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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

I think "The Right To Be Forgotten" is misleading in its use of the passive voice. A more accurate description would be "The Right To Force Other People To Forget".

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Other people's machines, you mean.

How's that? How is asking google to remove me from their indices forcing other people to forget? Where exactly is the "force"?

> How is asking google to remove me from their indices forcing other people to forget?

"Asking" is very different from "legally compelling".

If we buy the use of the "forgetting" terminology, it is quite clear how forcing google to expunge someone from all records is "forcing other people to forget". This isn't a complicated analogy, so I'm not sure what you're confused about.

> Where exactly is the "force"?

EU Law. Is that not manifestly obvious?

Your analogy is flawed. Being removed from a google index because of a court order != being wiped from peoples' memories by force. As far as I know the technology for wiping memory doesn't exist yet and unless you are equating the google index with some kind of exo-cortex and even then the analogy is quite a stretch.

Obviously the "people" in this case are the proprietors of news websites, web indexers, etc. If we look at the intent of the law (causing someone to be erased from public view), we could also argue that the public is being forced to forget in a moderately less concrete sense. I use the "memory wipe" analogy because the people advocating for censorship are using the euphemistically passive "forgetting" analogy. Not my choice, I'm just keeping it consistent.

Force would be misleading, it's more like "enable"

Google already has the capability to remove results, so they do not need to be "enabled" by EU law. I'm not really sure how you imagine this works, but the "right to be forgotten" refers to various legal frameworks in the EU for forcing companies to delete data that pertains to an individual.

Google seems to be happily applying DMCA to the whole world.

I don't think they're happy about it. They've funded a lot of anti-DMCA stuff under "chilling effect" branding. The DMCA is a horrible law, so I don't think we should use it to justify similar takedown behavior under other laws.

It doesn't actually. There are no laws that create or define the right to be forgotten. It was a "right" created out of nothing by a new court interpretation of a very vaguely worded part of the ECHR. Before the court invented this right nobody was even talking about it.

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