BOB GARFIELD:  This week, Europe’s High Court ruled that individuals have the right to be forgotten, at least by search engines. The decision came out of a complaint from a Spanish man who felt his reputation was being unfairly damaged by news articles from 1998 about the repossession of his home, articles that follow him like a bad penny on Google searches of his name. Now, within the EU, Google must delete, quote, “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant data, when a member of the public requests it.” Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, says this ruling not only seeks to enshrine a new human right, it also reclassifies Google as something more than just an impartial sifter of information.

EMILY BELL:  It really is like saying, you have to be responsible for this content, which, if you can imagine, everybody in Europe who may want something taken out of Google Search results, that’s potentially a lot of people.

BOB GARFIELD:  It’s potentially everyone. Now, one very ominous option that Google has is to say, we, obviously, cannot build out the kind of infrastructure needed to deal with every single complaint from every single computer user in Europe and, therefore, we are just going to rejigger the algorithm to filter out all sorts of stuff that could be deemed sensitive to individuals in fear of their reputations and essentially censor the internet. Is that in the offing?

EMILY BELL:  I think that that’s a very real possibility. We already see, in certain cases, where Google has tweaked an algorithm to take unfortunate material from its search results or, or certainly knock them off the front page. If you remember last year there was a case around these mug shot websites. If you’ve ever been arraigned for even a minor infringement, even if you ended up not being guilty, you have a, a police mug shot. And mug shot websites were appearing on the first page of Google search results for people's names. Google’s solution to that, ultimately, was to change the algorithm so that those things simply didn't appear in the search results. 

That feels like a very good thing that they’ve done, but it also is a form of censorship. It’s saying that can remove whole swaths of information, certain types of information by changing the algorithm. And now we’ve actually got a legal and cost imperative to do that, and we just can’t afford to fight all of these individual claims. 

When Google is the front page to the internet for so many people, this raises a really big issue about whether the right to privacy is now outweighing the public interest. 

BOB GARFIELD:  Complicating all of this is the nature of the internet itself. The European Union is defined by its [LAUGHS] physical geography. The internet is borderless. First of all, there’s the question of whether a US company that is governed by the First Amendment in its home country is subject to laws that emanate somewhere else?

EMILY BELL:  These issues will not apply to any of the results which are returned in the United States, but it is able to block or change search results on what they call a “territory by territory basis,” based on, on where your IP address is. We all know that there are very easy ways around that on the Web, so if you really want to find this information out, you’ll still be able to find it out. 

It’s worth saying, incidentally, as well, Bob, that they haven’t suggested that this material is removed from the newspaper archive. It seems to be that it’s the instantaneous nature of retrieval that Google currently allows which is really the thing that the court is legislating against. 

BOB GARFIELD:  I'm sure Europe's heart is in the right place, but the court's decision is essentially impossible to enforce. At some point, isn't the governing authority just reality?

EMILY BELL:  Well, it’s a very interesting question because there’s been a big change in sentiment in Europe around particularly American technology companies and particularly the large social platforms and search engines. And that’s really happened in the last 12 months, and it's no coincidence that that has been the period of time over which the stories about the NSA that Edward Snowden leaked have been having a very profound effect on certainly the countries in Europe that, that care a great deal about privacy and where there isn’t, incidentally, an equivalent to the First Amendment. So one has to wonder whether, in fact, this is just a, a bigger statement, apart from just being a legal statement. But it’s really sort of culturally saying, you know, in Europe we very much care now about this issue of individual privacy and particularly our ability to control our own data, when it comes to online representation.

BOB GARFIELD:  Has the court granted a new human right to Europeans?

EMILY BELL:  I think that that’s how it would see it. The right- to-be-forgotten cases go back in Europe to the 19th century, and particularly in France and Germany, where people used to duel to [LAUGHS], to defend their reputation. So there’s a sense in which the law has been more inclined to that.

I think the more difficult question is, is how that’s balanced against other rights, and how is it balanced against the right to know? And this is something that we’re going to see an increasing struggle around, as these large what we might call extensible social platforms, like Google or like Facebook or like Twitter - really export a, a standard of American free speech into parts of the world which don't necessarily agree that that’s the right place to draw the line and that a balance has to be struck between being able say anything about anybody, which might violate their privacy, versus a right for the general population to know important things.

BOB GARFIELD:  Right, by definition, is immutable. And either we have a right to privacy or we have a right to free expression and, if they seem out of balance, then clearly they can't both be immutable rights. Am I missing something here?

EMILY BELL:  No, I think you're really naming one of the great debates, both legal and ethical and, you know, political and commercial of our time. You know, we all have these censors in our pockets in the terms of mobile phones, which give off these signals about us all the time, capture tons of data. You know, [LAUGHS] they know more about us than we know about ourselves, and what our right to protect all of that information about ourselves is and how much of that we give up, and often we give it up, completely willingly. So I think that there are two competing and clashing rights here. And I think that we’re just at the beginning of a very serious debate, and I’m sure that the European court’s word on this feels final for the moment but it will not be the last thing we hear about this.

BOB GARFIELD:  Emily, thank you very much.

EMILY BELL:  Thank you, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD:  Emily Bell is director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. 

