Internet Ethics: Views From Silicon Valley

In October 2014, Google inaugurated a Transparency Report detailing its implementation of the European court decision generally (though mistakenly) described as being about “the right to be forgotten.” To date, according to the report, Google has received more than 244,000 requests for removals of URLs from certain searches involving names of EU residents. Aside from such numbers, the Transparency Report includes examples of requests received--noting, in each case, whether or not Google complied with the request.

The “right to be forgotten” decision and its implementation have raised a number of ethical issues. Given that, we thought it would be useful to draw up an ethics case study that would flesh out those issues; we published that yesterday: see “Removing a Search Result: An Ethics Case Study.”

What would you decide, if you were part of the decision-making team tasked with evaluating the request described in the case study?