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Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

> ‘right to be forgotten’

I really think that hiding facts is a mistake. Yes someone made a bad mistake why is it their right to have it removed from the internet? Now if there are factually wrong then absolutely they should have the ability to have it removed.

Things can legally be removed from a person's record like crimes committed by minors but if someone's life was impacted are we going to remove the victims' story for the sake of the offenders?

Imagine going to the library to read the old news papers and have excerpts redacted and cut out. To me that is what people are trying to do.

This is changing our history like the horrible biographies of the 19th and early 20th century where the hero of the biography was perfect and a superhero due to moral perfectionism, but now it is seeked after by individual's regardless to their poor choices and actions.

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As someone else mentioned on this thread, there's little distinction in search engine results between something that happened yesterday and something that happened 20 years ago. We now have the phenomenon of information no longer "aging". We've always had "news" to tell us what's, well, new. But over time that information would age. It would become harder to recall, and take more work to retrieve. A story on the evening news would later be in the paper, perhaps in a magazine a month later, then in a book a year after that. The book would move off the bestseller lists, the newspaper onto microfiche, and the magazine into the stacks of big libraries, or oblivion. The moving finger would write, and having written, move on.

But now it all lives forever, whether true or false, fresh and available and effortlessly findable by anybody, with no decay or attrition. It's a new and qualitatively different thing. The "right to be forgotten" feels like some attempt, probably quixotic, to align this new situation with the information decay expectations we've all had from the beginning of humanity right up until this very moment.

As someone whose first memories start after computers existed:

This is ridiculous. People need to fix themselves. They need to adjust their values judgements, understand the purpose of 'last modified time', and adapt to the new world.

Computers aren't going to become better at forgetting because a legislature or a court has decided they should.

Computers aren't the problem, search engines are.

There is nothing in the spec of a Turing machine that says "And this will remember what you did last Tuesday forever". It is a specific program that is written for a specific purpose. We have made the spam message network illegal to run I see no fundamental issue with extending this to other areas where it benefits society.

"Old news" - what an oxymoron! I agree with you - the real answer is to change how we react to personal blunders, we all have our bad moments and now they are forever logged and accessible.

btw, I see I got hammered, "oxymoron" is not a kind of moron.

> if there are factually wrong then absolutely they should have the ability to have it removed.

Who is responsible for verifying facts before they're allowed to be removed from Google?

If I publish an online review saying "baldfat stole money from me, don't work with him" is Google supposed to be a private investigator and verify my claims?

A search engine != the internet.

It should not be removed from the internet, but it should be removed from google. It's not the same thing as dealing with paper newspaper. One you have to go an explicitly look for the information and browse through them to get it (and still it can escape your gaze). With google you just need to type name and surname, and everything is at your fingertips.

removed from the search engine is like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the demolition of the earth was filed in the basement in a file on a far off world.

But how is it ok or reasonable to say "you are allowed to see this, but we're going to make laws to make it arbitrarily hard to do".

Either it's removing public information (censorship), or it's this bizarre stop-gap to allow people to conceal information while pretending they aren't deleting it. There's not reasonable or principled system here. Just a dangerous stop-gap measure where it seems like people are trying to delete (censor) information under the guise of individual freedom ("we're just making it harder").

I don't really buy into the middle-ground presented by this measure.

Agreed. Further along those lines, how does one reconcile the fact that Google still powers search for a number of other entities (including some libraries, academic institutions, etc)?

The "right to be forgotten", in that case, becomes the "right to erase history."

Right to be forgotten go beyond search engines. It’s a very dangerous law.

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