SERRAVAL, France — As a European proposal to bolster digital privacy safeguards faces intense lobbying from Silicon Valley and other powerful groups in Brussels, an obscure but committed group has joined in the campaign to keep personal data flourishing online.
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One of the European Union’s measures would grant Internet users a “right to be forgotten,” letting them delete damaging references to themselves in search engines, or drunken party photos from social networks. But a group of French archivists, the people whose job it is to keep society’s records, is asking: What about our collective right to keep a record even of some things that others might prefer to forget?
The archivists and their counteroffensive might seem out of step, as concern grows in Europe about American surveillance of Internet traffic around the world. But the archivists argue that the right to be forgotten, as it has become known, could complicate the collection and digitization of the mundane public documents — birth reports, death notices, real estate transactions and the like — that form a first draft of history.
“Today, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter — this is the correspondence of the 21st century,” said Jean-Philippe Legois, president of the Association of French Archivists, which has around 1,700 members in the public and private sectors. “If we want to understand the society of today in the future, we have to keep certain traces.”
The group represents a wide swath of professionals who specialize in preserving and cataloging documents from institutions ranging from town halls to museums. Still, supporters of the French campaign acknowledged the growing public concern about digital privacy, following the disclosure of a vast the extensive United States intelligence project known as Prism to mine data from Internet companies for security purposes.
While it is often said that Europe favors stricter privacy protection than the United States, the archivists’ campaign demonstrates that there is a range of views on the Continent on the issue. Even in France, which sometimes seems to delight in making life difficult for American Internet companies, the likes of Facebook and Google can draw comfort from the lack of a consensus on privacy.
To try to persuade European Union lawmakers to drop or soften the proposed rules on digital privacy, the French archivists introduced a petition, circulated by e-mail to their counterparts across Europe and in other countries, including the United States. The group says the petition has received almost 50,000 signatures, which it will present to the European Parliament.
The group also commissioned advertising posters underlining the threat it sees. One shows a metaphorical image of demonstrators marching through Paris, their faces hidden by digitally appended clown masks. It asks: “Without a name, does individual commitment still have the same meaning?”
The archivists know that their influence is limited as the Parliament is lobbied by myriad Internet companies, governments and other organizations, which have submitted about 4,000 amendments to the proposed law for the European Union’s 27 member states. This month, several proposals were softened, including the plan to require companies to obtain “explicit” consent from users to collect and process their data, though the United States surveillance revelations could renew the push for tougher rules.
The right to be forgotten is one of the most contentious measures.
The European Commission has drawn support from consumer organizations and privacy advocates, but the archivists have received backing from other European professionals who rely on record-keeping, including genealogists and history professors.
Advocates of the right to be forgotten say it is unrealistic to expect Internet companies like Google and Facebook, which collect vast huge amounts of data on their users in order to direct relevant advertising to them, to put safeguards in place without stricter regulations.
European Union lawmakers want to establish two separate, but related, digital privacy rules as it relates to right to be forgotten. One would guarantee Internet users the right to delete pictures, writings and other data on social networks and other online forums. In theory, this is already permitted, but regulators say that removal can be cumbersome and that deleted material often lingers in search engines and elsewhere.
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