John DeBevoise:Greetings everyone and welcome to another serving Of Bizness Soup Talk Radio. If it’s in business, it’s bizness soup. I’m your host, John DeBevoise. Joining us from Reputation Defender once again is Rich Matta on the subject of the right to be forgotten. Is it something that is right? Is it wrong? Is it fair? Rich Matta, welcome back to Bizness Soup.
Rich Matta:Thanks John. Great to be back.
John DeBevoise:Rich, what is this movement that’s called Right to be Forgotten?
Rich Matta:Yeah. So we’ve started a campaign at righttobeforgotten.org, and it’s really all about the basic principle that sometimes a person’s right to privacy outweighs the public’s right to know. Things that happened years ago, you know, mundane things like you were sued and you won, that can stick to your Google search results and that can destroy a life or business, and we just don’t think that’s fair. So the Right to be Forgotten is about giving people recourse to make it easy for them to move forward with their lives in those situations.
John DeBevoise:Well, who determines the level of the severity of this action that I did? If it’s a criminal, if it’s a civil fight with an ex spouse, I’m sure you guys could have a lot of business with a lot of these athletes that are out there. I’m sure a lot of their stuff would like to be forgotten by everyone. So who makes that determination of what should be forgotten and what isn’t?
Rich Matta:Yeah, it’s a very nuanced determination, but this has been largely figured out in Europe. It’s been in place for over four years, since 2014, and there are some guidelines. Mostly it’s mundane information, it’s personal information. Nobody really has necessarily the right to know exactly where you live and who your children are, and if you want that removed in Europe, you can get that. And then let’s say you were found not guilty in a criminal case or you won a civil case and it’s old and it’s irrelevant, your right to privacy exceeds the public’s rights to know.
Rich Matta:That’s the guideline. And there are all kinds of details below that have been figured out and are working well in Europe, and our proposal is bring some of those guidelines to the US so that people have more options in these situations.
John DeBevoise:You said that this has been started or been going for four years in Europe, and I’m looking at the list of them, and it’s quite a list of countries that are out there. How successful has this been in say the European Union?
Rich Matta:In the EU, there have been tens of thousands of petitions to Google for de-indexing, from the Google search index, of unwanted information, personal information, and I think a few million URLs that have actually been removed successfully. Google has approved something like 42% of the submissions through the Right to be Forgotten, which is to say not all, right? There’s certain kinds of speech that obviously don’t fall under the tight definitions of what is considered personal and private, even in Europe where they don’t necessarily have a first amendment.
Rich Matta:So you know, we’re for a very tight definition of what applies here, but some degree of recourse for individuals when they run into these kinds of situations to get things removed from the front page of Google and not suffer so much damage.
John DeBevoise:There have been numerous criticisms about this, particularly in the United States, on how it would restrict the freedom of speech. After all, we have this constitution that has been referred to many times as getting in the way by some politicians. But how do you get around the fact that this could be a restriction on the freedom of speech?
Rich Matta:This isn’t meant to cover actual free speech, for example, political speech, nothing to do with that, right? It’s more about mundane, perfunctory things about your life, you know, where you live, a case where you were maybe charged and found not guilty 10 years ago, a civil case from 10 or 15 years ago that you actually won. You know, in all of these situations, that first impression still exists online about you and it can kill your business, right? Or it can kill your job search.
Rich Matta:And so, the definition of what is covered under Right to be Forgotten, the devil’s in the detail for sure. This is not about suppressing opinions, you know, suppressing anything that’s already perhaps covered by free speech or covered by our existing defamation law, it’s just about filling some of the gaps where there’s really no coverage and no recourse for the individual today.
John DeBevoise:We’re speaking with Rich Matta. He is the CEO of Reputation Defender, and if you recall his previous appearance here on Biz Soup, we were talking about when and how you would need to defend yourself and your image to the world through the internet, and how Reputation Defender can help you as a business owner defend your business and your reputation. We’re talking about the Right to be Forgotten.
John DeBevoise:Who is your number one person who is signing this petition? I know it’s a petition, but who’s coming to it and saying, “Hey, I want to be forgotten.” Are these big people, little people, or everyone?
Rich Matta:Pretty much everyone. You know, this is a very popular point of view. There have been several polls, all of which showing response in the high 80% level, 88% is one poll that I saw recently, of Americans favor some form of Right to be Forgotten legislation, right? You can’t get 88% of people to agree on anything in America these days, right?
Rich Matta:So it’s pretty much everyone that would agree to this, but I think the people most affected are business owners and are professionals who are in the public sphere and who trade on their reputation, and who consider page one of Google, the way they’re represented online through big tech platforms, to be extremely important to their ability to acquire customers, attract investments, forge partnerships, right? For those kinds of people, this is particularly important.
