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Comment by ggreer | Hacker News Reader

My main objection to the "right to be forgotten" is that censorship of non-defamatory information helps unsavory people more than nicer ones.

People may Google my name and find things I don't want them to see.[1] Fortunately, I can do the same to them. Even though most people are nice most of the time, this fact incentivizes everyone to be nicer than they otherwise would be.

If we allowed people to take down results they deemed undesirable, it would give bad people fewer reasons to behave nicely. After all, they can just make search engines remove the entries they dislike.

And there's the problem inherent in all censorship: Who do you trust to determine what you're allowed to read or say?

1. Actually they might think I've been murdered, but that was a different Geoff Greer (may he rest in peace). Should I be able to get those results removed? After all, the late Geoff Greer won't mind.

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The ruling also states that if the article itself is in the public interest (such as an important person being unsavoury), it cannot be removed.

Also, no, you cannot have the late Geoff Greer's article removed, because it's not you. As I understanding the ruling, you can cannot act on behalf of someone else. Particularly not one who is dead.

However, I do agree with you on the problems with implementing such a system, which is why I at least think the EU should be handling the requests and not Google. But even so, while I agree with the principle, there will always be someone abusing the system.

The definition of public interest then becomes key. I also worry that information that does not seem to be in the public interest at present could become so in the future, but will be lost instead.

Realistically the EU is handling the requests. Google gets a request, they say no unilaterally, and then they wait for the EU to tell them to do it.

>My main objection to the "right to be forgotten" is that censorship of non-defamatory information helps unsavory people more than nicer ones.

Does it though? I think this is not one of the kind of statements one can prove (sort of creating a world to experiment on).

>If we allowed people to take down results they deemed undesirable, it would give bad people fewer reasons to behave nicely.

Well, we didn't have Google back a few decades ago, and we still managed to have civilized societies.

In fact, some societes were much more civilized then (e.g. with regard to fraud, or whatever), than societies with Google access are now.

This is the same argument people use for mass surveillance.

First, if you think that is the case, you aren't aware of persuasive arguments for surveillance. The best arguments have to do with ensuring public safety, not creating incentives to be nice.

Second, even if that were true, so what? The costs and benefits are totally different. To use an analogy: There are arguments for organ donation that also apply to organ theft. "One person's organs can be used to save a dozen lives." That does not mean organ theft should be allowed or that organ donation should be prevented.

I wasn't referring to the "it encourages people to be nicer" (which is obviously a ridiculous argument too) but to the "nothing to hide" argument:

> My main objection to the "right to be forgotten" is that censorship of non-defamatory information helps unsavory people more than nicer ones.

You did have a good argument though:

> And there's the problem inherent in all censorship: Who do you trust to determine what you're allowed to read or say?

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