LD Right to be Forgotten AFF

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet
any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.- Abraham Lincoln 16th
President of the United States
Thus, I stand ...
Resolved: The "right to be forgotten" from Internet searches ought to
be a civil right.
The Affirmative believes that in todays world it is incredibly hard to remove
inaccurate information from the web, and that the individual should have an
undeniable right to have those claims taken down. Obviously the Affirmatives value
for today's debate should be Justice. Justice is defined by Merriam Webster as the
quality of being just, impartial, or fair. My value criterion is accuracy. Accuracy
in that people have a right to have all false, irrelevant, or outdated information that
harms them taken down. The side with the least amount of false, irrelevant, or
outdated information on the web should win this debate.
First let me define some key terms
The right to forgotten: right to have untrue or inaccurate information removed
about you from the web
Civil right: is defined by the Cornell University Law school as an enforceable right
or privilege, which if interfered with by another gives rise for action and injury.
Examples of civil rights are freedom of speech, press, and assembly; the right to
vote; freedom from involuntary servitude; and the right to equality in public places.
Realize, Contention I: Internet often gets information wrong
A. Much of what is published on the internet is false
Oxford Health Journal, February 13, 2001
The Internet offers widespread access to health information, and
advantages of interactivity and information tailoring. However, access
is inequitable and use is hindered further by navigational challenges
due to numerous design flaw (disorganization, technical language and
lack of permanence). Increasingly, critics question the quality of online
health information; research indicates that much is inaccurate.
http://her.oxfordjournals.org/content/16/6/671.full
B. It is incredibly easy to hoax information on the web
University System of Georgia, 2014

There are no real restrictions or editorial processes for publishing

information on the Web, beyond some basic knowledge of Web page
creation and access to a hosting computer. Anyone can publish
opinion, satire, a hoax, or plainly false information. What this means
is that there is no way to know what is true or not on the web because
websites can be made so easily. The only way to know the truth is to
get rid of these false websites.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/how-to-remove-yourself-frompeople-search-websites/612
C. Contrary to Popular Belief Its Difficult to Correct Data on the
Internet without outside help.
New York Times, April 11, 2011
Many data brokers will let you opt out of their databases, though you will have to
contact each one individually. You may have to wait as long as 30 days for
information to come down. And they dont guarantee it will come down forever,
warns Amber N. Yoo, a spokeswoman for the Privacy Rights
Clearinghouse, which has a list of 140 brokers. Its a messy and complicated
problem.
All this can be a headache. A friend who faced a stalker last summer spent two
weeks trying to get her home address removed from four Web sites and search
engines. The sites cooperated, but, she said, there is still a ghost presence on
Google, even though she sent it multiple removal requests. Google said its search
engine reflected content that was available on the Web.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/technology/personaltech/14basics.html?
_r=0
D: False, inaccurate, or irrelevant information on the web can have very large scale
repercussions
Washington Post 2013
A posting on the Twitter account of the Associated Press reported explosions at the White
House that injured President Obama. Almost immediately, the stock market fell
sharply .But in the investing world, where super-high-speed computer trades dominate
the market, the reassurances did not come quickly enough to prevent momentary chaos.
The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 100 points between 1:08 p.m. and 1:10
pm. And it wasnt just the stock market. It was the bond market and commodity market

and everything, said Joseph Saluzzi, co-head of the equity-trading firm Themis Trading.
The event was done before humans could even process it.
Contention II. :Accuracy is a fundamental right which cannot be abridged

A: Inaccurate or Irrelevant Information hurts more than ever

New York Times 2010
Back in 1998, the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia

published two notices about

an auction of the property of a Spanish lawyer named Mario Costeja, held
to pay off his debts. More than a decade later, anyone who Googled Costeja
would see, in the search results, links to those notices on the newspapers
website. Costeja asked the Spanish Data Protection Agency, which
oversees the dissemination of personal data, to order La Vanguardia to
take the notices down and to order Google to remove links to the pages
from the search results for Costeja. The agency refused the first request
because the newspaper had published the notices by court order. But it
granted the second, telling Google to remove the links.

Also, Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training
at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her
MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and
drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption Drunken Pirate. After
discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo
was unprofessional, and the dean of Millersville University School of
Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking
in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before
Snyders scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching
degree.