Will The Right To Be Forgotten Be Good News For Jobseekers?

Who could forget that Europe's highest court ruled in favor of the "right to be forgotten"? The new right, as outlined in Farhad Manjoo's New York Times article, "‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Online Could Spread," is designed to "offer citizens some recourse to what had become a growing menace of modern life: The Internet never forgets, and, in its robotic zeal to collect and organize every scrap of data about everyone, it was beginning to wreak havoc on personal privacy." Manjoo interviews internet law luminaries and leaders, Including Jonathan L. Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School; Emma Llansó, a free expression scholar at the Center for Democracy and Technology; Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel; Jimmy Wales, the founder of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia; and Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group.

How this new right will play out between job seekers and employees wanting to distance themselves from information and employers wanting to get that information (who, in some cases, may have liability associated with hiring) remains to be seen.