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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

>It has nothing to do with censorship. In fact, the requirements of the Right To Be Forgotten are pretty clearly stated to ensure that anything that the public deserves to know or should know does not qualify for RTBF protection.

So ultimately, some body has to decide what does and doesn't qualify. We call that body a "censor" and their work, "censorship".

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This is not some body arbitrarily requesting removal of information. This is a body judging the legitimacy of requests on the behalf of a private individual. That is not censorship and I believe it's an attack on a fundamental human right to say that Google has the power to do whatever they wish with your private information that is outside of the public interest. Google is not a journalist or a news source.

Google is not digging up any information that hasn't already been made public. Any news stories it surfaces about an individual are part of the public historical record.

There are a lot of things that are made public that aren’t news stories. Should revenge porn be part of “the public historical record”? Can I publish all your private info on a random website and then claim it’s “part of the public historical record”?

You keep harping on and on and on in this discussion about "private" information. What you are referring to are unauthorized disclosures. That is not the issue here, and I don't think anyone has a problem with removing that. Please stop tossing out this irrelevant strawman.

The issue is redaction of authorized, public information from the index.

If any part of the site is meant to assassinate my character, I could sue you for defamation in the necessary jurisdiction. Alternatively, I could work to improve the SEO scores of my personal and professional pages, acknowledge that you are attempting to character assassinate me in my pages, and move on with my life. The problem is that in reality what's happening is that people who made stupid mistakes as teenagers are now realizing that their arrest record is searchable, and I feel terrible for them, but wouldn't it be better dealt with by passing laws to thwart the arrest record sites rather than forcing every site that indexes content to delist on a case-by-case basis.

That body is usually the search engine. Censorship is not the right word; if the request is granted, the documents are not being hidden absolutely, only for specified queries (name of the individual). "Protecting the individual" is better expression; it is about the search engine tuning its results to reduce the harm that is being done to the requestor.

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