Google has made it easier than ever to erase your online footprint when it comes to things like your personal information or non-consensual images (e.g. revenge porn). Except it really hasn’t.
This is important for many people. NordVPN (opens in new tab) has published the results of a survey in which participants from Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom indicate that they actively want things like financial information or details about their dating and sex habits to be removed from the internet.
I’m sure the results would be similar if the company had interviewed people in the US, Germany or any other country. Even people who claim to have nothing to hide some they would like to hide.
However, the sad reality of this is that it doesn’t do what you want it to. Even in countries like the EU, where Google is forced to remove user data, this type of policy actually removes nothing but hits in a search engine. The things you want to delete will still be there, and there’s not much you can do about it.
How it all works – the web spider
You may have heard the term web spider before. In case you haven’t already, or aren’t quite sure what it means, the concept behind it is actually pretty simple. Google and other web companies that can act as search engines have programs that crawl the web to find content. Crawling and web naturally coined the term spider – it has nothing to do with our eight-legged friends.
When a spider finds something, it indexes the information in a data center, and it’s in those data centers that companies like Google pull search results. Suppose you want soccer results. A media site or media feed puts the results on the web, the spiders find them and index them. Then when you pick up the phone and search, the results will appear on a search page.
Not like a spider.
Of course it’s a lot more complicated when it comes to the methods, and publishers can opt out of having spiders index their content, but that’s the general idea behind it and is fine for a basic understanding.
Google, Microsoft or Meta have no control over content not hosted on their platform. No, we’re not going to wade into the cesspool of Section 230 arguments here because none of that applies.
Google (for the sake of simplicity, we’ll stick with Google as an example here) can only act on the things it has control over. Google can remove a show from its streaming platforms. Google can remove an app from the Play Store. Google can delete a search result.
However, Google cannot delete the actual content.
In fact, nothing is forgotten
In case it wasn’t obvious from all the spider talk, Google will only remove the link to the content you want removed that appears in a Google search when you petition the company, using your right to be forgotten.
It’s pretty simple – you visit this Google page and fill out a form, and unless you’re some kind of public figure or the information you want “deleted” should be made available to the public, Google uses it this big Ctrl+X function and make it disappear from the search results.
actually Removing content can prove to be much more difficult.
There are many things about you that no one has the right to know unless you have specifically shared them.
It’s not impossible and it shouldn’t be impossible. Nobody has the right to see pictures of you naked unless you have posted them yourself. No one has the right to know anything about your health unless you have told them yourself. No one has the right to know your sexual preferences unless you choose to make them public.
Above all, no one has the right not to learn anything harmful about children under the legal minimum age under any circumstances.
Things like that can be removed by the courts if the people running a website don’t do it voluntarily. Personally, I prefer the DDoS-Into-Freaking-Oblivion approach to any website that exists to share private information about people who don’t want it shared.
Luckily I have no power over anything outside of my office. In either case, the information would be removed, as would personal information that a court would find harmful or defamatory (opens in new tab).
It’s better than the alternative
I don’t want Google or any other company to have the power to take things off the internet. I think the status quo, where Google removes the listing from search results, is the only power any company in the search business should have. I also don’t think Google would ever get that kind of power, no matter how much it would like it.
I just think it’s very important for everyone to know that the whole right to be forgotten doesn’t mean what you might think. There’s an old saying: the internet never forgets.