BOB GARFIELD:  This week, Europe’s High Court ruled that individuals have the right to be forgotten, at least by search engines. The decision came out of a complaint from a Spanish man who felt his reputation was being unfairly damaged by news articles from 1998 about the repossession of his home, articles that follow him like a bad penny on Google searches of his name. Now, within the EU, Google must delete, quote, “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant data, when a member of the public requests it.” Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, says this ruling not only seeks to enshrine a new human right, it also reclassifies Google as something more than just an impartial sifter of information.

EMILY BELL:  It really is like saying, you have to be responsible for this content, which, if you can imagine, everybody in Europe who may want something taken out of Google Search results, that’s potentially a lot of people.

BOB GARFIELD:  It’s potentially everyone. Now, one very ominous option that Google has is to say, we, obviously, cannot build out the kind of infrastructure needed to deal with every single complaint from every single computer user in Europe and, therefore, we are just going to rejigger the algorithm to filter out all sorts of stuff that could be deemed sensitive to individuals in fear of their reputations and essentially censor the internet. Is that in the offing?

EMILY BELL:  I think that that’s a very real possibility. We already see, in certain cases, where Google has tweaked an algorithm to take unfortunate material from its search results or, or certainly knock them off the front page. If you remember last year there was a case around these mug shot websites. If you’ve ever been arraigned for even a minor infringement, even if you ended up not being guilty, you have a, a police mug shot. And mug shot websites were appearing on the first page of Google search results for people's names. Google’s solution to that, ultimately, was to change the algorithm so that those things simply didn't appear in the search results. 

That feels like a very good thing that they’ve done, but it also is a form of censorship. It’s saying that can remove whole swaths of information, certain types of information by changing the algorithm. And now we’ve actually got a legal and cost imperative to do that, and we just can’t afford to fight all of these individual claims. 

When Google is the front page to the internet for so many people, this raises a really big issue about whether the right to privacy is now outweighing the public interest. 

BOB GARFIELD:  Complicating all of this is the nature of the internet itself. The European Union is defined by its [LAUGHS] physical geography. The internet is borderless. First of all, there’s the question of whether a US company that is governed by the First Amendment in its home country is subject to laws that emanate somewhere else?

EMILY BELL:  These issues will not apply to any of the results which are returned in the United States, but it is able to block or change search results on what they call a “territory by territory basis,” based on, on where your IP address is. We all know that there are very easy ways around that on the Web, so if you really want to find this information out, you’ll still be able to find it out. 

It’s worth saying, incidentally, as well, Bob, that they haven’t suggested that this material is removed from the newspaper archive. It seems to be that it’s the instantaneous nature of retrieval that Google currently allows which is really the thing that the court is legislating against. 

BOB GARFIELD:  I'm sure Europe's heart is in the right place, but the court's decision is essentially impossible to enforce. At some point, isn't the governing authority just reality?

EMILY BELL:  Well, it’s a very interesting question because there’s been a big change in sentiment in Europe around particularly American technology companies and particularly the large social platforms and search engines. And that’s really happened in the last 12 months, and it's no coincidence that that has been the period of time over which the stories about the NSA that Edward Snowden leaked have been having a very profound effect on certainly the countries in Europe that, that care a great deal about privacy and where there isn’t, incidentally, an equivalent to the First Amendment. So one has to wonder whether, in fact, this is just a, a bigger statement, apart from just being a legal statement. But it’s really sort of culturally saying, you know, in Europe we very much care now about this issue of individual privacy and particularly our ability to control our own data, when it comes to online representation.

BOB GARFIELD:  Has the court granted a new human right to Europeans?

EMILY BELL:  I think that that’s how it would see it. The right- to-be-forgotten cases go back in Europe to the 19th century, and particularly in France and Germany, where people used to duel to [LAUGHS], to defend their reputation. So there’s a sense in which the law has been more inclined to that.

I think the more difficult question is, is how that’s balanced against other rights, and how is it balanced against the right to know? And this is something that we’re going to see an increasing struggle around, as these large what we might call extensible social platforms, like Google or like Facebook or like Twitter - really export a, a standard of American free speech into parts of the world which don't necessarily agree that that’s the right place to draw the line and that a balance has to be struck between being able say anything about anybody, which might violate their privacy, versus a right for the general population to know important things.

BOB GARFIELD:  Right, by definition, is immutable. And either we have a right to privacy or we have a right to free expression and, if they seem out of balance, then clearly they can't both be immutable rights. Am I missing something here?

EMILY BELL:  No, I think you're really naming one of the great debates, both legal and ethical and, you know, political and commercial of our time. You know, we all have these censors in our pockets in the terms of mobile phones, which give off these signals about us all the time, capture tons of data. You know, [LAUGHS] they know more about us than we know about ourselves, and what our right to protect all of that information about ourselves is and how much of that we give up, and often we give it up, completely willingly. So I think that there are two competing and clashing rights here. And I think that we’re just at the beginning of a very serious debate, and I’m sure that the European court’s word on this feels final for the moment but it will not be the last thing we hear about this.

BOB GARFIELD:  Emily, thank you very much.

EMILY BELL:  Thank you, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD:  Emily Bell is director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.