The Right to be Forgotten
I don't get why people are so concerned about the right to be forgotten. Some might argue that it impedes on the American "right to free speech" but times are changing. Nowhere in the Bill of Rights does it mention "privacy". We live in a day and age where information is readily available with the click of a button. It's true what they say, "The internet is forever". I mean, in trying keep his house repossession under wraps, Mario Costeja Gonzalez just made his misfortune even more well known. It must have been a calculated risk he had to take. But it's not like Gonzalez posted that article himself. To me, this issue isn't all the different from blurring someone's face out while filming some sort of reaction show because the person didn't sign the paperwork saying that their likeness could be used. We update terms and conditions and privacy policies when they become obsolete by new technologies; why not update the constitution?
Which leads me back to the right to be forgotten. Look, this is somewhat of a personal issue for me. When I was a freshman in high school, I found out that I had been cyber bullied. I googled my name one day and a blog came up that was titled "I HATE (INSERT FIRST AND LAST NAME)!!!!" I honestly didn't think that it was me at first; I thought that it was about someone else named (insert name). Turns out that I have a very unique combination of first and last name. In this incredibly long post, the boy(s) used extreme and vicious language to convey that I was fat, ugly, and stupid. Fortunately for me the post was easily taken down because it breached the terms and conditions, but the link in the Google search still remained the top search hit on me until other articles about my work at NCC (and even one more less extreme cyber bully blog post) were published online. Situations like this is where the right to be forgotten comes into play.
But is it constitutional? I mean we do work off the Bill of Rights still and the first amendment is "the right to free speech". Would this be censoring people's right to information? Well...yes...until that information is harmful to the livelihood of another person. Like, should links to criminal records be taken down from the web? That depends on how relevant this information is. For example, there is a person who's a friend of a friend who went to jail for something they did when they were 18 and really messed up on substances (therefore not entirely aware of what they did while they were doing it). Since then, they have served their time, been rehabilitated, and have been successfully on parole. But if they ever want to move past this one mistake they made when they were younger, even though it haunts them for the rest of their lives and they would never even think of doing it ever again, they still have this record somewhere of what they did. People will look it up and judge them on it before they even know the whole story.
So I believe that eventually in the future, there will be either a national or international agency that deals with internet privacy rights. (Hopefully soon because thanks to the freedom of information act my whole voting record is available online.) This would be an agency that deals with what is relevant and what isn't relevant/could be forgotten.