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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

This has nothing to do with censorship and everything to do with privacy.

You don't have any "right" to other people's personal information -- much less for an eternity.

This is not about preventing journalists from disclosing scandals, corrupt politicians, corporations and the like.

It's about normal people (all 7 billion of them) not having to live with their spring break crazy-time pictures, their extra-marital affair or that stupid stuff they said when they were 16 and listened to death metal online well into their sixties.

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This has nothing to do with privacy either. The information is still there, just that google isn't supposed to include the information in a search result.

You conflate "total inabillity to obtain the data" with privacy. Privacy can just be "partial inabillity to obtain the data" or "making it a little harder to obtain them".

For example, your private life is private now, but there's nothing impossible about breaking it. Somebody could hire a private detective for like $1000, and have all your personal info, even phone calls, posted on the internet.

It's the existance of this small barrier (having to go through this inconvenience) that makes you say, not some mathematical impossibility.

Are things like removing results from search engines really the right solution to the problem?

Well, what else could there be? People behaving better at all times and never doing anything they'll regret being known later?

Sure, removing results from search engines is not a 100% solution (people could still find the stuff from elsewhere, e.g links on a blog or a newssite, if they are so determined).

But it's a working 99% solution. Most people data would be non retrievable and languish into extinction. You don't have to make something impossible to discourage people from doing it. You can just make it a little harder.

Removing your old data from Google, FB etc, is a huge boost in giving one's past a clean slate. Heck, even for murderers there's a "statute of limitations". Why should the "star wars kid" be forever "that idiot you did that when he was 10 years old"?

Well, what else could there be? People behaving better at all times and never doing anything they'll regret being known later?

Not what I am thinking of. There are even better solutions than this, like people researching things properly.

The dark net, TOR, Diaspora, using services that respect privacy, etc.

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