My SIL, divorced with a young daughter, started dating a man. My wife (her sister) googled him and discovered he was a convicted child molester.
What if I was hiring an accountant? Should I be able to google him and find out he had been convicted of embezzlement?
But you hear about people having to explain drug possession charges, or even robbery charges from their past when they were a different person. We pretend like we actually want the judicial system to at least sometimes “fix” people but we make it next to impossible to do that. We assign a “price” to pay back to society, and the whole point is that price is supposed to be concrete and understandable.
The line is hard to draw between crimes where “society agrees you’ve ruined your life” (child molestation) and “society wants you to get better”. (drug possession, I hope?)
Maybe I’m more so vouching for “public awareness” to be a part of the sentencing procedure? (Allowing crimes without that punishment minimum to be forgotten on public platforms like Google.)
We already have laws/precedence that make the distinction between degrees of homicide for example. So the fuzzy line problem is already kind of solved in that sense? We’ve being doing that sort of difficult sorting for other punishments for many centuries. We just assume that EVERY crime is worth remembering at the moment.
Who decides what’s inaccurate or outdated? I think the subject of a negative article may often feel it’s inaccurate even if it’s generally correct.
Addressing your point, if the newspaper article is inaccurate, why not have the article removed or corrected? Instead, it is the opposite. The man says the articles can stay up. Canadian defamation law is pretty clear. If the article is false, he can sue to have it removed. I'm tending to believe delisting from Google is the man's plan because he can't get the articles removed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_defamation_law
FTA: "The man said outdated and inaccurate information about him in newspaper articles found on the internet was leading to great personal harm, including physical assault, employment discrimination, severe social stigma and persistent fear." and "He wanted the information to be delisted – made unsearchable, unless someone knew the website urls featuring his name."