Introduction
High internet penetration, especially in developed countries, makes it possible for information to go viral and reach millions of people within minutes. The implicated may not want some of their personal posts to continue lingering online because of the impact it can have on their career, social relations, and the perception of others. To protect the public, the European Union (EU) established the right to be forgotten. The law demands erasing personal data, ceasing its further dissemination, and halting that party’s processes on the data (Fefer & Archick, 2020).
The right directly impacts record keeping, ongoing business operations, and retention of information by an enterprise or individual. Consequentially, there are several practical, legal, and ethical ramifications for organizations as they integrate the law for a more inclusive and supportive community. Although the EU is determined to protect the citizens, the right to be forgotten has several practical, legal, and ethical ramifications that cannot guarantee complete protection from unpleasant web memories.
Background on the Right to be Forgotten
The basic tenets of the right to be forgotten were protecting people from squandering personal information, leading to cyberbullying, embarrassment, and suicide. Moreover, some people have lost job opportunities due to social media posts dating decades ago (Habisch et al., 2022). During the European Law 1995 directive, the members agreed to protect information privacy; later, in 2016, there was an absolute establishment of the right to be forgotten (Talwar, n.d.). The promulgation of the right was informed by loss of privacy for people unable to remove unpleasant data from the web. The right empowers people to decide the extent to which they can use personal information on the web. People can now control their private data, which is great but difficult to achieve. Noteworthy, the internet is designed to remain a free space where information is perennial and accessible. Thus, the contrast between the right and the nature of digital media raises questions about its practicality and impact.
Impacts of the Right on Record Keeping
Documentation is a significant task in all businesses as it helps keep data that can be used for future reference, forecasting, and monitoring progress. Notably, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), under which the right to forget falls, has a set of rules and a legitimate basis for the retention, limitation, storage, and keeping of records of digital data (Fefer & Archick, 2020). As a result, businesses and people residing in those regions must abide by those rules. Some entrepreneurs can be discouraged from making business investments in information technology due to fear of the consequences emanating from non-adherence to the right to forget. The other impact of the right is that people in the EU and the United States now have more power to keep their records, delete the information they do not want, and request the permanent removal of selected personal information from the web.
Impact of the Right on Business Process
Search engine corporations have global networks of operations, which implies that they will have to execute the law in other regions and leave out the rest. For example, within the EU, the concept of image ownership is accepted and legal regardless of whether the individual is a public figure (Frankel, 2022). Conversely, in the United States, the belief is that once a photo is published online, it cannot be recovered. Enterprises with customers across borders may affect their operations because they must refrain from making territorial distinctions on their users. Further, companies may have to make their policies to show their scope of adherence to the rights and responsibilities of their clients.
Practical Ramifications
Implementing the right to forget has proved difficult for users and service providers such as Google. Removing a request requires “identification of the claimant, his residence, legal identification, certain personal information, an account of all the URLs that are requested to be removed with a summary of each” (Talwar, n.d, p.12). The process is lengthy, and not all people know how to file a complete form on a search engine website. Moreover, upon receiving the complaint, the search engine provider is expected to verify if the content needing removal has legal relevance, as is evident in an ongoing case. Such requirements are hard to achieve given that billions of people are on social media, and most have profiles with identities different from their legal names.
The other challenge is that there are many requests made within a short time, causing a backlog. For instance, Google was the first company to publish an official form and received 174,000 requests, of which it managed to remove 41.5% of the request (Dredge, 2014). Noteworthy, the gap between requests and successful removal will increase, given that many people are seeking the service. The challenge is further compounded by having little manpower because the process does not provide income for the company.
Legal Ramifications
One of the legal ramifications is that companies must act in complete compliance to avoid lengthy court cases and penalties due to non-compliance. For instance, Google got a fine amounting to €600,000 for breaking the right to be forgotten (Fefer & Archick, 2020). Other multinational enterprises with social media platforms have been implicated in other cases for violation of people’s privacy. The cases on privacy are ever-increasing, and yet there are only a few courts to listen to the cases. Particularly, two years after the passing of the law, more than 300,000 complaints were already filed (Fefer & Archick, 2020). The implication is that there is a backlog of court cases that may never be resolved. Moreover, the law only binds the member countries of the EU, yet the internet goes beyond any territory (Floridi, 2014). It remains uncertain how the court can handle requests for viral content that have gone beyond Europe and the United States.
Ethical Ramifications
The right to forget redefines how privacy and confidentiality of personal information on the internet are defined without contextualizing the fluid nature of the web. The law to delink personal information has a provision for declining requests if the content is of public interest. However, it fails to define the nature of public good, leaving the interpretation to the search engine providers (Floridi, 2014). Consequentially, a conflict of interest can arise when the parties involved interpret the law differently. In addition, there are concerns about whether it is right to automate the removal process or whether there must be a human provider to verify the details. Using robotics may scale up the process and reduce the workload, but it will have higher margins of error.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the EU established the right to forgetting to give people a chance to delete unpleasant memories from the internet. It significantly impacts how companies and individuals keep and store records as it lays out privacy procedures. Moreover, the right has changed the scope of business operations and affected the policies adopted by multinational corporations. However, the implementation of this right possesses several practical, legal, and ethical ramifications that make its absolute actualization a mirage.
References
Dredge, S. (2014). Microsoft and Yahoo responding to ‘right to be forgotten’ requests. The Guardian. Web.
Fefer, R. F., & Archick, K. (2020). EU data protection rules and US implications. Current Politics and Economics of Europe, 32(2/3), 255-261. Web.
Floridi, L. (2014). Right to be forgotten poses more questions than answers. The Guardian. Web.
Frankel, J. (2022). Surveillance capitalism and the right to be forgotten: Does the general data protection regulation or the California consumer privacy act better protect individual’s data privacy in a surveillance economy? (Doctoral dissertation). Web.
Habisch, A., Kletz, P., & Wack, E. (2022). Unpleasant memories on the web in employment relations: A Ricoeurian approach. Humanistic Management Journal, 7(2), 347-368. Web.
Talwar, S. (n.d.). A comprehensive analysis of the right to be forgotten. The Law Journal, 1(1), 1-22. Web.