Last Thursday Justice Minister Owen Bonnici called for a debate on the ‘right to be forgotten’. The idea, which is based in part on a 2014 ruling by the Court of Justice of the EU, is that people should have the right to request internet search engines (Google, in a word) to remove search results related to them.

Bonnici mentioned the example of a man who applied for a job and who lost out after his interviewer googled his name and discovered he had an old conviction for petty theft. The drift was that it is not right that the past should haunt the present.

I think the minister is justified in his concern. I also think that this so-called right to be forgotten causes more problems than it solves, for a number of reasons.

The disclaimer is that I’m certainly not for a brooding attitude that writes people off as shadows of their past. I’ve had occasion to recommend to University three applicants who had a record of serious criminal convictions. I’m glad I did, because none of them went on to disappoint. They had done their time, and the three years spent at University wasn’t it.

The debate, then. First, the idea that a person should be thought of as some kind of tabula rasa is plainly nonsense. It reminds me of Descartes’s argument that animals have no sense of the past or the future, and are imprisoned in a perpetual present.

That argument, which was used to dismiss animal suffering as little more than a blip, was not Descartes’s finest moment. Anyone who has owned a cat – let alone observed chimps – will tell you that animals can and often do build legacies of experience which they tap into to deal with new situations.

Animals of the two-legged and hairless kind call these legacies ‘biographies’. They like to twist them around and rework them according to need, but are able to do so only to an extent. There is a limit as to how inventive one can get with one’s own or other people’s biographies. That limit is called ‘facts’, and it is used to evaluate competence and worth.

Take a typical evaluative situation – a job interview, for example. The candidate brings along an elaborate confection of facts and experiences, reworked to make it match the job description. It is the interviewer’s job to make sense of it. To do that properly, they need to concentrate on the unsaid.

This so-called right to be forgotten causes more problems than it solves

I’m saying that biography is indispensable as a tool to assess and evaluate people, and that that assessment is best served by access to the facts. The right to be forgotten is counterproductive, because it translates as the right to mislead people into making the wrong evaluations.

It is also a misguided principle. One might convincingly argue that it is in the person’s interest that others should get their facts right. Take someone with a criminal conviction. Surely it is better for them that their job interviewers should not have to work their minds round dark secrets, but rather to have access to the facts.

The right to be forgotten is on a collision course with the right to information. The damage would affect two parties. On one hand, society, that needs full access to information in order to properly evaluate its members. On the other, the individual, who is best served by that full access as opposed to rumours and half-truths.

The second reason why I don’t much support the right to be forgotten is that it tampers with the internet. The whole point of search engines is that they should search as efficiently and widely as possible.

It would of course be naive to think they do so all the time, or in a comprehensive way. Search engines do not have a mind of their own. Search hits are the result of some or other programmed algorithm. It follows that a person’s past exists in cyberspace according to the specifics of that algorithm. It is one, and only one, way of remembering things.

That said, I’m sceptical of anything that tries to block access to online activity. I get equally suspicious when people think and speak of the internet as some kind of external force that threatens to cause harm. We’ve seen more than one example of late.

A few weeks ago a man was blocked from using the internet following some nasty things he wrote about the Prime Minister. Some days later, the President’s Foundation for Social Wellbeing saw fit to perorate about what it called ‘problematic internet use’. And so on to paranoid and technophobic hell.

Now I am aware that the right to information is not absolute. Child pornography for example is visual information, yet most of us (me included) would agree that one should not have the right to produce or access it, online or otherwise.

Still, the right to be forgotten takes things too far. It departs from the principle of protection of citizens and wades into the marshy territory of information engineering. I would like to reserve the right to know, if only to better be able to be fair.

mafalzon@hotmail.com