Let's say tomorrow you enter and win a hot dog eating contest.

You just house the competition-- dog after dog

you are an unstoppable frank mangler.

People are so impressed they take out their phones,

they make videos, everything.

And then 10 years from now, after many considered life choices,

including becoming a serious vegetarian,

you're applying for a job at PETA.

Except, right there on YouTube for all to see,

your face, the Hot Dogalypse, Harmageddon.

Thank you for your resume, we'll be in touch.

Or far more realistically, though hopefully unlikely,

let's say you go bankrupt.

A bunch of years pass, you get back on your feet-- steady job,

no debt-- feeling good, you want to buy a house.

You go to the bank and the lending agent simply

Googles your name, bankruptcy.

And there you are, years ago on some public record-- fiscal

pants around your fiscal ankles.

You are a risk, and so no loan.

In both of these situations the internet's impeccable memory

could lead to trouble.

But at this point you might be asking

who is going to Google, really, for a loan?

-Human torch was denied a bank loan.

-Well, let's talk actualities.

Mario Costeja Gonzales from Spain had lots of debt

in the '90s-- so much so that his house was foreclosed upon.

A newspaper then reported on the foreclosure.

Costeja Gonzalez paid his debts, and

while his financial troubles disappeared,

that newspaper report did not.

It even got digitized and put on the internet.

A simple Google search brought it right up.

He asked the newspaper to take it down and they wouldn't.

He asked Google Spain to remove it

and they said he had to talk to Google US.

The whole thing ended up in the Spanish courts,

who then took it to the highest EU court, who

said that Google has to unindex those search results.

They point to things which are no longer useful or noteworthy,

and so the European Court of Justice

ruled that Google must comply with Costeja Gonzalez's request

and provide similar functionality for others.

If there is public information about private citizens indexed

by search engines and those private citizens

want that public information gone, gone.

And so begins the discussion of the right

to be forgotten-- well, sort of.

Much older, and not specifically internet, French and Italian

laws provide what is called a right of oblivion,

where a convict can block printing of details regarding

their misdeeds after they have paid their debt to society.

This emphasis on personal privacy

might seem extreme to many Americans, which

we'll talk about in a second, but it

does have a foot in history.

Viktor Meyer-Schonberger, show the author of Delete:

The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,

talked to The New Yorker about how

personal information collected innocently

by European cities in the early 20th century

was used by the Nazis to track people down

by religion and ethnicity.

He suggests that Europe's past inspires

a suspicion towards permanent comprehensive records,

that their attitude towards collecting and storing

personal data is a careful one.

Google's head counsel agrees that this careful attitude

is quote, a European concept, and given

that, the right to be forgotten needs limiting, he says.

Which it is limited-- to Europe.

Currently, if Google unindexes a search results from Google.es

or .fr or .de at the request of a European citizen,

that search result is still indexed on Google.com.

The EU courts are suggesting, but ultimately can't

force Google and other search engines like Yahoo and Bing--

who are also unindexing search results in the EU

to adopt the right to be forgotten worldwide.

Google has even basically said, um, yeah, no,

that's not going to happen.

Why would they say that?

Well, there are three big concerns,

and here is where we get to some of the America stuff.

One, does this encroach on the freedom of speech?

Bloggers, journalists, publishers--

they should be able to write about whatever they want,

even if the people it's about aren't super psyched about it.

Concern two, same issue, different angle--

is this censorship?

If someone can zap stuff about them that they don't like out

of existence, that seems bad.

Costeja Gonzales himself has said,

I support freedom of expression and do not defend censorship.

What I did was fight for the right to request

deletion of data that violates the honor, dignity,

and reputation of individuals.

The EU commission even wrote that the right to be forgotten

isn't about making prominent people less prominent

or criminals less criminal.

In other words, freedom of expression

and from censorship and the right to be forgotten

are not mutually exclusive.

NNG Andrade has suggested reconsidering the right

to be forgotten as the right to be different from oneself.

It's not about censorship as much

as it's about how perfect memory can sometimes

be an enemy of the future.

Imagining people complexly through the network

is already tough.

We're different people in different places

at different times.

Maybe the right to be forgotten prevents becoming

unfairly chained to your past.

Which brings us to concern number three--

does this allow the rewriting of history?

We've argued on Idea Channel before that even the smallest

bit of seeming ephemera could hold

great historical significance.

