In Europe, “The right to be forgotten” ~ now known as GDPR ~ was introduced into the public square in 2014 after a landmark case Google v. Spain.
“In Google v. Spain, the European Court of Justice ruled that the European citizens have a right to request that commercial search firms, such as Google, that gather personal information for profit should remove links to private information when asked, provided the information is no longer relevant. The Court did not say newspapers should remove articles. The Court found that the fundamental right to privacy is greater than the economic interest of the commercial firm and, in some circumstances, the public interest interest in access to Information. The European Court affirmed the judgment of the Spanish Data Protection Agency which upheld press freedoms and rejected a request to have the article concerning personal bankruptcy removed from the web site of the press organization.” 1.
This legal judgement expanded throughout Europe, and has now morphed into what we know today as the General Data Protection Regulation standard.
By May of 2018, all major corporations that held personal information on European clients/customers had to adhere to steps to ensure privacy and, when asked to do so, expunge the personal records they held. This opened up a whole new set of issues in ensuring that the company that was doing the purging had documented and verified electronic ways of proving they had done so.
While North America has not caught up to this standard of protection and privacy for its citizens, many individual States in the USA have implemented such laws ~ California’s CCPA being the first and farthest reaching to date.
This came about through a desire by individuals to shield their personal information from those who looked to exploit it for either monetary or nefarious gain. If this information is about you, why did you not have the ability to make decisions about how it was used?
Privacy and protection is a starting point as we expand our thoughts on how how we wish our data to be mined by third parties and what, if any, control we have on that process as we move through the world of technology.
Like most major upheavals, the digital age was off and running before society had an opportunity to study, discuss, ponder, and decide how best to deal with all the issues that came with it. Laws allowing you to pull back your own bits and bytes from massive data storage centres around the world, gives back some level of control to you, the consumer.
Next week, we will touch on data breaches and why this privacy of our information continues to be so important.
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