Can the internet ever forget a crime?

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I was in my natural state this morning — scrolling through Twitter — when I came across a news article from an Australian media publisher that made me physically shiver.

I’ll share why, but first a little story about me: my first reporter job was working for the ABC in Geraldton, a coastal town about 400 kilometres north of Perth. My job was mostly reporting and sometimes reading the local radio bulletins each day. It was a great job!

We only had a small office with a handful of reporters, so court duty was one of the more reliable ways to find yarns. You turn up to the courthouse and there’s a quick procession of hearings — essentially stories handed to you on a platter, ready to be reported.

It was around that time I really started to think about the newsworthiness of crime reporting (which largely overlaps with court reporting). There’s certainly public interest in crime stories, but what is the public value in telling audiences about someone they don’t know being arrested or convicted of a crime they’d never heard about?

There’s a lot of good criticism of crime reporting. It fosters systemic racism. Crimes are reported on because of the novelty factor rather than merit. A lack of follow-ups means articles rarely show the full story of a crime (including if charges are dropped). It tends to uncritically share the narrative of police, even though they are unreliable narrators. And above all else, it publicises one of the lowest moments of someone’s life and probably makes it harder for them to right the ship.

This has gotten much worse with the introduction of the internet. The combination of digital publishing and the power of search engines means a news report that once would have faded in people’s memories is now forever associated with that person’s name. Social media accounts exist purely to share and promote content about people’s crimes. Some conniving types even scraped public databases of public arrest records and published mugshots online, only taking them down for a fee.

The article I came across today was a list of 20 fathers from South East Queensland who’d gone before the courts on drug charges. (I’m not going to name the publication or journalist because this is systemic behaviour and not limited to one person or outlet). Pictures, seemingly taken from social media accounts, were included. Names were formatted as headings, absolutely perfectly optimised for search engine rankings.

It feels deeply grotesque to me. Imagine taking a criminal proceeding and making it as easy to find as possible on search engines and as shareable as possible on social media. Even if you were comfortable with crime reporting before, the new accessibility and permanence of online crime reporting should make you feel uncomfortable.

Some news outlets are adapting to this — like The Boston Globe’s Fresh Start initiative — but this is something that needs a bigger solution. In Europe, privacy regulation gives citizens a “right to be forgotten”, allowing individuals to have data erased if the information is no longer necessary, consent is withdrawn, or there’s no legitimate interest to keep it.

Needless to say, Australia has no such right. In fact, law groups have historically argued it’s not necessary. But perhaps we should be rethinking that.

At its core, this is similar to what is happening with the Optus breach. After all, the company appears to have held information beyond what was necessary. There’s a lot of data out there about each of us that we don’t control — be it public or privately held.

The power of inertia means that data, once collected, tends to hang around. We’d all be better off if that wasn’t the case.

Hyperlinks

Alleged Optus hacker deletes extortion threat and apologises after releasing more personal data

You might have heard: Optus had a data breach last week. Well, here’s the latest turn in this strange saga so far. (Crikey)

NSW Police sued by US tech firm Mark43 over terminated contract

A few months ago I included a story about NSW Police’s contract with a software company linked to Jeff Bezos, Ashton Kutcher and Malcolm Turnbull — an update on that. (ABC News)

Rich residents posting to Facebook ‘create false fear of suburban crime’

I love neighbourhood Facebook group drama! This research is fascinating. (Nine)

Australia’s changing how it regulates the internet — and no one’s paying attention

Nice bit on some important internet regulation that has gone under the radar. (ABC News)

Facial recognition use should be registered and — in some cases — banned by law: report

A group of academics have made a very practical suggestion for how to regulate the use of facial recognition. Will policymakers listen? We’ll see! (Crikey)