Now, are we saying that some of it should just get axed?

-Here's Johnny.

-But Google's not deleting things,

they're unindexing search results.

So maybe the bigger question is whether people

should be allowed to bury or disconnect from their own past.

That is a big question.

I see a related anxiety on social media

when people habitually write posts and then delete

them not long after.

There are lots of reasons you might do this.

Maybe you post something you instantly regret

or maybe you write something inflammatory

with every intention of deleting it immediately,

sort of like internet shouting into a pillow.

Or so you have a high follower count with not much content,

but some people post and delete because having

a persistent publicly available self

document is terrifying or embarrassing or just weird.

I've heard some people refer to this as delete culture.

And developers, at least, are responding to this desire

to be forgotten-- to always already be forgotten,

to have never been remembered by the internet.

Apps like Snapchat, Yik Yak, Secret, Whisper,

and a surprising number of others-- so many sources

in the doobly-doo are premised on impermanence, anonymity,

or both.

Of course, as some of us learned the hard way with Snapchat,

impermanence doesn't necessarily equate with deletion.

And as for the others, time will tell exactly how anonymous

they really are.

Personally, I don't post anything on Yik Yak

that I wouldn't say to my own mother.

Anyway, the right to be forgotten,

delete culture, these apps-- they all

speak to the perceived, though possibly

actual, effective permanence and influence of the internet.

Many people feel like if they put themselves on it

or if their selves end up on it, it

will become monumentalized-- it will tower over,

transcend some self that they hope eventually to become.

Reputation.com's founder sees it as unfair

that Disney or Fox or Viacom can handily

have their media scrubbed from Google's search index

but such a thing is nearly unthinkable

for a private citizen's public data,

even if that public data is out of date.

The question is whether private citizens do have the same right

to control their public data as media empires do

over their copyrighted material.

Some people say yes.

Some people say all people do and that the right

to be forgotten is and should be considered

nothing short of a universal right, a human right.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of and potential damage

caused by enforcing such a right will be determined by the way

it is implemented and how people use it or abuse it.

But before we get to that point, it's

worth reasoning out what it means

to support such a right to be-- I

just completely lost my train of thought.

Um-- What were we talking about?

What do you guys think?

Does everyone have a right to be forgotten?

Let us know in the comments and don't forget to subscribe.

Subjectivity in the my journalism?

It's more likely than you'd think.

Let's see what you guys had to say about objectivity

journalism and cereal.

First things first-- office hours

are this weekend on Saturday, February 7,

at the IBM Pavilion, 590 Madison Avenue in Manhattan, New York.

Come and hang out.

We're going to be there from one to three.

There's no plan-- just going to chill, have a conversation,

meet each other.

I'm really excited.

There's no plan of where I will be

since it is a private public space, so we can't really

reserve anything but if you don't see me just look

for my super bright orange backpack.

I will have this with me and you can see it from space,

so I should be pretty easy to find.

Second order of business-- next week's

episode is about the Legend of Korra finale.

So if you haven't seen it, you can.

You don't necessarily have to watch

it to understand what we're going to talk about,

but having the background wouldn't

hurt-- Legend of Korra, Book 4.

It's really good anyway so you should just watch it.

OK, finally on to comments.

Joe Hansen from It's OK to be Smart left a comment saying

that he was shocked we didn't get to Jay Rosen's

idea of the view from nowhere-- this idea that journalists are

able to view the world from nowhere,

from a place that is free of ideology, free of background

information, which is a place that doesn't really exist.

And Joe goes on to talk about the really important idea

of authority and how audiences give authority to journalists

and news networks and broadcasters,

and there is the question of why we do that and whether or not

we are maybe about to stop.

And I think that this comment is so, so great.

I wrote a pretty long response to it

and then there was a great conversation that followed.

So links to this one and the rest in the doobly-doo.

Matolryu from the subreddit hits

on the really important, uh, factor

of entertainment in journalism.

And Googolplex Byte also sort of hits on this same thing

by saying that journalism can't be objective

because objectivity doesn't sell.

And this is a big thing that I think about all the time--

whether or not journalism should or should not be competing

on the level of entertainment.

I feel like a lot of times it feels like it has to-- I don't

know that that's true.

And related to this idea, jakers457

seems to suggest that ideally, the news would just

be explanations of things that have happened--

just pure information.

And absent the problem of even the gathering

of information being objective, which, you know, there's