There is a vast number of situations where someone might want to be forgotten because someone else has done / is doing something wrong towards them.
Google decides what someone will see when they Google your name, they might decide that the articles where you were accused of CP have much more priority then the single article 1 month later where you were found not guilty.
As a tangential side note, why shouldn't people have the right to be killed? Assisted suicide is legal in many countries for people who are e.g. battling a painful disease with no hope for a cure or improvement with modern medicine.
The same goes, of course, for any drunken party pictures and the likes, which should have no bearing on your life decades later.
Rather than gaslighting the world, shouldn't you just prevent the problem? That is, just ban posting that sort of information before a conviction.
A society that does not make arrest information public is one where it is very easy for someone to "disappear." That's the whole point.
I recognize the potential problems, but there are absolutely good and just reasons for this in the main.
Does that mean if there's unflattering information about you on the internet (eg. disorderly conduct video), you can get that scrubbed by by posting some "demonstrably false information" about yourself (eg. that you're a child predator and war criminal), thereby causing your whole identity to be delisted?
Barring that? I think erring on the side of the vastly more numerous set of decent people who may be affected by parrot farms is probably wise. (And I can't speak to Canadian jurisprudence, but it's often the case that courts make a broader decision in the American system and constrain it down over time.)
Okay but the hypothetical above doesn't include any court proceedings or any other government records. It's just a video of the person doing something illegal. It doesn't even have to be limited to videos/photos, it could also be verbal accusations (eg. of sexual harassment).
>Barring that? I think erring on the side of the vastly more numerous set of decent people who may be affected by parrot farms is probably wise.
I don't get it, are there websites out there dedicated to posting false information about random people?
Yes. And also prurient and invasive things that may be true (which is why we have laws against things like revenge porn, which Google also removes from its SERPs in some jurisdictions.
We already have defamation law for that, have had it for literally centuries. If you can prove in court that something is defamation, you can then get court orders around it, including having it taken down from the actual source sites as well as search engines. There is no new "right to be forgotten" law needed for that that that's not what the push has been about, it's about people complaining about stuff that they say is "outdated" or "harmful" but not actually defamatory, you'll notice they don't actually go after any of the places that host the content even when it's in their own jurisdiction. It's the truth, just an unpleasant truth they don't like showing up.
The extent to which government force should be used to wipe someone's slate cleaner is certainly debatable. Arguments can be made that at one point even a nasty criminal who wanted to turn over a new leaf could travel to a frontier or the like where nobody would know them or find out about them and start anew, and that was a good thing (vs criminals who did that and just did more crimes). And that maybe that should be something society backs. And then there are arguments against it.
But that's a very different debate then if the information is simply false.
Allowing someone to delist information via the single most important bottleneck, the search engine, is a very reasonable solution.
I don't see your logic at all. The premise is something which the person is seeking, and your examples are things the subject would not want (to be killed or sold into slavery). I understand the rest of what you're saying, though.