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Comment by greggman3 | Hacker News Reader

Right-to-be-forgotten laws are a not a solution

Your right to be forgotten does not out weigh my right to remember and share what I remember with others.

You have no right to tell me that I can't tell someone else I was in a hacker news conversation with Flowerlad on HN in January 2021 where he wrote "....whatever you wrote...." and that includes writing an article on my blog, tweeting about it, publishing it in the NYTimes, etc... and the idea that some law would prevent a search engine from indexing my content because your name happens to be in it seem wrong to me. You'd have effectively de-platformed me to talk about you or even my own memories.

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As far as I understand, the earlier EU right-to-be-forgotten laws have been replaced by the GDPR and the right-to-erasure in it.

You are correct that right to be forgotten does not outweigh you right to remember and share what you remember with others. The law does not restrict this right - GDPR, including that clause, does not apply to private persons personal activity.

However, that right is more narrow than you imply. First, you personally have the right to share your memories with others, but companies and businesses do not have such a right. Second, you do not have a right to have your content indexed by a search engine - your right to talk about these things in everyday outweighs the other persons right to privacy, but their right to privacy outweighs your privilege to publish your memories in mass media. Yes, you would be effectively deplatformed, but that does not violate your right to speak about this - the right to privacy is a fundamental human right, the right to a platform is not; any rights to free speech does not include a right to be widely disseminated.

> the right to privacy is a fundamental human right

no it is not.

The world seems to disagree - United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 12, European Convention on Human Rights Article 8, etc - the human rights definitions that we use explicitly list privacy as one of the fundamental human rights.

IIRC the ECJ ruling is not de-indexing - the requirement is to remove the link from certain search results, ie. when you google for "flowerlad" but not when you google for "greggman hacker news conservation".

I don't see the distinction. I want people to be able to search for "greggman's conversation with flowerlad". Flowerlad should have no say over what I can share and how others can find it.

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