If you agree with me — and you should — that the “right to be forgotten” is, in some form a necessary part of the digital age, then you need to be involved in the discussion of how this will happen in the United States.

Protecting people and organizations from Google results gone wrong is complex and could easily become expensive. It may be difficult to totally automate take-down requests in a way that does not open them to the abuse of having all derogatory information subject to removal.

Making responsible search engines

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What we must do is make search engines responsible for the information they publish as search results. At least to the extent that results can be removed in response to valid complaints the results are defamatory and untrue and not protected speech. There should also be a requirement that certain types of personal information and references be removed at specific time intervals.

At one end, there might be a requirement that Google remove, upon demand, any reference to any person living or dead that is not posted by the person themselves or their representative. Clearly, this is much too broad, though for some types of information it might make perfect sense.

There might even be whole categories of personal information that would require specific approval, not hidden in someone’s terms-of-service but real affirmation, to be indexed online.

At the other end is Google’s present practice which is, as best I have been able to determine, is “screw you!”

Here are some questions:

• What is the goal? Are we trying to erase information  or simply make it more difficult to access, as it might have been in the pre-Google era?
• Should the Internet have a particularly low standard for defamation, at least in terms of having search results removed? Should it apply to individuals, organizations, businesses or all three? Equally or differently for each group?
• Is there any protection for celebrities, public employees and/or politicians?
• Would proof that “the information is false” be enough to get something removed? Would labeling something as opinion provide protection?
• What about review sites, especially those who take money from the companies they review?

I am a big supporter of an Internet where almost nothing lasts forever. Sure, I occasionally find it useful to visit old versions of websites via the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine, but it’s more important to protect reputations and give people — and maybe even companies and organizations — the chance to outlive their mistakes and avoid the malice of others.

The problem here isn’t the websites themselves, so much as search engine results and how they can be gamed to place untrue information high in the results for particular search terms. Google purpose is making it easy to find content you’d otherwise not find on your own. Sometimes those results are a problem.

Searching for Santorum

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Here is an example involving a public figure:

For a long time, Googling the name of former Senator and GOP Presidential candidate Rick Santorum brought up a particularly disgusting “definition” created by an author who opposed the Senator’s anti-gay views. Santorum complained, most folks who agree he was being defamed and Google in response to his complaints. Here is an ABC News version of the story.

As much as I disagree with Santorum on basically everything, the guy had a point. Google had been unfairly turned against him and was not providing the sort of information someone searching on his name would want or expect.

Google was, in effect, penalizing its own users because of its inability to build common sense into its algorithms or have humans manually tune the results when required. You don’t have to feel sorry for Santorum for this to be a good idea, just being a Google user who wants useful and valid results is enough to demand the change.

Balancing automation and humans

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Handling this is going to require the involvement of something Google loves to profit from but otherwise seems to hate: Human beings. Google is great if the product can be totally automated and is, ideally, just search results. Google is often a total fail when it actually has to deal with human beings.

It is not clear precisely how Google will deal with take-down requests from EU residents or whether the company will extend the program to countries, like the US, where it is not (yet) legally required to do so.

Google would be wise to quickly adopt a global method for individuals to have information about themselves removed because it is untrue or defamatory. It should also adopt a “statute of limitations” for content so that people’s blog postings (and posts about them) disappear after a certain period of time that might vary with the type of content.

I doubt we can ever create a total “right to be forgotten” and am not sure we should, but for many years the #1 hit on my name as an Internet forum exchange in which a noted author and I disagreed about how to ride a bicycle through an intersection. He went ballistic and I don’t remember that he actually understood what I was saying.

That was 30 years ago and I’d like to think the content has “aged out” of Google, but I am certain it still lurks somewhere. Likewise there are idiotic Facebook posts I’ve occasionally made that I really hope no one ever sees. They have been deleted from Facebook but must live on in some search engine.

As in people who can help determine what is and is not fair comment and whether sites are worthy of protection as “news media” or not.

Yes, I know this will be an imperfect process. But we need something to protect good people and punish bad ones, on a global scale.

The commonly uncommon name

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There is the related issue of what happens when your fairly uncommon name is the same or close to that of a convicted rapist/child molester/scammer who is about your same age and lives somewhat near you.

In that case, otherwise acceptable and true news stories give people reason for concern. Based on that concern, you may not get the job (or date) you are hoping for.

Prior to Google, people were unlikely to find this information. That’s good when it helps the unfairly targeted, bad when if couldn’t can’t search for real sex offenders living along the route to your child’s school.

In the case of mistaken identity, being more thoughtful about your search and just a bit of digging will usually find the truth. Yet, it seems that on many occasions the person conducting the search decides it is not worth “risking it” even if the search subject may not be the bad guy whose search results pop-up first.

I’ve interviewed a man whose life was very negatively affected by having the same name as a serial sex offender who used to live in is town. The name was just uncommon enough that it would be easy to surmise that anybody living there with that name had to be the offender, especially if you don’t know that subject had moved away many years earlier.

I am not sure how we deal with this, except by perhaps adding a footnotes page to search results that could include, say, a link to a site with the picture of the person who is not the sex offender. Not perfect, but we need something.

What is the news media?

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We may finally have to make a decision as to what is — and more importantly is not — the news media in the Internet era. We used to know what the media was: It either bought ink by the barrel or was known by a three or four-letter name or call sign.

Today, you are the news media simply because you say you are, which has allowed bad people to create all manner of sites claiming to be news but which really intended solely for defamation of companies or individuals. Of course, my defamation may be your fair content.

We need a way to stop these people without quashing their First Amendment freedoms. The best way to solve this and the other problems I’ve mentioned is to regulate search engine results to eliminate, as far as possible, the damage they can do.

You may have protected free speech, but you don’t have the constitutional right to a search engine result. And search engines shouldn’t be allowed to hurt people simply because they aren’t designed well-enough to prevent it.

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