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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

If you read the article it was a bit more nuanced than that. The one who had the right to be forgotten denied had a track record of misleading people about his conviction. The court (rightly, in my view) took this behaviour as evidence that his conviction remained relevant in a way that it was not for the other person (described as showing remorse). They didn’t just measure the length of the sentence.

IMHO, this is an encouraging, nuanced development. There has to be a balance between protecting people against serial offenders and rehabilitation.

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I did read the article, but it simply said that the person had “continued to mislead the public”. At the very least I’d need to know more to call this fair, as we have no idea what that very broad statement entails. Is there proof that he continued to mislead the public? Has he been convicted of other crimes since then? What standard of proof was used to make this determination? If, for example, he has simply explained his side of the situation that led to his conviction publicly, and some people found that “misleading,” I would say this isn’t fair. If he has been convicted of additional crimes, then I would call it fair. So it depends on the specific circumstances.

Since it’s a report of a U.K. high court case, I think it’s safe to say there was documented proof. I mean, you can read the court transcripts if you like, but UK judges aren’t in the habit of letting unsubstantiated claims into the courtroom.

In the article it is said that he tried to mislead the court also.

Is it up to Google's lawyers to do extensive investigations to find out that this guy had "a track record of misleading people"? What if Google decides they don't want to pay for that? Then all that nuance will be gone.

If google wants to ignore an erasure request for journalistic and public good/interest reasons, yes.

Responsible Journalism can’t ignore stuff like this, so I’m not surprised that the Judge would expect google, after making the journalism case, to demonstrate some of that attention to detail.

No, Google has the right to fight each such request in court.

This is basically an impossible burden to bear. If everyone who had anything whatsoever bad about them on the internet decided that the tiny burden of sending a letter was a worthy use of time then fighting the 1/10 which were the most dubious would ruin google financially.

This is like a network where you can cause a network to waste a GB of data by sending a KB of data.

The only reasonable response in that situation would be to invest only the money available to fight the worst of the worst requests and blanket accept almost everyone's request to silence anyone else.

If you turn it around and make a single request take a few thousand dollars worth of legal fees and many hours of work then worthless requests which are likely to be denied wont be bothered with but the most worthy may still be seen to.

Excellent, the law works as intended.

You want anyone to be able to silence anyone via a letter?

When the lie is essentially acting like the record was already expunged, that is a terrible reason to deny expungement. It's not quite catch-22 but it's getting close.

You're right and it makes sense but how is someone like Google supposed to handle these requests case by case? Or are they supposed to hire an army of lawyers and send thousands of requests to be decided by the courts?

Why not attack the publication rather than the card catalog?

Requiring the publication to make the change is more feasible. In a hypothetical defamation situation the courts in the US have made this costly to do. In a conviction scenario Google search results can prevent people from being employed. I had a relative of a friend which had a published DUI which made it difficult for him to seek employment years after the issue. Employers have the ability to find criminal convictions and decide whether or not to hire an individual. Almost everyone googles people prior to contact.

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