeff Jarvis see the ruling as “a blow against free speech.” But even free speech absolutists have good reason to side with the EU.

I used to work as an editor at Harper’s Magazine and was charged with putting its archives, dating to 1850, on the Web. After the digital archive went online in 2007 and the articles began to show up in Google search results, people started asking to remove items, some decades old. The petitioners were sometimes litigious, sometimes plaintive. One submitted a funny letter about sex to a contest years before, and the magazine published it. Now he was looking for a job, and the letter was the top search result for his name. He worried that a prospective employer wouldn’t get the joke.