Gone but not forgotten

While previously ‘snapshots’ of our early life lay relatively safe in dusty newspaper archives or on microfiche at public libraries, today our past is only a few keystrokes away.

You may think that the European Court of Justice
ruling in May forcing Google
to support a person’s ‘right
to be forgotten’ offers
protection against sensitive or embarrassing material online.

Google is not revealing
how many people have so far filed a request for specific search results to be deleted, but it is reportedly averaging 10,000
a day.

The removal of search links with ‘irrelevant, outdated or otherwise inappropriate’ personal material, in compliance with the European ruling, began at the end of June. Web users can submit links for consideration with details of why they want the page to be hidden from Google searches.

It is, of course, no indication that the material itself will be deleted. Far from it.

It will remain in cyberspace, albeit lying deeper and without
a Google spotlight pointing
the way.

However, one area where Google and other search
engine operators, such as
Bing and Yahoo, will stand
firm and not allow people
to airbrush their past is
where there is public interest, specifically culprits of financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions or someone’s public conduct
as a government official.

Meanwhile, changes to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 introduced in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment Act 2012 came into force in March, meaning significantly reduced periods for many convictions before they are considered spent.

In some cases, rehabilitation periods are more than halved in a bid to help offenders determined to get their lives back on track without employers or others knowing their
criminal past.

Regardless of these reforms, however, criminal cases that attract media attention will maintain the unforgiving permanence of the internet after the Information Commissioner’s Office rejected a complaint that media organisation Newsquest was breaching the Data Protection Act 1998 by featuring an archived story about a fraudster from 14 years ago.

The conviction is spent
under the terms of the 1974
Act, but Newsquest successfully argued that its archives – whether dusty bound copies, microfilm or online – are a valuable historical record that should be kept indefinitely.

So, can we really escape our past? In reality, our past is forever online in a diminishing shape or form and, providing it is fair and accurate, we have limited legal redress. SJ

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