Internet Memes And 'The Right To Be Forgotten'

The Internet is a difficult place to police. "The law is frankly very ill-suited to respond to that," says Woodrow Hartzog, an associate professor at Stanford University's Cumberland School of Law. "It doesn't really offer a great tool to respond to unwanted attention." The European Union and Argentina have instituted a concept known as "the right to be forgotten." It allows for individuals living in these places to ask search engines like Google to de-index certain pages that are irrelevant, false or not newsworthy. It's a concept that has been controversial, as it raises concerns about public records and freedom of information. The battle has been playing out between Google, which is fighting to apply Europe's "right to be forgotten" only in the EU, and EU regulators, who want the company to apply the rule globally.

For those who did not grow up in an era where everything got recorded, it's hard to imagine the mortification of having our silliest teenage moments live on forever, beyond a photograph stowed away in mom's garage. "It's important for us to fail when we are young," says Herzog. "That's how we learn. That's how we develop our sense of right and wrong. That's how we develop our sense of empathy. And the ability to move past that, and not have those same things haunt you."