Search engines froze personal information in permanent foreground of digital identity

Evidence

Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—starting with the web—changed all of our lives. There have been enormous benefits, to be sure. But for individuals it has meant that information that would normally age and be forgotten now remains forever young, highlighted in the foreground of each person’s digital identity. The Spanish Data Protection Agency recognized that not all information is worthy of immortality. Some information should be forgotten because that is only human. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 183

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that ‘some information should be forgotten because that is only human’ raises a question about the moral status of forgetting—is forgetting a human right, a psychological necessity, or a social norm being disrupted?
• XREF: connects to: Google’s indexing changed the information life cycle by making personal data permanently accessible — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 182; Search engines as attention condensers make data seem to speak for themselves — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 214; Radical online openness paradoxically produces a more filtered, self-censored self — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 632

Broader Connections

• Search engines as attention condensers make data seem to speak for themselves #expands (0.80) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 214
• Radical online openness paradoxically produces a more filtered, self-censored self #complicates (0.72) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 632