Yo, Tech Answer Guy,
I’m not vain. Okay, my license plate reads: Vanity2 (I think some rock star beat me to number one – bastard). Yes, I had my initials tattooed on the back of the necks of my children – purely as a safety measure! Then, there was the incident with the sand blaster and the giraffe – okay, I may be a little vain. But, you don’t have to be vain to do a Google search on your own name – everybody does it.
Imagine my surprise when I didn’t find myself. There was nothing there. Nada. A Nietzschean abyss, with nothing looking back.
Now, I’m no celebrity (as my wife keeps reminding me – really – she had stationery printed up with that motto), but I have done things in the past that have gotten the Internet’s attention. There was the time my grade school chess club went to the regional semi-finals (the eight year-old bastards at Malcolm Muggeridge Primary cheated, I’m sure of it!). There was the time I was caught Driving Under the Influence of Ska (damn musical profiling!). Hell, there was even the time I distributed brownies to inmates of the Aunt Mae Old Folks Home and Superhero Hangout – how was I supposed to know that the “special ingredient” in them wasn’t nutmeg? It’s not like I’d be caught dead in a kitchen!
How can this happen?
Sincerely,
Awful Leo Otto from Oshawa
Yo, Sir AwfuLOt,
There’s a French term, le droit a l’oubli. Since I don’t speak French (the Macho Code of Manliness forbids it – I wonder how French men cope with that…uhh, best not to question the MCM), I put the phrase through some Internet translation devices, and got “derecho al olvido,” “rätt till glömska” and “recht auf vergessen.” Since I don’t speak these languages, either, this was of limited use to me.
Instead, I decided to use French to English translation programmes. When I did, I got the following responses: “the right to be forgotten,” “the right to oblivion” and “the essence of meerkat stampeding.” I’m thinking this last one is an outlier, so let’s go with the right to be forgotten.
Now, that may not sound like a serious right. It certainly cannot be as important as the right to a steady stream of brewskies while watching hockey on Saturday night, or the right to rev your brand new V-8 engine at two in the morning – sometimes, a lion has to let out a mighty roar to show everybody else just who is king of the jungle. But, you know, people will claim the darndest things as rights
Turns out, the European Court of Justice ruled that people have a right not to have inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant information about them stay forever on the Internet. Okay, you and I may feel that le droit de la brewski is more important, but until it is upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada, le droit a l’oubli is the only one that has the force of law.
What does this have to do with you? I did a little digging. It turns out that Artemis Smedley – remember him? Teeth like a Godzilla-sized beaver? Hair like an oil slick? – is a successful lawyer with Bingham Gingham Gingrich and Subwoofer, and he felt that information that he was part of a losing chess team when he was a kid would make him the laughingstock at the Pedantic Penguin. So, he asked to have that information removed from the Internet, and it was.
Judge Deedee Dee, who presided over your DUIS case, asked that all mention of all of her rulings for a period of three years be removed from the Internet because “I was not in a good headspace at that time, and some of the decisions I made are…embarrassing.” The estate of Harrison Bergeron, one of the people who ate the brownies you distributed at the old age home asked that all mention of that incident be removed from the Internet: “This may give the erroneous impression that Mister Bergeron was a drug addict, and, in any case, he was too blitzed on Percocet to know what he was doing when he ate that brownie!”
I’m sure all other mentions of you on the Internet are gone for the same reason. You appear to be the innocent victim of a drive-by forgetting. I’m afraid that, until legal theory changes (and, if they hadn’t all been melted by global climate change, I would be able to use a glacier metaphor here for the speed of that), there’s not much you can do about it.
If it’s any consolation, you’ll be starting a new Internet footprint when this article is published. At least, until one of the people who complained about previous digital information about them complains about this. Enjoy finding yourself on Google while you can.
The Tech Answer Guy
If you are a dude with a question about the latest technology, ask The Tech Answer Guy by sending it to questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Just remember: Uhh…something.