Ready to be forgotten? Or...ready to stand up, fight, scream, and hold on to the lamp post?

Ready to be forgotten? Or...ready to stand up, fight, scream, and hold on to the lamp post?
#eu # net neutrality

Originally shared by David Amerland

The Right To Be Forgotten

As London SMX got started last week and SEOs and marketers rejoiced at the new reality that created greater transparency and the ability to let us be more real (http://goo.gl/HPcTnf) a development that had become public just days before that, cast a little bit of a cloud: http://goo.gl/MhUuiF.

The EU ruling is intended to help private citizens retain control over their identity. Viviane Reding, who spearheaded the drive for a data policy change wrote on her Facebook page: “Today’s Court Judgement is a clear victory for the protection of personal data of Europeans!”. There are a few things which seem inconsistent here: First, historically, ‘Europeans’ (as in the average citizen) have never had real privacy. All we had was the semblance of it by keeping our “heads down and our noses clean” and not drawing attention to ourselves. 

The moment we didn’t the “system” had the ability to railroad all our rights and trample our privacy under the guise of doing its job. Given that you have to ask whether this is a case of true intentions being hidden under a different guise. As in any case where a ‘mystery’ needs to be solved, the real question to ask is “who benefits the most?’ from such a ruling. 

Meg Tufano  (http://goo.gl/95UVTf) provides an answer of sorts by suggesting a “shoot the messenger” policy is at work. Certainly the “radical transparency” that EU governments have come to worry about is only abetted by search that makes it easier to find information. 

The Washington Post article suggested that “Many Europeans say that their fears are guided by memories of invasive dictatorship.” forgetting perhaps that the only real protection we have against any kind of totalitarian control lies in the ability to see what is happening and work together to change it. 

Writing in The Gulag Archipelago  (http://goo.gl/XR8P5C) where he detailed a rule of fear and repression during the Stalinist years in Russia, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (http://goo.gl/XIYIHc) details in a passage that struck home to me how the secret police, filling a quota that showed they were being proactive in safeguarding the system against dissidents, stopped to arrest a babushka (http://goo.gl/LBW4c9) walking along a Moscow street. The approach was always simple: the van would stop. Man in suits would ask you to come inside to verify allegations made against you. As Solzhenitsyn details, the majority would quietly enter, without a fuss, confident in the system and their own innocence. And they would disappear. Some of them forever. In this case the old woman didn’t go quietly. She cursed and spat, and screamed and kicked and held onto the lamppost and created a scene and passersby stopped and stared. The men trying to bundle her into the van stopped and went away, presumably looking for another, easier victim. 

Solzhenitsyn made the point of asking what would have happened if they had all done that? What if they, in their hundreds of thousands, had resisted. Fought. Spat. Made a scene. And asked questions? How many would have been saved? How short would have been the Stalinist regime’s life?

Anne-Marie Clark  draws attention to the implication of rulings such as the one made in the EU by saying that "Many of the incidents described in the book are not about administrators censoring speech because they don't agree with its politics; they are about administrators censoring speech because they feel entitled to be free of criticism or dissent." (http://goo.gl/CjywpI) and Harrie Baken shows in a recent share on Turkey, just what happens when censorship starts (http://goo.gl/Mcun7H) and does not know where to stop. 

The “C” word, of course is explosive. Said out aloud it smacks of control. It reminds us that the “system” is primarily there to serve its own interests first and ours second. It plays on our worst fears and feeds our nightmares, which is why I did not use it in the title of this Sunday Read. 

Underlying this latest development are some very real questions: Are search engines the ultimate arbiters of information? (http://goo.gl/T24ec2). Should one’s indiscretion be there forever for the world to see? Should pictures of a drunken party you foolishly published at 16, affect your employment opportunities at 28? 

These are not easily answered, though, personally, I say we live in a world where human connection is finally beginning to take center stage. We accept that people are fallible, that mistakes happen, and trust is given more readily (and truthfully) when we see and understand how one has changed and who they now are. Forgiveness is a powerful human attribute. The ability to sweep things under the carpet, to my mind, guarantees the exact opposite: no need to change. No incentive to become anything more than a façade. No need to work hard to achieve any kind of redemption or forgiveness. 

This is not easy to achieve. It requires real connections. Deeper interactions. The kind of understanding that in the past we reserved for face to face connections. That we can now achieve this digitally suggests a maturing of the online world to a degree that few of us foresaw at the beginning of this century. 

Search Engine Land  suggests that these are still early days. How exactly the ruling will be applied remains to be seen (http://goo.gl/673VZT). Both Lee Smallwood  (http://goo.gl/D2blp3) and Mick Fealty  (http://goo.gl/eaqqFz) have weighed in on censorship in general (Twitter and Google+ pics). Jelena Ilic (http://goo.gl/eFIlx4) surfaced a piece of news on the wake of the EU ruling on Google that suggests we’re in for a bumpy ride ahead. 

Each of us here is already challenged. We’re struggling to juggle, work, life, learning, unlearning (and relearning), relationships, marketing, the creation of our own identities and our place in a world that is changing faster than many of us can comfortably handle. This perceived pressure is banding us together in a loose, global community where we are forced to work together to share information, exchange knowledge and affect the world for what we perceive to be the greater good, because we are also served well by it. 

In the process we’re becoming better. The world is becoming better. Legislation and law are not our remit. We have little energy and time to spare to be activists for the sake of activism. Yet now, in our ever changing roles, we’re being forced to become more involved. 

In the UK (as in the US) the government already suffers from an erosion of public trust (http://goo.gl/R4uwwq). Yet those who are in power think that this can be brushed off and it really is “business as usual” (http://goo.gl/0rfpTQ). And in the US the FCC may be already taking the first  step towards more control of the web (http://goo.gl/QSqtHW).  

Every time I see legislators grapple with the internet (which a precious few understand) I am reminded of Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach (http://goo.gl/5Z0aHZ) and its closing lines: 

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Well, for better or worse, we’re transitioning towards a hyper-connected world. There are huge challenges to that as it is without adding more to it through restrictions that, I suspect, will hurt us, citizens of the web, more than anyone else and will take us back to the days when a position of power and authority meant an automatic free pass to anything. 

Sadly, this now adds to our roles. It requires that, in addition to everything else we do online to make a living, we also must act as each other’s eyes and ears and voices. We did this with SOPA, when a single, blatant move to control the web in the name of special interests united us and we got it thrown out. 

This time round the issues are less black and white but no less important. There are days when I tell myself that the online world is simple. I click my device on and I am free. That is an over-optimistic fallacy on my part. We’re never truly free, but we should get to the stage where we enjoy greater degrees of freedom than just what a system (any system) deems fit to allow us to enjoy). That now, requires, from us, a considerate, thoughtful, community-driven approach. 

As Solzhenitsyn suggested there is real power in being many and being connected. No system, anywhere, can exist without our implicit acceptance of it (and that includes Google). That is our power. It's time we used it, while we still have it. 

This has been a Sunday Read that is a little more contemporary and pressing perhaps, than usual. These are issues which really have no ready-made answers. What answers we do develop, will come from each of us, all of us, and our ability to prove that we can work in a decentralized, yet organized and self-organizing manner, together. Coffee and donuts are definitely needed for this. Have an awesome Sunday wherever you are. 

#davidamerlandsundayread  
#privacylaw  
#censorship