I'm holding back on the kudos for NPR's editorial accountability until we get some context.
The subject of that story was a hedge fund guy who didn't like the search results appearing for his name and the legal expenses that went into trying to change them, the piece was sympathetic to him and it was framed as a story about 'net privacy and the lack of regulation around it, but of course it wasn't about privacy it was about censorship, two concepts that are too often conflated nowadays what with publications falling all over themselves trying to extol EU regulations.
The bottom line is that the so called "right to be forgotten" is as nonsensical an expression as it is a policy.
The EFF opposes the Right to be Forgotten. Some of their staff talked about it at Defcon two years back. In too many cases it simply leads to censorship.
Freedom of speech, and its implementation by the Supreme Court in the US, makes this kind of legislation impossible.
There are trade offs. Even if you can afford to get your criminal record expunged, data collection firms can still hold a copy of your record while it was public; so it can still show up on some background checks.
We need to move away from the stigma of lifetime labels more than we need to be able to erase the past.
A rare occasion where I disagree with the EFF: There might be many cases where people want to get inconvinient truths censored but the right to be forgotten is necessary in an internet where lies are spread just as easily, where the media (look at you yellow press) are quick to print a suspects name before they've been convicted. We are not just talking criminal records or data collection companies.
I don't know why criminal record checks aren't treated similar to a credit bureau report. There is a legal time limit as to how long a bad debt or bankruptcy can stay on a report, as the people who wrote the credit reporting laws recognized that people can change. But a criminal record, even for a minor crime, lives forever unless explicitly expunged.
I would assume it's because of intent. Companies want to give you credit, they just use your credit report to determine the likelihood of your future creditworthiness. They've determined that after 7 years your previous actions aren't indicative of future behavior.
Background checks on the other hand are serving their intended purpose, telling you exactly what someone's background is.
I think the intent of a background check in the context of employment is also to predict future behavior. An employer really shouldn't care that an applicant was busted for drug possession in college fifteen years ago - there's little change of reoffending, and the crime isn't super relevant to the performance of most jobs. On the other hand, if an applicant for a position at a hedge fund has a conviction for securities fraud three years' prior, you would not want to hire that person.
I think there's an argument in favor of requiring criminal background checks for employment to be run through bureaus that have a legal requirement to drop certain offenses off the report after a certain amount of time. The offender has repaid their debt to society through the punishment meted out by the court, there is no point in making them unemployable for the rest of their lives.
One reason for the difference, at least in the case of very serious crimes, might be that bad debt is often either due to bad luck, or due to mistakes on your part that you learn from and are much less likely to make again.
For example you might get laid off during an economic downturn and not be able to find a new job in time to avoid missing payments. A few years later, when you have gotten back on your feet and caught up on everything, there is not much reason to believe that you are a bad credit risk.
Or maybe you don't appreciate how big an impact high interest rates on credit cards can have when you carry a large balance. You can easily learn from this and not make that mistake again.
If short, as you note people can change, and in the case of bad debt there is a good chance that they have done so after a few years. And if they haven't, they will probably have newer bad debt on their credit report to take the place of the expired items.
Compare to a very serious crime, such as child molestation. You don't do that because of bad luck or poor judgment. To do that you have to be seriously broken mentally, and modern medicine does not yet know how to fix that level of broken. You are very likely as dangerous 30 years from now as you are today.
In short, except in rare cases the people who do these kind of crimes do not change. They just learn to be more careful to avoid getting caught.
Some countries do expire some convictions on the public criminal record legally available to an employer. And consider it a violation on employment law for an employer to source gray market date when hiring.
The problem with criminal records is that when they get expunged, they are only expunged from the government's records. Third-party aggregators and background check agencies can retain them.
Again, that would be similar to a credit report - here in Canada, for example, the bureaus are legally mandated to not report certain credit events after a prescribed amount of time. A similar rule could apply to background checks for employment, where certain less serious offenses have a "sunset period" where they fall off the report.
The trouble with court records is that they are public, and for good reason (the justice system needs to be transparent). Unfortunately, the internet has made what used to be a process with a significant barrier to entry (a manual court records search) into a simple google search. The problem is exacerbated by extortionists who post mugshots (many of people who have their charges dropped) and charge a fee to remove them [1]. Regulation which enforces some level of right to be forgotten may be a solution.
Privacy requires some censorship. For example, a law that makes it illegal to take certain photos lacks teeth without a corresponding law that restricts publishing them.
What's with all the "teeth" comments lately? who's pushing that agenda?
We enjoy great constitutional protection to publish, unless it's copyright violation or you're revealing the allied plan for the normandy invasion no court will rule against you.
There typically aren't criminal charges, but civil penalties for publishing private information do abound. Whether or not that constitutes censorship is a matter of semantics.
What happens, exactly? In the U.S., AFAIK, there is no law preventing taking and publishing photos in the newspaper of minors or others in public spaces without prior consent.
I'm holding back on the kudos for NPR's editorial accountability until we get some context.
The subject of that story was a hedge fund guy who didn't like the search results appearing for his name and the legal expenses that went into trying to change them, the piece was sympathetic to him and it was framed as a story about 'net privacy and the lack of regulation around it, but of course it wasn't about privacy it was about censorship, two concepts that are too often conflated nowadays what with publications falling all over themselves trying to extol EU regulations.
The bottom line is that the so called "right to be forgotten" is as nonsensical an expression as it is a policy.