Cybersecurity & Tech Surveillance & Privacy

Coping with the Right to be Forgotten: A Business Opportunity

Herb Lin
Wednesday, December 30, 2015, 9:37 AM

According to a European Commission fact sheet on the Right to Be Forgotten, “individuals have the right - under certain conditions - to ask search engines to remove links with personal information about them.” Since this right apparently does not require deletion from the World Wide Web of that information itself, there seems to be a business model in this rule for some enterprising party.

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According to a European Commission fact sheet on the Right to Be Forgotten, “individuals have the right - under certain conditions - to ask search engines to remove links with personal information about them.” Since this right apparently does not require deletion from the World Wide Web of that information itself, there seems to be a business model in this rule for some enterprising party.

  • Search engine companies would not report in their search results links to information that must be forgotten, but would note for users the existence of links that had been suppressed.

  • Search engine companies would enter into contracts with an enterprising company (call it PMC, for the Permanent Memory Company) to identify the links they had suppressed.

  • PMC would archive the material to which these links pointed.

  • PMC would make such material freely available to anyone who wanted to search the archive.

  • PMC would be able to support itself through crowdfunding and donations, since nearly all of the process described above could be automated.

I freely acknowledge that this model sounds like a hack, to put it mildly. But maybe someone else has a better idea for pushing back on a rule that really does seem like an invitation to censor the Web coming from a group of liberal democratic nations.

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Herb Lin

Herb Lin

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Dr. Herb Lin is senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Hank J. Holland Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University. His research interests relate broadly to policy-related dimensions of cybersecurity and cyberspace, and he is particularly interested in and knowledgeable about the use of offensive operations in cyberspace, especially as instruments of national policy. In addition to his positions at Stanford University, he is Chief Scientist, Emeritus for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies, where he served from 1990 through 2014 as study director of major projects on public policy and information technology, and Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Senior Fellow in Cybersecurity (not in residence) at the Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies in the School for International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Prior to his NRC service, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He received his doctorate in physics from MIT.

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