Web-oblivion: ‘Right to be forgotten’ or censorship?

Here we go again! Mr. George Orwell and his popular novel “1984” are back again to show the great relevance to modern times of a visionary and prophetic masterpiece.

The news is dated Wednesday May 14th and tells about the Internet giant Google loosing an European Court of Justice battle against an individual who requested personal information, he considered irrelevant and incorrect, be taken down from search engine results (Reuters). This reminds of the Ministry of Truth's duty to rewrite history and change the facts to fit Party doctrine for propaganda effect, doesn't it?

 

The comparison, though, is not really exact as cancelling search results from a list is not vaporizing the very source itself. Not to forget copies of it that might have been (legally or illegally) saved in others’ websites. It’s more like a book disappearing form the catalogue of a library, that keeps the book in its shelves, anyway, and the countless photocopies held by the students from the nearby University.

 

The issue is really controversial and makes parts tangle over the question of the trade-off between privacy and liberty - freedom of thought, freedom of press or web publishing…

Big Brother Watch (a British civil liberties and privacy pressure group) warns that making intermediaries responsible for the actions or the content of other people, is like establishing ‘a model that leads to greater surveillance and a risk of censorship.’ But on the other side, Viviane Reding, Vice-President of the European Commission and Commissioner for Justice, on her Fb pages wrote: ‘Today's judgement is strong tailwind for the data protection reform that the European Commission proposed in January 2012 as it confirms the main pillars of what we have inscribed in the data protection Regulation (…) Big data need big rights.’

Apart from this reminding me Uncle Ben’s quote, spoken to his nephew Peter - Spiderman - Parker: «With great power comes great responsibility», now, once again, we’re asked to decide which side to be on: apocalyptics or integrators, borrowing from Umberto Eco’s 1964 essay “Apocalittici e integrati” (Apocalypse Postponed, 1991).

 

Some may say Western countries, today, are far from the time when the Holy Office of the Inquisition played a major role in censorship, banning books, converting heretics and burning witches. Others may say we have now merely replaced those rough methods with much subtler ways to manipulate contents, to rectify personal information, to make an event as it never happened. They’re both right, no doubt. Each one of us has plenty of examples to recall, and this one is nothing but the latest.

 

In the end, this is a invitation to read Orwell’s book (once) again. It is embarrassing to discover how much it can still teach us.