Authors:
Ramnath Sai Sagar
You can throw away the key, but information is persistent.
Strong privacy laws that establish the ‘right to be forgotten’ may be unenforceable. EU citizens can request that search engines remove results that are no longer relevant or accurate; however, researchers at NYU have found that even after links are delisted it is possible determine the names of individuals who petitioned for their removal. Simply by reviewing source material on websites, parsing names that are mentioned, then cross-referencing searches of the article topics with null results for those names, virtually anyone could uncover 30-40% of the delisted results and individuals. The fact that antagonists can exploit this easy hack leads to the paradoxical ‘Streisand effect’ for those who wish to regain anonymity. The lesson? Once information is out of your control, it stays that way- no amount of legislation can reverse Pandora’s gossip box.