The most recent Bentley Research Colloquium focused on Big Data and a broad range of issues and topics surrounding the topic. This series highlights some of the issues examined or suggested by colloquium presenters.
Chances are you’ve been googled. Any number of people — a future employer, acquaintance, coworker, neighbor, relative, new lover, old friend — has typed your name into a search engine to see what comes up.
For your sake, I hope what they’ve found is not deeply invasive, irrelevant, and inaccurate because if that’s the case, there’s nothing you or any of us can do about it. If we lived in Europe, yes, but in the United States, no.
A French citizen, for instance, finds herself the victim of a personal revenge site that’s designed to humiliate her whenever someone specifically searches on her name. A Spanish man finds his name linked to a newspaper page about a home repossession that happened years ago and has long since been remedied. An American businessman discovers his name links to an inaccurate report about his alleged drug habit in college.
The Europeans can successfully request the link be removed from Google’s index. The American cannot.
Do you think that is a problem? I do. And while much has been written in Bentley’s PreparedU View about data security risks and the power of the Internet in the hands of millennials, this important topic deserves far more attention.
Our lives have been enhanced by technological advances but they’ve also been altered in ways we didn’t anticipate and haven’t caught up with. Much has changed since I graduated from then Bentley College, now Bentley University, with a degree in Computer Information Systems in 1982. My younger self could not have imagined the rapidity of our digital growth nor the myriad ways it has come to demand our attention.
Before the age of information technology and the Internet, our privacy rights were largely protected by default. One had to make a concerted effort by going directly to the archives in town and city municipalities, libraries and newspaper companies, to seek information about an individual — an effort alone that many folks would not follow through with protecting one’s privacy to a great degree. Accuracy was also paramount because public record sources were official, complete, up-to-date and reliable. That is now far from the case.
We’re losing much of our privacy by default. We need state and, ideally, federal laws that protect individual privacy when data provided by a search engine compromises it for no justifiable reason. The digital age cannot be allowed to diminish or destroy our rights to such protections.
Forbes columnist Joseph Steinberg, who covers cybersecurity, has pointed out that many privacy protections that Americans think exist no longer really do in the digital age. Google searches undermine them. We have laws, for example, that require negative credit reports be removed after a period of time or that criminal records be sealed under certain circumstances. But all of that information can forever be found in a matter of seconds by doing a Google search.
In Europe, when you search for a person on Google, you’ll now sometimes see a warning at the bottom of the page, “Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe.”
Google is a “data controller” under the meaning of the European data protection directive, according to a European Court of Justice ruling of May 2014. That means Google has a responsibility to make sure the data it holds about people obeys the data protection laws and the “right to be forgotten,” which means it must not be irrelevant, out of date, inaccurate, or an invasion of privacy. If it is, people can request that Google take searches against their names out of its index.
We deserve the same right.
As a first step, I have drafted a bill that will be introduced during the first 2015 Massachusetts legislative session. It requires that search engine companies, as in Europe, honor the “right to be forgotten.”
While such a law is likely to provoke controversy around freedom of speech, it does not have to. The data still reside at the source websites. Accounts of history as written from the third party perspective and as recorded by town and city municipalities are not erased. This is about creating the legal right to take an individual’s name out of a search index when that corrective measure is justified.
Just because technology and the Internet have taken away much of our privacy does not mean they always should. People, not technology, must define our rights as human beings.
Deanna Brown Duplak '82 graduate from Bentley with a degree in Computer Information Systems.