Reclaiming Your Online Identity

Thanks to new European data laws, you can reclaim your digital footprint.
Once upon a time, when your name appeared on the internet it was a novelty, kind of exciting, and usually not concerning. Those early internet days were filled with the carefree notion that the world wide web was simply a playground for information, not a place that would soon come to dominate nearly every facet of our professional, social and personal lives.
Fast forward about a decade, and the sheer reams of data and information that’s available about individuals online is staggering. It doesn’t matter if you’re a celebrity or a just an average Joe—chances are that if you Google your own name you’ll find things you may not rather see. For some people, these things can be quite benign. Old Facebook photos from university that they’ve forgotten to untag themselves in, or a interview they did with their local newspaper that has an unfortunate picture attached to it. These things may hurt our ego slightly, but they don’t ruin our reputations or our livelihoods.
For others, the opposite is true. People who have been involved in a scandal, smeared by an enemy over the internet, celebrities who have been slammed by the paparazzi, or unsuspecting people that found themselves the target of a gossip rag’s attacks may rediscover very unwelcome material. These things can be incredibly painful when they first occur, but the real damage comes later. Thanks to the unique powers of the internet these painful occurrences in people’s lives stick around. Unlike the analogue days where two weeks of bad press would eventually recede into the background as those print pages went to the recycling bin, the internet attaches our bad press or moments to our name like a badge of shame. This can affect us when searching for jobs, building a business, or even in a simple dating context.
Sometimes people have control over these search histories—such as a friend’s social media post, which they can directly ask be removed—but other times they don’t, such as when an unknown user has posted a YouTube video depicts a person in a negative light. In 2014, the European Union did something about the latter case by passing legislation that stated that each and every European citizen has the “right to be forgotten”. This essentially means that one faux pas or mistake should not continue to define a person online forever.
Practically, this meant that Google had to comply with any request from a European citizen who wanted a URL containing outdated or irrelevant information about their name to be removed from the internet. And request they did. To date, Google has received  348,085 URL removal requests, with the majority coming from citizens in France, Germany, UK, Spain and Italy respectively. Unsurprisingly the bulk of these requests were for social networking sites like Facebook, but YouTube wasn’t far behind.
The fact that this has been such a popular course of action is very telling. While the EU seems to be on the vanguard of this idea, the right to anonymity online and to digital agency is a very of-the-moment topic. Social networks are giving users more control over what can be seen and unseen on their profiles, and the idea that we should be “opted-in” to things online without our knowledge is becoming increasingly unpopular and offensive. This question has major implications for the future of the internet, especially as technology advances. As new parents post hundreds of pictures of their kids in 2015, are they opting them into a image cataloging system that’s yet to be invented yet? Shouldn’t their child have a right to control how their digital lifespan starts?
These are big questions, for sure, and ones that will not be solved overnight or with any court ruling. But it’s plain to see that the carefree days of Googling ourselves are officially over.