Now, columnist Liza Tucker is arguing that the “right
to be forgotten” ought to be honored in the United States, in an op-ed on p.
A17 of the Washington Post on Monday, September 14, 2015, “The right to bury
the (online) past”, here.
Tucker argues that Google and other engines (Bing) are
not having difficulty identifying requests that would seem morally legitimate,
from subjects who are not public figures. In Europe, the volume of these requests is
huge, but Tucker argues these private companies are making big profits from
their search engines.
She also argues that Google is honoring some requests
in the United States, when circumstances seem compelling enough.
A related issue is my own practice of placing my book
text online where it could be searchable.
There’s the question of “self-competition” which I have addressed
elsewhere, but some people may feel that it is not appropriate to leave
narratives of old incidents available if people would not normally pay for them
(as with a best-seller book). But it’s important to note that the book contents
normally don’t name non-public persons involved in questionable behaviors.
There have been a couple of incidents where the name of someone associated with
a normally obscure publication has presented an issue for them when found on
Google. While I can easily suppress
names with initials on my own online file copies of my book contents, they
still could get picked up by Google Book Search.
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