Network member Abraham Newman (Georgetown) has published an article (with Henry Farrell of George
Washington University) in Foreign Affairs which may be of interest to readers.
The first two paragraphs are below and you may read the remainder here.
***
The modern innovators of Internet human rights are not U.S.
leaders, or bold Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. They’re stodgy bureaucrats,
politicians, and lawyers in Brussels, Berlin, and Strasbourg. As the National
Security Agency (NSA) and American firms have relied on sucking up massive
amounts of data to observe citizens and create and serve consumers, the
European Union has fought to establish privacy rights for its citizens. Over
the last ten years, however, the EU initiative seemed to be on the ropes as the
United States pressed Europeans to water down privacy protections in a number
of key sectors. But now, the tables are turned.
This month, the European Court of Justice, Europe’s closest
equivalent to the Supreme Court, has ruled that Google must delete search
results for a Spanish citizen that the citizen had found outdated and
upsetting. The ruling obliges Google and other Internet firms to respect a
limited version of the “right to be forgotten” --the right to have certain
kinds of information, such as former debts or inappropriate photos, removed
from the public sphere. The right will be enforced by national data protection
authorities, for example the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and
Freedom of Information in Germany or the Information Commissioner in the United
Kingdom, which can require e-commerce firms to remove embarrassing, misleading
or outdated information about EU citizens where they think it appropriate. In its
most extreme form, an individual could request that search engines remove all
links to their name, making them virtually anonymous in the Internet. [continue reading here]
No comments:
Post a Comment