Is there something I'm missing about Right to be Forgotten then? Why is this needed if it's already illegal to discriminate against someone over minor crimes or scandals?
Does the law not have much teeth or something?
Case-in-point: Facebook. Most people don't believe that when you ask a company like Facebook or Google to delete your account, they actually delete your data. Sure, you no longer have access to it, definitely, but most people seem to assume that it's not entirely gone.
RTBF ensures that companies whom you provided information to delete this information if asked to politely.
Or I'm a, 18 year old caught in a Romeo & Juliet, with my face plastered across Facebook as a "sex offender", but it's later overturned (or, as I call it, sanity prevailed). Should I have a right to be forgotten?
Or... the list of possibilities continues.
A real con artist can just fake someone's ID, for them it's pretty trivial.
The issue is less than 1% of convictions ever make it to the Internet, and those people currently will be stigmatized forever, unlike the other 99%, unless they have this mechanism. Google's plea was 'we will self police, but we won't tell you how. We will ignore court orders, because we choose to'. The court objected to that approach.
If you are convicted of new crimes, no matter how long ago, then your sentence may be significantly increased as a repeat offender.
So, employers don’t get access to criminal records, and generally, newspapers can’t republish information about people in a way that would harm their life today. Even criminals whose cases were public when they went into jail have a right to a normal life after they’ve finished their sentence – sometimes this is included with a change of name, but ideally, it’d be better if we, as society, would just forgive, or forget.