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Comment by Simulacra | Hacker News Reader

Now do America. I know - a lot of Silicon Valley business models are built on scraping and utilizing and selling personal data - but people should have control over that data and they should have the right to say no.

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What about when it's news articles? Should people have a right to control those that might contain their name?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You could be arrested tomorrow in a case of mistaken identity. Every time somebody searches for “Kalium”, the first result might be details about how you were arrested for some terrible crime and the follow-up a few day later about how charges were dropped would rank way lower because that never made the front page.

Yes, that definitely could happen. The question is if I have the right to personally control what random people see if they look up public information about me.

I'm not particularly comfortable with the obvious extensions of this. What if I'm a local businessperson doing unpopular things? What if I'm running for office? Where does it start and stop?

So who decides if an individual person has the right to be forgotten?

I think the problem is not so much the news article, but that it pops up front and centre when doing a trivial search. Also, considering the low levels of alphabetization, most people won't even bother reading the article, just the (often clickbait) snippet. I'm not blaming the newspaper, I'm saying search results should be held to higher standards.

I think the First Amendment would block anything similar in the US.

Not an American, but I think your first amendment only applies to gouvernement. Most sites do moderate which would run afoul with your interpretation.

Sure. What we're talking about here is government action enforcing a putative "right to be forgotten".

The court and the gouvernement are independent and different things. In this instance the gouvernement is not involved. A citizen is taking google to court.

Yeah, no. Courts are part of the government. Third branch, you know.

I don't have an opinion on whether there should be a right to be forgotten or not, but it doesn't do the thing you described. We need GDPR or a similar protection. And to do that, it needs to be regulatory legislation, not court rulings.

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