Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, has a particular cultural and economic perspective on free speech - reflected in comments made both by him and by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Free speech is undoubtedly a cornerstone of freedom, but it cannot always be fought or guarded in the court of public opinion; the free market of ideas.



To Wales, bad speech is defeated by more speech. Such a solution does not guarantee a defence to the weak and the marginalised. Here, in particular, the human rights that benefit all of us serve a fundamental purpose.

In the UK - where a serious legal commitment to human rights is wavering - we cannot afford to be loose with terminology. Wales refers, inaccurately, to “history as a human right”, to “the right to remember”, to “the right to truth”.

Of course, memory is at the foundation of humanity. Memory builds truth, truth brings justice, and justice brings peace. These are the fundamental pillars of human society.

Within these pillars, the right to privacy and, in Europe, the right to personal data, are embedded, harmonised, legally-recognised human rights.

And so we come to the hard sociopolitical problem at the heart of the so-called “right to be forgotten”. It is not about the search engines, online services, Google, or Wikipedia. It is about the value humanity ascribes to them as purveyors of “truth”, of “history”, and of “memory”.

It is about confronting what they really are. These services offer catalogues, or maps, of human knowledge, sentiments, joys, sorrows, and venom. But they operate under fundamentally privatised, economic drivers. They are a black box. They are open to manipulation, to abuse, to blocking and censorship. These algorithmic machines of so-called truth are not unbiased, dumb, accidental, or natural.

The internet is, or should be, pluralistic. A space that encourages a diversity of cultural perspectives. Data protection law is an area where countries would do well to respect their neighbours and their antecedents, and the fact that different value systems exist.

The fundamental idea at the heart of data protection law jars particularly with US-style notions of free speech. It is the idea that personal information should be within my capacity to control - information that concerns me, and which has lost its timeliness, its relevance or its accuracy, and has no public interest.

Guidelines and greater certainty on how each of these concepts will be interpreted and applied are absolutely essential to giving confidence to data protection law for the future.

These must address the fact that the conditions - and particularly the pivotal public interest criteria - are jeopardised by the law’s structure. That structure prohibits processing information that is sensitive but may be in the public interest, such as that concerning criminality, political donations, or sex offences; or information that pertains to us all unconditionally and without reference to relevance or accuracy, such as information revealing race or ethnicity (images), or philosophical beliefs (opinions).

Jimmy Wales is right that this is, at some level, censorship. But so are a plethora of other things online - the far more extensive foreclosure of the public domain by virtue of laws on copyright, gambling, ‘child safety’, pornography. Data protection law is the legally-backed control of personal information in some circumstances because we think there are deeply-embedded values worth protecting, under appropriate guidelines, for the enrichment of all society.

We are not far from a world of augmented reality, where the first page of search results after searching my name might be pasted, virtually, on my forehead by Google Glass and its kin. At the moment, we walk the streets with everyone. Criminal, queer, classed - we don’t know, we don’t care, and we respect one another’s personal space.

There is a public sphere of memory and truth, and there is a private one. This is fundamental to higher, egalitarian values. It is at risk if we are not prepared to creatively, openly, and earnestly explore the rights embedded in data protection and privacy laws.

Without the freedom to be private, we have precious little freedom at all.