Control, alter, delete?

At some point in the future, when I’m hugely famous and successful, I might regret some of my previous exploits.

Especially those that made it onto the internet.

Luckily for me, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. The European Court of Justice recently ruled in favour of a webtastic ‘Right to forget’, meaning anyone can ask for links to information about them on the interweb to be removed.

If there is no public interest in the content flagged up for the axe, search-behemoth Google have to comply. Mind you, when ‘public interest’ can be anything from “information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials”, it would seem the option isn’t exactly going to be wide open to those who graze their herd on the “naughty” side of the fence.

Google are less than chuffed. In their all-seeing eyes, this restricts the freedom of the web. Yes, the original item will still be there, it just won’t show up in searches. Or, to put it another way, imagine walking into a supermarket the size of England and asking where the Chocolate HobNobs are, only to be told there is no such thing. You wouldn’t walk up and down every aisle, and soon settle for regular HobNobs instead. Or maybe a Bourbon.

Actually, now that I come to think of it, I probably would keep looking. They are addictively delicious.

It won’t matter how prominent you are either. Even the BBC’s Robert Peston had one of his articles removed (that’s got to smart), although he then went on to talk about it rather a lot, and the person who it was about. Is that the sound of a backfire I can hear?

With a quarter of a million requests landing in Google’s heavily reinforced In Tray, this would appear to be a system about to collapse under it’s own weight.

Should we be allowed the right to have something about us on the web removed? If we didn’t request or instigate it, it’s unwelcome, and it isn’t in the public interest mentioned earlier, that’s fine. Right?

Ponder that for a second.

Tough one to answer, isn’t it? To give a little context, what if a comment left on one of my newspaper column posts on the North West Evening Mail’s website, saying (entirely unfairly, I should add) that I’m an idiot, irked me? I could rightly ask for the whole lot to removed from searches, unless my highly political views on Butterscotch Angel Delight and wind chimes were considered to be of ‘public interest’.

The world would be minus my views on budget (but yummy) dessert and irritating jangly dangly things. Would anyone care? (Please say ‘yes’ here, by the way.)

What if I then went on to attack someone, who said Chocolate Angel Delight is better, with a blunt wind chime? There would be no evidence linking their unfortunate ‘accident’ to me.

I may have just invented the perfect crime. Thanks, European Court of Justice.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column , in the North West Evening Mail, on the 11th of July 2014.

The paper retitled it "Is the "right to forget" alright?", and edited about 40 words out. You can view their version here minus the HobNob praise, slightly risqué Peston joke and a large chunk of the 'ponder that' section.

It has been an eventful week in new computer land. After indeterminable hours spent staring at the screen in utter horror and confusion, I finally seem to have got everything running, loaded back on, and working on a much faster and (hopefully) more stable machine.

I am struggling a bit with the keyboard though. I've got so used to the old laptop keyboard, or my mac one at work, that I'm struggling a bit with this one. It'll come. So my next column will be written on this machine, which I can tell you're all tremendously excited about.

(Today I am enjoying the delights of 80's/12", which contains some slightly less mainstream outings from the likes of Men Without Hats, Alphaville and Peter Schilling. Poptastic.)

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