Online encyclopedia founder Jimmy Wales has launched a counter attack against the European Court of Justice’s ‘right to be forgotten’ …
The man who created the 200,000 strong community of writers, academics and editors behind Wikipedia is one of Google’s panel of experts that will convene in Madrid, Spain in September 2014 to respond to the EJC judgement in the case of Mario Costeja Gonzalez, a Spanish man who won the legal right to require Google to’ de-link’ posts about his historical debts and the re-possession of his home. The judgement has resulted in a flood of requests from people and organisations who want Google and other search engines to take down links to out-of-date or irrelevant informations about themselves.
Index links
Wikimedia’s executive officer Lila Tretikev explains that this is – in Wikipedia’s opinion – a wrong-headed approach. “It’s like going to a library and telling the library to take the name of a book out of the library’s index, but without removing the book“, she says. FI asked Tretikev, and general counsel Geoff Brigham and wiki founder Jimmy Wales whether there was any information about themselves that they would wish to remove from the public record, and if so how they would proceed. Hear their answers here
Of the three leading lights in Wikipedia perhaps Jimmy Wales has the most to regret, since he made his fortune as an online pornographer or – as he describes it on his own Wikipedia entry ‘a male-oriented web portal featuring entertainment and adult content’. This business venture provided the startup capital for Wikipedia, which is a non-profit social enterprise and relies on the support of millions of volunteers known as ‘the community’ who write, check and edit content.
Wikimania in London
This community is gathered in London for Wikimania 2014, a five-day festival that includes hackathons, an academic strand and a series of ‘Diversity debates’ that focus on encouraging the mainly white male middle-class English-speaking supporters to reach out to other cultures and attempt to redress the gender balance within the encyclopaedia’s unpaid workforce. Delegates are encouraged to wear badges indicating the foreign languages they speak, and a number of female speakers aim to provide role models. Wiki chiefs are using the London festival to launch their Transparency Report, which shows that – unlike Google and other search engines – Wikipedia robustly defends itself against requests to take down entries or delete links.
Founder Jimmy Wales says the right to history is a human right that is at least equal to the new EU-backed ‘right to be forgotten’. Born in the USA but resident in Britain, he believes it is ‘inconceivable’ that Americans would adopt or allow such a measure which contravenes the First Amendment of the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of the press. He points out that there are legal remedies such as the right of reply and the law of libel to protect anyone who is the victim of untrue bad publicity or reputational damage. And Wales says that Wikipedia offers its own remedies too – “If something’s been posted that’s not true then everyone has the right to create their own post putting their version out there.” Of the five recent requests to get material removed from Wikipedia, general counsel (head lawyer) Geoff Brigham says one relates to an individual serving a prison term, one to a gang member and another to a person accused of a crime in Italy. He says the EU law is likely to prove unworkable and approves of the actions of the UK Government in rushing through a new law called ‘DRIP’ or the Data Retention Investigatory Powers Act just before Parliament ended its latest session for the summer holiday.
Opponents
However the DRIP has its own opponents – Labour MP Tom Watson has teamed up with former Conservative Home Office Minister David Davis to mount a legal challenge to the DRIP, backed by the human rights campaign. In Europe, the DRIP is seen as a direct challenge to the EU’s attempts to reulgate the online space in favour of individual citizens’ rights and to curb the power of search engines and the Internet’s commercial giants such as Facebook and Microsoft. Claude Moraes, the British Labour MEP who leads the European Union’s response to National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance of citizens’ online communications, says the right to delete and the right to be forgotten should be enshrined in all member states and described the new British law as ‘unhelpful’.
Austrian thought leader and Oxford University Professor Viktor Mayer Schoenberger provides both a philosophical and a practical framework for assessing how much data we should retain and who should have the right to keep or delete it. His is a speaker at Wikimania 2014 and also gave evidence to Future intelligence’s report for the EU website Netopia ‘How can we make the digital world ethical?’
A vocal critic of big data, the mass of information that is increasingly being assembled upon us Mayer Schoenberger claims that much of the information is irrelevant yet will be used to shackle us together and lock us to records and information that are no longer in context.
Fear
“With big data, there is a risk of predictive social control and a system of social control which slaughters human volition at the altar of collective fear,” said Mayer Schoenberger. who has published a book called ‘Delete’ based on the liberating experience of accidentally wiping a hard drive containing his PhD thesis, and argues strongly in favour of time-limits on data retention, and the individual’s right to control how his or her own data is stored, updated or used.
While Wales argues that our past is history and therefore should be there as part of a public record Mayer Schoenberger argues that its only relevance is in its historical context and thus should not be used in relation to understanding us in the present.
The FI report has also been presented to the French Senate, where Rapporteur Catherine Morin Desailly supports the right to be forgotten and has quoted extensively from FI’s report in drafting legislation that has already been passed by the Senate (the upper house of the French Parliament) and will soon be considered by the National Assembly.
It is available to purchase – to get a copy please email futureintelligence@outlook.com .
The French Senate’s Rapporteur on digital ethics
