Jimmy Wales: evaluation

Transcript context

…Do you believe in what the Europeans sometimes called the right to be forgotten on the internet? I have a real problem with the right to be forgotten as it is currently enshrined in European law. It’s a complicated subject, but here we go. First of all, I think privacy is very important, and I think that a lot of internet services need to be much more thoughtful about people’s privacy and really think harder about this. I also think a lot of governments need to think harder in the new era about privacy versus transparency about public information about their citizens. As an example, I live in the UK, but I’m registered to vote in Florida. So I registered for a mail-in ballot. I got an email saying, “Here’s your ballot information, blah, blah, blah.” I can look up my ballot — not how I voted, but I can look up my home address, which I normally try to keep very, very secret. I probably shouldn’t even mention this because trolls will now know where to go look for it. But my home address is there, and all you need is my name and my date of birth, and you can get my home address. And I’m like, “That’s not really necessary for public transparency.” Or is it? It’s a good question. I think we need to struggle with some of those questions. Right to be forgotten — my biggest beef with right to be forgotten in the UK, currently, is that Google can be forced to take down links to content that is perfectly legal on a publisher’s website. In fact, the case that got this all underway is a link to a newspaper article, which is still online, but Google is not allowed to link to it, and there’s no judge involved. When we think about this in an American First Amendment context, what you would say is, it wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t pass First Amendment scrutiny to say, “Oh, no, it’s perfectly legal to publish this magazine. It’s just not legal to offer it in stores.” Like you’re not allowed to. You have to hide it. We would say, “Hold on a second. That’s just not right.” That is a violation of the freedom of expression if you can’t distribute your content because, clearly, if you’re not findable in Google, that’s a problem. Nobody’s going to read the piece. There’s no easy right of appeal. You could appeal to Google, and I do believe Google’s doing the best they can to balance people’s privacy interests with freedom-of-expression interests, but I don’t think it’s Google’s job. I don’t think that we want to have a company, however well intentioned, to be tasked in society with deciding those kinds of issues where, really, if something is such an egregious privacy violation that it should be censored, boy, I really want to have a judge involved. I think that is something that we need to not have handled at the company level. Now, in the middle of all these conversations, we have a section, overrated versus underrated. I’ll toss out a few ideas. You tell me if you think they’re overrated or underrated. Got it?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.