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> he actually WAS an bad actor in the past

To be clear, one of the main points of the article is that he was not a bad actor in the past; he saw sketchy behavior from a prospective investor and reported it to authorities, and the sketchy investigator then launched a smear campaign against him from another country.

The parent comment seemed to be talking not about the specific case in the article, but about the general "right to be forgotten" and expressing an opinion about what the commenter perceived to be potential for misuse.

> he actually WAS an bad actor in the past, so it's still hard to trust somebody

If you don't forgive/forget, there is no incentive for the person to behave differently. E.g. if someone once was involved with the police and as a result cannot get any proper job anymore, how would this individual ever change?

Some countries seem to focused on punishing people for the rest of their lives. This sometimes under the assumption that people actually consider the impact of their actions before do it.

Further, if a person is considered to be/treated as a criminal all the time then eventually they'll just behave as one.

Since when did forget become acceptable? Do we just remove eg. the holocaust from history books now?

Yes, forgetting is sometimes inappropriate, but not every crime is the Holocaust.

It's the norm in cases involving childhood offenses, for example—expunging one's juvenile record—and it's the reason for statutes of limitations.

> If you don't forgive/forget, there is no incentive for the person to behave differently. E.g. if someone once was involved with the police and as a result cannot get any proper job anymore, how would this individual ever change?

Forgetting the past is bad.

However if the person really changed!!! than it could be easy to get positive news and trust, no matter how your past was/is. You can't change the past, so maybe it's better to get remembered at the past and be better than you were.

I did bad at my past as well. Should I forget it? Hell, no. Currently I changed a lot of myself to be a better person / harder worker, etc. I did not try to dismiss my past.

Is a mugshot of your DUI arrest (but no conviction) 20 years ago the first result of a google search for your name?

No one is saying we should completely forget the past, but there needs to be recourse for people who are being treated unfairly.

Is a mugshot of your DUI arrest (but no conviction) 20 years ago the only remotely notable thing you've ever done in your life? If so, why shouldn't it be the first result of a search for your name? If not, why is it the first result?

> If not, why is it the first result?

Because google search rankings for any niche search strings are pretty meh. Basically anything with your full name in the URL / main body of the page will show up at the top.

I filled the first two pages of results for my name with random stuff I control simply by creating profiles on carefully-chosen sites with my full name, as well as registering a bunch of domains that contain my full name.

That was much easier than contacting the hundreds of news outlets who published my full name in a negative context to correct their lackluster or ambiguous journalism.

There was a few notable exceptions where journalists (who all like to copy stories from each other, then copy that again) had distorted the story so far that they actually managed to confuse me with the perpetrator. In those cases I had the search results removed under the "right to be forgotten".

Honestly I'd rather have the right to be forgotten in a world where bad journalism is the norm, and where trash like the Daily Mail, yellow press, and some kid with a smear campaign have so much power to destroy a persons reputation.

Basically you shouldn't have to know what "SEO" means in order to fend off a smear campaign or simply bad journalism.

I feel for you, out of curiosity did you create your profiles and sites purely to displace the bad results or did you also try to engineer your content to refute them?

Yes. My personal blog (which is now the first result) contains a statement as well as a link to a properly researched article (the source that broke the news), so the article would presumably rank higher in the search results for my name.

I think you deserve better than just having google modify its search results. If a newspaper is slandering you, we need to make them stop.

It's virtually impossible to win a libel case against a news media organization in the US.

If you're a "public figure" (and if more than one media org ran a story about some event involving you, the court will likely find that you are), then to win you need to prove not only that 1) the story was false, but also that 2) the journalist knew the story was false, prior to writing it, and 3) you suffered some material loss due to the story (e.g. being fired from your job).

In other words, journalists can publish speculation as fact (what we might call "lying"), so long as you can't prove they knew for certain it was false.

(In the very unlikely event you aren't found to be a public figure, you still need to prove the story was false and that you suffered a material loss, themselves pretty steep legal hurdles).

I’m really talking about the mechanism of enforcement. Your point about the legal aspects are well taken. But, once those aspects have been resolved, as in Europe, I think there needs to be a better resolution than breaking search. Think about it, looking to Google as the solution assumes they have a monopoly on search.

You don't have to know what "SEO" means in order to fend off a smear campaign or simply bad journalism. You may not have to know what SEO means in order to get your defense sorted higher in search engine results than the slander, but you have to do it because you set SEO as your goal yourself.

Who decides what is notable? You? Google? Some jerk who has it in for me?

Any system that functions as a gatekeeper to full participation in society needs accountability.

In this situation, google, since that's the search engine under discussion. Feel free to hold them accountable if you like. China did.

I often cite this (lesser known) G.K.Chesterton's essay:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16641608

That’s where I come down on this too. Google isn’t defaming anyone. And, what about Bing, duck duck go, or any other search engine?

The guy in the article could have put up his own website to correct the record. I don’t really like that solution. I really think there should be a way to get a judgement in the US to DDOS the defamatory site. If the hosting company won’t comply.

But, breaking search is a cover-up not a solution. I recently left a company with a cover-up culture. You’ve never seen such terrible code. Because, no one ever weeded out the real problem. They were just ok to bury their heads in the sand as long as google didn’t let them know there were problems.

Looks like you want the government to implement a perfect law that works in every case and will never be misused. Perhaps you could propose one? :)