Google’s indexing changed the information life cycle by making personal data permanently accessible

Evidence

One had been terrorized by her former husband and didn’t want him to find her address online. Informational privacy was essential to her peace of mind and her physical safety. A middle-aged woman was embarrassed by an old arrest from her days as a university student. Informational privacy was essential to her identity and sense of dignity. One was an attorney, Mario Costeja González, who years earlier had suffered the foreclosure of his home. Although the matter had long been resolved, a Google search of his name continued to deliver links to the foreclosure notice, which, he argued, damaged his reputation. While the Spanish Data Protection Agency rejected the idea of requiring newspapers and other originating sites to remove legitimate information—such information, they reasoned, would exist somewhere under any circumstances—it endorsed the notion that Google had responsibility and should be held to account. After all, Google had unilaterally undertaken to change the rules of the information life cycle when it decided to crawl, index, and make accessible personal details across the world wide web without asking anyone’s permission. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 182

Categorization

• XREF: This connects to the reader’s knowledge of right-to-be-forgotten debates and to broader surveillance-capitalism themes of data permanence versus human forgetting. — connects to: Google’s founders conceived its product as capturing all personal life data — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 310; Search engines froze personal information in permanent foreground of digital identity — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 183

Broader Connections

• Search engines froze personal information in permanent foreground of digital identity #expands (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 183
• Google’s founders conceived its product as capturing all personal life data #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 310