'Right to be forgotten' proposal is wrong for Hong Kong
Francis Fong argues against following a European ruling that would set back Hong Kong's journey towards more open access to public information
According to last month's ruling by the European Court of Justice, individuals in the European Union can now demand search engines and other content "controllers", including social media platforms, remove links to webpages that don't serve a "public interest". Since then, search engines like Google have received thousands of requests, including from a politician, a doctor, and a person convicted of child pornography, to remove links to unflattering material from search results.
With Hong Kong Privacy Commissioner Allan Chiang Yam-wang's statement that search engines should extend this practice to Asia, it is worth considering the serious consequences of this so-called "right to be forgotten". This is particularly so because this right can infringe on our equally important right to know and access information.
When governments gain the power to ask private companies to obscure legal public records, it will produce a chilling effect on Hong Kong's tradition of free expression. Under these measures, activists, journalists and ordinary citizens could be denied ready access to information that may seem "irrelevant" to privacy officials, but turn out to be important in public and private life.
This is particularly relevant for Hong Kong, where an active debate is currently under way on a possible freedom of information law and an archive law. We are seeing momentum of reform in the direction of increased transparency, and a "right to be forgotten" measure would reverse that.
Late last year, an editorial in this newspaper praised the Legislative Council Secretariat for digitising voting records and verbatim records dating back to 1877, making them machine-readable. They have greatly empowered citizens by making public information easily searchable. With the "right to be forgotten", however, if a legislator wants to erase links to some of his or her inconvenient truths in the council archive, how would we balance this with the broader public interest?
Requiring search engine providers to remove links deemed "inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant" would also hinder our ability to make reasoned and informed decisions. If search engines become the judge of the balance between personal privacy and public interest, and bear the legal and financial implications if they make the wrong call, they are much more likely to err on the side of caution and remove links that ought to stay up.
And what if a cosmetic surgeon with a record of professional malpractice could ask to remove links to news articles unfavourable to him or her? How would companies weigh the public interest against the surgeon's perceived right to remove this information?
The European court ruling has effectively created a balkanised internet, where European internet users will see one version of search results, and the rest of the world another. If similar measures are introduced here, we will not be able to access information in the same way as most of the world.
The free flow of information is an important cornerstone of Hong Kong's economic and social development. The last thing we want is to import a proposal from Europe that may be regressive and gets the balance wrong.
