Deletions: From an Index, From a Data Structure, From Back Ups
May 14, 2014
I read “Europe’s Top Court: People Have Right to Be Forgotten on Internet.” Fascinating. The real news article said, “People can ask Google to delete sensitive information from its Internet search results.” The source of the assertion was Europe’s top court. After I read the item, I wondered what was being “deleted” and “from where”? When it comes to removing content, the concept of deletion may need some of Mr. Bill Clinton’s “is” type thinking. Content can disappear. An example would be information from government servers. In some cases, the removal of content is intentional. In others, a system administrator performs and operation and – poof – content is history.
Digital information is like “dark matter.” It may be hard to detect, but some people know that it is very real. For example, poke around the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. There is some interesting information on that system that may be otherwise difficult, if not impossible, to access.
Then there is the problem of deleting content from data management systems. I am confident that Europe’s top court knows that removing an item from an index does not remove the item from the data management system, back ups, or mirrors of content residing “out there” on the Internet or on a researcher’s personal computer.
The notion of deleting is fuzzy to me.
Almost as fascinating is the question of who gets to “remove” what? What are the procedures for getting content deleted from Google or any other system? How does one know that the information is gone? Run a query on a free Web search engine? A commercial system?
Like many ideas in the category “barn burned and horses gone”, deleting content from the “Internet” may be a challenging issue to resolve. In the case of removing content from some of the major online search systems, a Costco has already been erected on the site where the barn once stood, horses grazed, and sun touched information farmers once raised their data crops.
Stephen E Arnold, May 15, 2014
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