Internet has a scary side, too

Imagine you are in a relationship, close and committed, yet your beloved keeps bringing up something you got wrong seven years ago. Or something you said, incorrectly, ignorantly, a decade ago.

Or that time when you were in college and you did something so embarrassing that you would like to forget it forever, but they won’t let you. They’re there week after week, throwing it in your face, telling all your friends, blabbing it to complete strangers, whispering it to your mum, informing your boss, even spreading photos, and never, ever letting you move on.

You’d think you would just end the relationship immediately, but the truth is they won’t let it go, whether you’re there or not. They’ll follow you down the street, round the corner, round the world, shouting your secret after you.

Maybe, you think, you’d change your name and move house but, unless you move countries and start again from scratch, denying your old life and work and friends entirely, they’ll find you soon enough and point fingers, and everybody will know. Again.

Perhaps in despair you’d consider ending your own life to escape, but that lowest moment will then become your obituary.

Well, this is a relationship we’re all already in: welcome, my friends, to the truth of the Internet.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the internet, but it scares me, too. That’s why I’m glad Google has lost a landmark “right to be forgotten” case in London and must now remove search results relating to a man’s conviction over a decade ago for “conspiracy to intercept communications”.

Another claimant, meanwhile, lost his “right to be forgotten” case regarding false accounting 20 years ago. The difference? He continued to lie about it, to mislead people regarding his past crimes, and shows no remorse.

As for the winner, he’d owned his crime, served his time, was regretful and, crucially, was highly unlikely to repeat his wrong. It was not in the public interest that his misstep was the first thing – the first 20 things – that Google revealed about him.

The truth is we all mess up. I don’t want a past mistake or “mistweet” or misjudged article to be my legacy, any more than I’d want a bitter ex to write my epitaph.