Out Loud: The Right to Be Forgotten

Earlier this year, the European Court of Justice granted individuals within its jurisdiction the right to have certain information about them removed from online search results linked to their names. In this week’s magazine, Jeffrey Toobin writes about the court’s decision and its implications for search-engine companies and for Internet governance. Toobin appears on this week’s Out Loud to discuss the issue of online privacy with Nicholas Thompson, the editor of newyorker.com. They are joined by Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University and a frequent contributor to newyorker.com.

Wu says that the right to be forgotten is related to two values that are essential in democratic societies: privacy and free speech. “I think most of us have a feeling that something that happened long ago for the average person” shouldn’t have to haunt that person forever, he says. But “part of the democratic process is finding out things about people. There is a free-speech component here. And in totalitarian regimes the first thing they go after is the search engines. Try searching for ‘Tiananmen Square’ in China; you don’t find a lot.”

Toobin says that he was initially “appalled” by the European Court’s decision. “But, as I got more into the issue, and as I more came to understand how it arose, the cultural context, and also the specific claims that had been made, I thought this was a much closer question than when I started,” he says.

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