Terry Carter - ABA Journal -
I think this is sort of a step-sister to the problem of when to allow someone to have public records purged of something they did when they were a juvenile (expungement). There's something to be said for letting folks who might've done something they regret in the past get a fresh start. OTOH, there may be a legitimate need to know someone's background for employment or other purposes.In September 2016, a newly formed committee of four editors at the Tampa Bay Times hosted the first of what will be quarterly meetings to develop policies for requests to remove or alter stories in online archives. This is yet another disruptive twist for journalism in the digital age: the possibility of erasing the historical record.
The committee at Florida’s largest newspaper, based in St. Petersburg, acted on such a plea at its first gathering: A woman wanted the committee to delete a story from years earlier in which she spoke with a reporter while she was interviewed for a job with a “naked maids” cleaning service when she was 19 years old. The woman now works in the more traditional business world, and the paper’s managing editor, Jennifer Orsi, thought it wasn’t fair for that instance in her life to define her now.
“Sometimes people don’t realize something may come back at them in ways they don’t expect,” says Orsi, who spearheaded the creation and is a member of, “for lack of a better term: the Web Content Review Committee.”
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Anecdotal evidence indicates that requests to unpublish have picked up in the United States since the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2014 created the so-called right to be forgotten. It is law for citizens in the 28-member countries that comprise the European Union.
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Google soon developed procedures to deal with requests to delist stories in Europe, although doing so only where the person resides: . . . . But in March 2016, the French agency for privacy regulation . . . fined Google for not heeding its order to scrub links worldwide on google.com.
Last May, Google appealed what it considers an attempt at extraterritorial law, forcing a kind of censorship on people in other nations. A decision in the case is expected this year.
“France has no territorial jurisdiction over the U.S., but it’s purporting to tell Google to delete content from the U.S. market, the Canadian and Mexican markets, and others,” says Jonathan Peters, a lawyer who teaches journalism at the University of Kansas.