John DeBevoise:As to the kind of things that can be forgotten, is there a limitation, a guide that says, “No, we’re not going to allow you to be forgotten about that,” or, “That’s okay, we’ll forget about that.” Who makes that decision?
Rich Matta:There are guidelines that are laid down. The way this has been done previously in Europe is based on a high level principle; a person’s right to privacy outweighs the public’s right to know, which isn’t true for everyone and it isn’t true for all cases.
Rich Matta:So for example, if you’re a politician, the public has a right to know just about everything about you, right? Not quite everything, but just about. Or if you’re the CEO of a public corporation, you know, again, you have a very public-facing role and there’s very little in the set of information that would be considered truly private for you because there are investors that have a right to know a lot about you.
Rich Matta:But for the normal business owner, where you live or who your children are, or the fact that you were sued 15 years ago and won or lost, it doesn’t really matter, but you know, for something non-criminal, that isn’t necessarily something that should be on page one of Google for the rest of your life, right? And so, that’s an example of a case where you would be a candidate for de-indexing through a Right to be Forgotten process.
John DeBevoise:Rich Matta is joining us. He is the CEO of Reputation Defender and we are talking about the Right to be Forgotten. Rich, this is a petition. Where are you at with this petition? You said that you are at the forefront of this. What are you looking for and what will be the next step at the Right to be Forgotten?
Rich Matta:Well, we’re just getting started frankly, and we need support. And we know this is a very popular initiative. 88% of people support it in polls, and they just need to go to righttobeforgotten.org where you can sign a petition. It automatically knows who your representatives are and it sends them an email. You can also optionally tweet at them through the form that’s on the website. And you can learn more, most importantly. You know, educate yourself, read the resources that are on the website, find out more about how you can support it and sign the petition if you agree, and we appreciate your support. We’re hoping that this becomes a movement, that this gains some organic groundswell, and that we can take this to Congress and push harder for some real legislation.
Rich Matta:The last major laws in this topic area were passed in America in 1996. There’s something called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and it protects these big tech companies from any degree of responsibility or any need to take any action for these egregious situations where lives and businesses are being destroyed for no good reason. And so, we think that’s unfair and we want to do something about it.
John DeBevoise:As to this being implemented, let’s say that the Right to be Forgotten is agreed. The legislation goes through and they say yes. Is this going to be a federal thing? And what about the states? Is there going to be an individual aspect to this Right to be Forgotten that the states will be able to ignore or have to enforce?
Rich Matta:We see this as a federal thing. I mean, for example, there was a privacy law recently passed in California, and now the debate has moved to Washington, and there’s bipartisan support for some form of federal legislation in the area of privacy. We see that similarly that the States could do something about it, but it’s inevitably clunky and, you know, you can’t force companies reasonably to conform to 50 different types of legislation. So we see this at the federal level.
Rich Matta:And you know, importantly, all we’re calling for is thorough debate on this and definition of exactly what it should cover and what it shouldn’t. You know, the US is not the same as Europe. Even though a certain thing has been figured out in Europe and has been in place, we’re supporting the healthy debate about this on a topic that 88% of Americans already support, and the definition with some federal legislation.
John DeBevoise:We’re talking with Rich Matta. Rich is the CEO of Reputation Defender, and the subject here on a followup to his previous interview here has been all about the Right to be Forgotten. Rich, in closing this segment of Bizness Soup up, what would be the number one tip that you would pass on to our audience of small business owners on what they should be looking for in this movement of the Right to be Forgotten?
Rich Matta:I think, you know, look, these things take time. So I think, you know, support the movement definitely if few agree. Otherwise though, you still need to be vigilant about your online reputation. There are lots of things that this would not cover, including reasonable or unreasonable opinions about your business. That’s just free speech, right? And that’s not going away, nor do we want it to go away.
Rich Matta:So you have to monitor your online reputation. You have to set up free monitoring services like Google alerts or reputationdefender.com/free so that you know what’s going on, what’s being said about your business. And if you have a problem, you can certainly come see us at Reputation Defender and we can help you push down that negative information and give you back your good name, your business’ good name so you can keep being successful.
John DeBevoise:We didn’t talk about this earlier, but are there any special offers to make me disappear? Can I just go poof?
Rich Matta:Well, John, we just want to make you look better. We don’t want to make you disappear. We want to make you look your very best, and of course, yeah, we’re happy to offer listeners a 10% discount. And they can get that discount if they can go to reputationdefender.com/bizsoup to learn more and receive the special offer.
John DeBevoise:We want to thank Rich Matta of the Reputation Defender. He is the CEO and at the forefront of the discussion here of Right to be Forgotten. Rich, thanks for joining us again on a serving of this soup.
Rich Matta:My pleasure, John. Great to be here again.
