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Comment by rpenm | Hacker News Reader

Mostly, I have a bias against book burning, which is what this kind of knowledge destruction resembles.

which is why the law asks the search engines to remove stuff from an index and not to remove the original source. They are trying to do what archival did: the information is still there, but it's not nagging you constantly.

I was being a bit snarky, apologies. But at the end of the day, we are still talking about making knowledge inaccessible. It may be necessary to protect individual privacy, but it still worries me. Each case will be about weighing the harms to the individual against the harms to the public. Powerful interests will find ways to exploit such a subtle system for their own benefit.

We are talking about protecting individual against corporations. Currently media corporation are all powerful and only big money can fight them with enough media splash to make a record straight (or do a PR white washing campaign after a crisis). This law doesn't suppress the information, it does the equivalent of forcing you to go to the basement of the newspaper to find some select personal informations concerning individual people.

Moreover the concept of free speech itself has been high-jacked by big money for bullshit (the nickname for citizen united), so I don't see how it's protecting anyone from anything, it's part of the game. Free speech was just a protection of political ideas against the government and it's mostly dead in the days of terrorism law.

Does the search engine not have a right to freedom of speech? Who is the government to tell Google what they can or cannot say?

The government is at least in theory acting on behalf of the people, and European countries have long had fairly strong privacy rights that actually means something.

When that right collides with the publication of information the court needs to weigh how to best protect public interest.

In this case the court decided that privacy rights for information that is not in itself in the public interest outweighs the interest of making the information easily searchable.

What exactly constitute the privacy rights for information that is already public?

I argue that an act that is reported in a newspaper does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and as a result that the right to be forgotten is distinct from the right to privacy.

More particularly, the concept of public interest is static neither in time nor is it equal across all citizens, but rights are by definition equal across all citizens. A rule that always applies except for when it doesn't is really just a venue for arbitrary decisionmaking.

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