After the first chapter of Noble’s book, it’s been a lot easier for me to get through it. I found Chapter Four really interesting. I hadn’t ever thought about the possibility that some regular people out there might not want their information taken off of search engines. I know that politicians and other public figures sometimes want things hidden if they’ve done something bad, but I didn’t think about the effects certain Internet findings could have on regular people. I didn’t even know that you could petition Google to have content removed! It seems like a nice concept, but from what is mentioned in the book it doesn’t seem very reliable or helpful.
Back in middle school and around then, I had heard about teachers getting fired for people finding past ‘adult film’ work that they had done, but it was before I was “woke” as the kids would say, so I didn’t find any issue with it. Now, I think it’s ridiculous that people’s past things could affect their lives so much. It’s like when people will go back on celebrities’ social medias and find something racist or insensitive that they said when they were twelve. We all said dumb stuff when we were twelve, but people change. I don’t think it’s fair to use the past against us, so I completely understand why people would want personal information and things ‘erased’ from search engines. I think it’s interesting that the “right to be forgotten” laws Noble talks about “generally ignore the record keeping that Google does on individuals and organizations that are archived and shared with third parties beyond Google’s public-facing search results.” I don’t think that Google should be keeping too much information on individuals, let alone selling it to third parties inside the law.
Chapter Five was kind of boring to me (although I am now kind of interested in reading up on library information systems), but I did want to mention this powerful quote: “Those who have the power to design systems- classification or technical- hold the ability to prioritize hierarchical schemes that privilege certain types of information over others.” I think this connects well to my DTC 206 class, where we’ve talked about how the powerful few influence the masses in unimaginable amounts of ways. The people making these database search systems and protocols hold a staggering amount of power over the perceptions of the masses, and that’s incredible and terrifying.
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