Except this only makes information disappear from Google, not from the web. If a news site has an articule about that time you were arrested for drug dealing, it will be there and you have no right to make it disappear.
This is true for very many things, the act of making it searchable is to make it follow you into the future.
The example I used in the other conversation about this when it first emerged is a real one, I know a girl who was the victim of an attack and chose to contact the police. The attacker was young and the court scrubbed his name from public record, but the local newspaper reported the victim's name and profession. Now you have a victim with a permanent smear against her created by an easily accessible record of fact (the newspaper, not the court record). The problem with the patriarchy and an unequal society being that woman who are victims of attacks are frequently met with doubt and victim blaming, "Was it something she wore?", "Did she act in any way as to provoke it?"... and so a victim is punished by the availability of information. Her peers have remarked how they've seen it on Google, because in her profession researching your peers is what you do.
The courts aren't wrong to record things.
The newspapers aren't wrong to report things.
But neither action was intended to be a permanent cross for the person to carry.
The girl in question? Her view is that if she knew it would end up on the front page of Google for her name, she would never have gone to the police.
Now ask yourself, is that the world you want to live in? I'm very glad the EU legal system agrees that it isn't, and that the EU politicians enshrined that it isn't. It makes me glad to be European.
Is there such an EU country, where newspaper is permitted to disclose identity protected victims by officials?
> Now ask yourself, is that the world you want to live in?
I want to live in a world, where search engines do what they are supposed to do - search the internet. For the hamrful information available, authors shall be accounted responsible.
Shall we pass any law by giving colourful examples? Yes, censorship can be positive, if it protects the girl you knew, I agree, but it does not stop being censorship.
No worries, it seems such a divisive topic it's almost entertaining watching the upvotes and downvotes aggressively cancel out each other.
I didn't realise just how extreme the opinion on this is. Shame HN doesn't show this in how the votes are displayed... I get that they're not displayed... but black text vs shaded implies only positive or negative, and hovering around 1 vote with lots of up and down votes is interesting in itself.
Which is how things are in the non-digital world: you have, say, a police record, but it doesn't follow you wherever you go, attached in big flashing letters to your picture for anyone who asks "who is that?" If someone does a record check, they'll still find out--but it doesn't haunt you as "the most relevant detail to know about X."
And think about it in the longer term (talking from a Brit perspective here). In ye olden times, when everything was made of wood, people could still go down to their library and look through newspaper archives and find out stuff about what you'd done, however 'spent' the conviction. (OK, the UI wasn't great, but those were the days when local papers would reliably have loads of reports of magistrates courts, so the content was probably better. My brother and his friends, who often made an appearance, called it "Stars In Their Eyes".)
It is not illegal for newspapers to report past, spent convictions if you should make your way back into the public eye. There has never been a right to 'privacy' in this way. There still isn't, except for Google's search index.
In general, privacy laws of this kind - which we know all too much about in this country - help the powerful. (I don't notice any blacklisted trade unionists taking out superinjunctions - just Trafigura[0] covering up an ecological atrocity and rich men concealing their infidelity[1][2].)
Doesn't this match the real life societies have learned to deal with over the centuries? Your stupid mistake 20 years ago will probably be remembered by someone. Someone might even have a picture of it. But it will not be the first thing a stranger will learn about you.
