One year and six months ago, Croatian-born pianist and composer Dejan Lazic sent The Washington Post a request to remove a 2010 review of his Washington debut by classical music critic Anne Midgette that — he claims — has marred the first page of his Google results for years.
Anne Midgette wrote an article titled “Sparks but no flame: Pianist Dejan Lazic at Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater.” Dejan Lazic said in the email, “A single article like this one, being not only of a rather negative or even toxic connotation, but also in my opinion coming from a rather uninformed source …….” In Lazic’s version, Midgette mischaracterized his 2010 performance at the Kennedy Center and slandered him as a performer, out of ignorance or malice.
Pianist asks The Washington Post to take down the concert review under the EU’s ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling. The EUs top court ruled in May 2014 that data about individuals held by search engines including Google must be deleted on request. The European Court of Justice said an individual has the right "to be forgotten" when such personal data "appear to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purpose for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed."
The Washington Post chose not to remove the review for the sake of freedom of speech. “We ought to live in a world, Lazic argues, where everyone — not only artists and performers but also politicians and public officials — should be able to edit the record according to their personal opinions and tastes,” the Washington Post concluded.
Though The Washington Post's imbroglio with Dejan Lazić ended with the newspaper publishing a counter-article containing his emails, it has sparked controversy over the ‘right to be forgotten.’ As South Korea is also going to introduce guidelines on the right to be forgotten, inevitable conflict between two distinct social values—privacy and free speech- is expected to ensue.
According to the guidelines, when users are unable to delete posts they wrote after canceling their membership, they can ask the message board administrator to halt other users’ access to the posts. If the message board administrator cannot take action due to the shutdown of the message board, users can ask search engines to do the job.
Controversy over S. Korea’s guidelines on the right to be forgotten is three-fold. First, the guidelines could undermine freedom of expression and the right to know and could be used as a pretext to justify censorship.
Second, as the guidelines protect only the right to be forgotten and do not include ways to remedy the damage done by posts written by others, some call the guidelines a ‘job left half-finished.’
Lastly, the guidelines do not apply to foreign online service operators, so reverse discrimination against Korean companies is feared.
A balance should be struck between the right to be forgotten and the right to know.
Records circulating on the Internet sometimes arouse good memories of the past but sometimes serve as shackles of the past. It is agonizing to see past mistakes and wrongdoings inflicting damage on your current life. However, deleting posts on request simply because they appear to be inadequate or no longer relevant today could encourage irresponsible behavior and spawn distrust in this era of information explosion.
In particular, in this money-oriented society, people in power and socially influential people can abuse their authority to cover up and glorify their past wrongdoings.
Therefore, to effectively help users who lost access to their posts while protecting the right to know and freedom of speech, the guidelines should be applied sparingly.
Also, as the guidelines are focused mainly on users’ rights to their postings, the number of people suffering from false and defamatory postings written by others is expected to rise. Thus, the guidelines should be designed to strike a balance between the two.
