>This makes every person they might do business with to withdraw.
Hiding information from people sounds like a bandaid to the issue of people being overly judgemental. Maybe we need to be more accepting to rehabilitation.
I mean, listen to yourself. Rather than an easy, technical solution, for a very limited and well defined problem, you're proposing we instead just wait until the billions upon billions of people on earth suddenly wise up, hit nirvana, sing Kum ba yah, and _be less judgemental_? So that, what, a giant, wealthy corporation isn't mildly bothered?
If we have to consider the reality of the situation for felons, we must also face the reality that they don't really seem to be the end goal, but just a story to placate worries about overregulation and censorship.
If I am a search engine, and don’t comply, I am going to jail. It’s not easy nor technical.
Put another way, if I put the name of my new neighbor into Google, the resulting webpage I would in fact most want to see as the result would definitely be the article on the murder they committed 20 years ago, even though they have a Facebook page that was updated 10 minutes ago. Facebook page can be result number 2.
If Google didn't show that result at all because it happened 20 years ago, and that person never did anything else notable more recently, I would consider Google to be a little broken.
People change and your neighbor now has a family and lives quietly. It seems unfair the world should know him about his past mistakes
Your approach is of little comfort to the people this actually affects.
A reduction in this privacy might precipitate a change in how people react to learning the private affairs of others. If everybody's legal history was laid bare, for instance, one might discover that getting in trouble is something quite a lot of people do--and in this light one might temper his reaction to learning of another's checkered past.
I think it is a bandaid, but the proper solution would (1) require massive social engineering and (2) be really hard.