Should this be forgotten?

A tale of my slightly oblique involvement in transgender employment experiences.

The recent news about the ruling in Europe around the concept of the ‘right to be forgotten’ got me to thinking it was time I did a bit of ego surfing earlier on tonight.

For those not entirely familiar ego surfing is putting your own name into Google or another search engine of your choosing if you are so inclined.

For me it’s somewhat topical I suppose as I’m currently contemplating a change in career and I’m sure some prospective clients or employers will be searching me out and finding all sorts of dregs around the internet.

I know of only four other people on the planet with my name so it’s not like I can even use the ‘Bill Smith’ defence and claim it wasn’t me who did whatever it is that the search engines find attached to my name.

As a curious segue I’m facebook friends with one of the other Chris Hellyar’s who resides in the UK. He too is employed in IT, has a beard and glasses. Small world, apparently.

:left
Anyway, I’m ego surfing earlier tonight and there are always lots of hits as I’ve been a netizen for a while now and although I prefer to keep my private parts that way a lot of my club activities and work life is available in bits and bytes somewhere.

Part of my working world is stock photography. You know the stuff; photos of smiling people doing happy things. Photos of books, logs, pins, ducks… Stock photography is the essential furniture which graces the virtual and print media world with images of almost anything you can think of.

I see my images popping up all over the place. Bank websites, book covers, advertising for shoes, travel, health conditions, pet food.

Some of the hits are often obscure and tonight I found one that really caught my attention a listing under my name in the search results for ‘transgender employment experiences’.

After a bit of hesitation I clicked on the link to find a fairly serious bit of literature by a Kyla Bender-Baird with one of my images on the cover no less. Google had found the copyright notice for the cover image a couple of pages into the book.

I’m not fussed to be honest and I’m happy that Kyla’s publishers honoured the copyright terms and credited the image. I do wonder what a prospective employer might thing of that in the search results though, given I have a beard and I like to think I’m a pretty manly sort of figure!

Is this the sort of search result that the complainants in the EU want to have forgotten? I do wonder.

(You can see the preview to the book on google books here. Here is the book publishers page on the book if you wound up here looking for the book!)