Quality of Information, the Right to Oblivion and Digital Reputation - Discrimination and Privacy in the Information Society - page 285

In this respect two cases, presented by Mayer Schonberger 22 , may serve as an
example.
In the first one, known as the “drunk pirate”, a young trainee teacher had placed
on her “My Space page” a photograph of herself wearing a pirate hat while drinking
from a plastic cup, with the words “drunk pirate”. The photograph was seen by
someone from the school where she was a trainee and despite her successfully
removing it from the site, it had already been circulated on the web and had already
been indexed by search engines. Because of the appearance of this photograph, she
was not taken on by the school and did not pursue a career in teaching.
In the second case, a 70 year elder doctor was stopped on the United States-
Canada border by a customs officer, who had typed his name into a search engine
and found an article written in 2001 in which the doctor mentioned that he had
made use of LSD during the sixties. The elderly doctor was stopped at the border
and denied permanent access to the United States.
In legal terms, the two cases seem different. In the first one, the processing of
personal data by the social network appears legitimate although the circulation of
the picture on the network without the data subject's consent is unlawful. In the
second case, the doctor should have been able to exercise his right to oblivion.
Both cases reflect the value of information and its influence on the creation of
third party opinions. As a consequence, the above examples lead to consider the
need to guarantee that every process involving the treatment of personal data
fulfils specific requirements, driven by the rule of fairness and by both the need
for accuracy and the protection of0 an individual's reputation. In the first case, the
information was out of context. In the second case, it was outdated. In both cases
the inaccurate information caused a harm to the reputation of the two persons
involved.
The above considerations about the principles regarding to data quality take a
different perspective on the web, where memory seems to have no limits. As a
general rule, the Internet does not forget. It is not common practice to remove data
from a website. Data are replicated on other websites and in the cache, in order to
make it more readily at the time of request. Therefore, the data published on the
net is subsequently traced and rarely deleted. No act of cancellation is commonly
performed and would be in any case technically difficult. The net is therefore a
repository of global dimensions. There are no fundamental criteria of archiving
related to the quality of information, the contextualization in a part of a process or
setting up relationships between information (metadata).
This raises the issue of removing data from the network, which does not
naturally forget or select information, as well as the well-known problem of
quality of information and sources, which are not always reliable or at least
recognizable. However, this problem cannot only be solved by the law, but also
through technology. For instance, Mayer-Schönberger proposes assigning a
deadline to information 23 . Whatever the solution or solutions, the contribution of
technology is also essential to allow individuals to exercise their right to
22 Mayer-Schönberger (2009), p. 1.
23 Mayer-Schönberger (2009), p. 152.