Most Canadians support ‘right to be forgotten’: poll

Canadians appear to be generally in favour of the ‘right to be forgotten’, with most showing support for the idea and a majority saying they would support having it set out in Canadian law, according to a poll released Monday by the Angus Reid Institute. Half of Canadians said they believe people should have the right to have certain information about themselves removed from search results, while a quarter oppose the idea and another quarter have yet to make up their minds. Just slightly more than half -- 56 per cent of respondents -- said they would support legislation to put a right to be forgotten into Canadian law. Broken down by how respondents had voted in the 2015 election, the detailed results suggest Liberals, and more so NDP voters, were the most supportive of putting it in law. The vast majority of those polled said they don’t personally know anyone who has been haunted by negative information about them published on the internet, but then almost one-in-five said they do. Only two per cent admitted to having that problem themselves. The issue seems to be more relevant for younger Canadians. Nearly 30 per cent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 34 said they know at least one person who could benefit from such a right. That all said, most respondents knew very little about the concept before they were polled: 60 per cent had not heard of a right to be forgotten before being prompted, while 18 per cent said they had only heard the phrase. The pollster defined the idea as a person’s right to petition search engines to “remove references to embarrassing or irrelevant information about themselves from search results.” The results come from an Angus Reid online panel survey about the issue from late November 2018, which sampled 1,500 Canadian adults. Because it is an online poll, it does not include a margin of error. Federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien has asked the Federal Court for a reference on whether the private sector’s privacy law already applies to search engine de-indexing -- testing a position his office took that some have compared to the European Union’s right to be forgotten. The test-case stems from a complaint that Alphabet Inc.’s Google search engine contravened that law by “continuing to prominently display links to online news articles” disclosing “outdated” and “inaccurate” sensitive information about a Canadian’s sexual orientation and medical condition, according to the court documents submitted by the privacy commissioner last fall. Google has argued the issue doesn’t fall within the scope of the law because its search engine service is not a commercial activity under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) -- and even if it did, it would be protected by the Charter of Rights under freedom of expression.

Most Canadians support ‘right to be forgotten’: poll

Brief | January 7, 2019

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Most Canadians support ‘right to be forgotten’: poll

Brief | January 7, 2019

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