Solace Of Oblivion Rhetorical Analysis

The Right to be Forgotten
Pathos and logos are two techniques used in the following article. To pull the readers into the article The Solace of Oblivion, the reader uses the literary technique known as pathos. To start the article, the author Jeffrey Tobin wrote, “On October 31, 2006, an eighteen-year-old woman named Nikki Catsouras slammed her father’s sports car into the side of a concrete toll booth in Orange County, California. Catsouras was decapitated in the accident.” This is an issue that creates sympathy for the family of Nikki Catsouras and gets the reader to empathize and side with the argument in the article. With a lack of privacy due to the Internet, the right to be forgotten needs to be advocated and upheld in the United States,

like it is in outlying countries.
Author Jeffrey Toobin introduces the article with the case of an eighteen-year-old woman named Nikki Catsouras. Catsouras slammed her fathers Porsche 911 into a concrete tollbooth at over one hundred miles per hour. Catsouras was instantly killed on impact as well as decapitated. California Highway patrol officers, who took the photographs at the scene, sent the photos to their colleagues. Within two weeks, the photos leaked onto the Internet and popped up on thousands of Web sites. This created an outrage for the Catsouras family as these pictures were private and should not have been open to the public. Pathos is present in this article at this point, as the readers will empathize for the family who are facing an emotional burden.
Once the investigation confirmed and located the two employees that shared the photographs, Catsouras father embarked on a modern legal quest: to remove information from the Internet. Similar to the Catsouras case, many people have made similar attempts, from actors who don’t want their private photographs in broad circulation to ex-convicts who don’t want their long-ago legal troubles to prevent them from finding jobs. All of these people want one thing that doesn’t exist in the United States: the right to be forgotten. (Toobin 1)
As a result of the Internet and search engines, it is harder for the world to forget about things.

Back in the day when there was no Internet, criminal records and similar records would quickly fade away, however now a days its almost impossible to expunge such records from the Internet. Toobin states, “In Europe, the right of privacy trumps freedom of speech; the reverse is true in the United States. Europeans think of the right to privacy as a fundamental human right, in the way that we think of freedom of expression or the right to counsel. (2) The furthest the United States has gotten to freedom of privacy is the laws that Congress has passed prohibiting the disclosure of medical information, education records and video store rentals. All of these protections can be competently overridden by law-enforcement investigations. Toobin, along with Mayer-Schonberger, have a strong belief that “we can’t trust anybody – not the state, not a company – to keep its own role and protect the rights of the individual.” (3) Schonberger also published a book entitled “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.” Schonberger asserts that the European postwar, post-Wall concerns about privacy are even more relevant with the advent of the Internet. Back in the day, they used to keep records on paper and film in filed cabinets, making the material harder to retrieve and publish. Schonberger says today, “digitization and cheap online storage make it easier to remember than to forget,

shifting our behavior default.” (3) All it takes is a click of a button to find detrimental information about people that shouldn’t be able to be accessed, or at least that easily.
Without a right to be forgotten in American law, the Catsouras family had no means of forcing Google to stop linking to the photographs. (Toobin 3) Google stated, “We knew people were finding the photos by Googling Nikki’s name or just ‘decapitated girl,’ but there was nothing we could do about it.” (3) As an interim measure, the Catsouras enlisted the help of Reputation.com, a company that tries to manipulate the results of additional information on the Internet. This service makes less desirable links harder to find in a Google search. After asking thousands of websites to take down the photos, at least two thousand of them did. The images were still easy to find however.
Along with the issue of the right to be forgotten, convicted criminals who want to escape the taint of their records are also out of luck when it comes to petitioning Google.

Although their situations are completely different from Catsouras, they’re actually somewhat similar. They both have documents and articles posted about them on the Internet, which are unable to be taken down which effect them in different ways. Over one hundred million U.S. citizens have a criminal records, in which are getting easier and easier to access. Even with the expungement of criminal records, which are completely erased from the system, documents and articles still wander the Internet, making the information accessible to the public. Over thirty states allow different forms of expungement of criminal records, but even with the expungement, the articles still appear online because of Google searches. This creates many issues for past criminals in which they are unable to get jobs because of a simple Google

search.
Concentrated efforts to escape the unwanted attention of the Internet would soon be carried out with one weapon: copyright law. It is unlawful to post photographs or other copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder. As a result, along with the copyright issues, many people try to attack Google and blame them for the problem. Google has fought back and said, “We don’t create the information. We make it accessible.” (4) The company wanted nothing to do with the content or issues that arose from it, they just are a source to find the information. Another adversary of Google who opposes the company was Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, in Washington, D.C. Rotenberg states, “Google is no longer the card catalogue. It is the library-and it’s the bookstore and the newsstand. They have all collapsed into Google’s realm.” (4) The court said to Google, “If you are going to be in this business of search, you are going to take on some privacy obligations.”(5) Google responded by creating a system in which you can file a claim and create a petition as to why a document should not be found on a Google search. Although this sounds like a good idea, this creates more issues however. The de-linking creates a fear that the “right to be forgotten’ will be abused to curb freedom of expression. Elliot Schrage, the vice president of Facebook says, “There is an inevitable conflict between two distinct social values” – privacy and freedom of speech. (6) This is a complex, problematic issue that is difficult to address and fix because of past cases and the outcome of them. European regulators are focusing on imposing more restrictions on Google; meanwhile the United States still hasn’t made restrictions.
In the end, the Catsouras settled with the California Highway Patrol with a two million and four hundred thousand dollar settlement. Toobin sides with the Catsouras family as he explains all of the issues with the freedom of privacy and how this case pertained to it. The ‘right to be forgotten’ is a rising issue in the United States and is slowly but surely progressing and being resolved.