In Search of the Truth–Organic, of Course!

Sometimes you go in search of the truth and it has been there, right in front of you, all of the time! As I thought when I googled “Ten things we know to be true” and these truisms or statements of “truthiness,” as Stephen Colbert is wont to call them, popped up. In any case, the #1 search result on the #1 SERP (search engine results page) was Google’s corporate philosophy on the selfsame topic. As is commonly known, Google’s truth #6, “You can make money without doing evil,” has been the topic of much public debate over the past few years. For seeming to violate truth #6, under its more popular moniker “do no evil,” Google has been criticized at various times, such as, during their rather abrupt switch to a consolidated privacy policy across all Google services, or when it was discovered that they cooperated with the National Security Agency (NSA) on its request for search records, or during their perceived vacillation on China’s search-related censorship laws before pulling out of that country, etc.

However, more recently, after the May 13, 2014 ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) establishing a so-called “right to be forgotten” throughout the European Union (EU), I went in search once again of Google’s version of the truth? This time I found Google’s acquiescence to the ECJ ruling in contradiction of at least three more of its afore-mentioned truisms, namely:

#4: Democracy on the web works – but apparently not when a large and powerful business segment, such as the EU is involved.

#7: There’s always more information out there – and apparently the citizens of the EU can continue to access it by circumventing national Google sites within the EU and searching for it on the all-encompassing www.google.com across the pond? China must be having the last laugh on that one.

#8 The need for information crosses all borders – Google (and the ECJ as well) must know that the “right to be forgotten” is meaningless in the digital age. Henceforth, EU citizens might believe that they are forgotten at home (i.e., within their own country), but to quote Google’s #7 truism again, “There’s always more information out there.”

Unfortunately, what is more confounding is the ECJ’s belief that they can implement a “right to be forgotten” for EU citizens by controlling the search results returned by Google. Aside from the technological naiveté that this ruling implies, the more disturbing concerns are the censorship aspects of it. By definition, search implies looking for something and that is what Google algorithms do, they don’t own the searched content that their algorithms find, they only offer a link to it. So the ECJ ruling is not actually asking Google to delete the “right to be forgotten” content (again, they can’t because they don’t own it), the ECJ is asking Google to censor its search results by introducing a “relevancy factor” in its algorithms for searched items?

More importantly, if the information on an individual is true and was not posted to the Internet in violation of applicable privacy laws, the individual cannot claim an inherent right for that information to be forgotten. However, if the posted information on the individual is false, the individual is either free to sue the posting party for libel or post correcting information that establishes the truth as said individual perceives it. But for the ECJ to expect Google as the messenger, not the message owner, to modify its delivery methods is dealing with the symptoms of a questionable problem and not its root cause – understandably, because censoring a content creator would be far worse!

At the end of the day, this ECJ ruling might be one small step for an individual’s “right to be forgotten,” but it is one major setback for the EU and its citizens’ rights for the free flow of information! As far as Google is concerned, it might want to seriously reconsider some of the “things we know to be true.”

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