I made it a point in Fall 2018 to get away from the most damaging place I knew of, Twitter. The year prior had been a long one, and as I approached my final semester of college, I figured I could use the extra head space. I was right.
I enjoyed not being bogged down in the daily Trumpian cycle of men and women I was taught as a child were elected because they were the best and brightest constantly acting like the elephants and donkeys that graced their party flags.
I was shocked at how much extra energy I had and the new ability to do something I hadn’t had to in a while: ask questions of the flesh-and-blood people around me. Not being as politically or socially up to speed, I was able to learn from those whom I encountered in person opinions on every side under the sun. It was while I was talking to a friend about Kavanaugh’s nomination hearing that I had a sobering thought: Would my high school past catch up to me?
To be clear, I never did anything bad in high school, especially nowhere near the level of Kavanaugh’s alleged actions. I was an introvert, an engineering nerd who played a lot of videogames. Which means I worried that there might be too many cringe-worthy photos of me out there on the Internet in World of Warcraft Cosplay. Then, there were the photos of me playing airsoft that a friend jokingly said looked like militia training, a throwaway comment that made me paranoid. I went to https://tweetdelete.net/, which did exactly what the site name implies. I thought the matter was settled.
Today, I work in data privacy at one of the largest visual media companies in the world. With the recently implemented General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), in the EU, and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which goes into effect in January, the field of data privacy has become a bigger focus for many law firms and media companies. These new laws not only advocate for the “right to be forgotten” but also the right to gain access to what companies have on you, to be able to rectify that data, and to opt out of the selling of your data to third parties.
My job is to handle such requests for my company. I make sure data subjects—website users, employees, or contributors to our company—understand what we can and can’t do regarding their queries . Mainly, we get deletion requests, which for my company means deleting either the user account or taking down photos taken of data subjects. We do handle other requests, such as requests for access, but they are incredibly rare compared to requests for deletion. Most of the time we honor the request to delete in full; however, there are some cases where we do not. For example, we cannot fully delete the account of a paid contributor to the company, since we need to keep track of payments for royalties.
In addition to various commercial images, my company also sells news photos, and we have business and, by superseding laws, legal reasons to keep all those photos up on our website. Meaning, we can refuse someone’s right to be forgotten if their image is included in media of a newsworthy event that may be provided to journalistic organizations.
In handling one request for a news photo to be taken down, because it included the image of a particular woman who didn’t want her image being used, we determined that the event was newsworthy and open to the public, and so her inclusion in the image was incidental. We decided to take the photo down anyway, because we had other good photos of the event. A week after we told her we had taken down the image she contacted us to say that the photo was still showing up in Google searches of her name, as it was being used by a news blog.
The rest of that story is for a different article, but when the woman contacted us about her photo still being out there, I immediately thought, Which of my photos were still out there? After searches using my full name we well as past usernames, it turned out that some of my Twitter images were indeed still findable, since other friends who were in them kept their copies of the images up. I could theoretically reach out to each of those friends and make take-down requests on my own, but without any legal reason I had no power, and perhaps no personal reason to be up-in-arms about a few silly images. So. I have embarrassing photos on the Internet.
Personal bummers aside, the real point is that, as someone in the field and as a fellow Internet citizen, I want to encourage anyone reading this: Be careful what you put out in the world. The right to say what we feel and put into the world what we want has caught up to us. You can get many things removed or deleted, but not everything. I needed to be reminded that the freedom of speech also includes the freedom to not speak at all.
On the declining empire that is America, we reflect on our mistakes and worry we can’t recover. On the mega-tech corporations that grow in wealth and stature, we reflect that we may have given up too much in our pursuit of “prime” delivery and our desire to share our lives with the world. Yet there are signs of hope. Perhaps America itself is correcting, in its often-awkward way, with a resurgence average people realizing that they have a voice to be heard. So too are our major companies, when they are forced to understand and obey laws like CCPA that seek to protect that refound voice. My job is evidence of that.
Still, with the right key-words and my middle name, anyone can find out where I was and exactly what I was doing throughout most of 2015, the year I graduated high school, including some San Francisco restaurants, my prom, and one, unfortunate hospital stay.
