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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

The idea of 'right to be forgotten' is... ignorant. It is simple to create a web spider (yes, yes, it gets more complicated quickly), and you can be operating your spider quite quietly and privately. The logical outcome is that there will be grey market databank sellers of 'unforgettable' indexes of information.

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I would suggest that you're ignorant of the issue.

It's not the information existing that's the problem.

It's that the most powerful search robot in the world, with little context, can tell other people severely out-dated information about you that people treat as canonical fact, long after the information was pertinent or relevant, and that can define an entire person's online identity. And it may never fade away, or drop down the rankings, because the computer is too stupid to realize that a house foreclosure notice for 10 years ago is not an appropriate thing to show.

> It's that the most powerful search robot in the world,

So, other search robots doesn't do that?

See my response below.

It's not about expunging information from the internet, it's simply to prevent something inappropriately or incorrectly defining a person.

    When the Spaniard googled himself in 2009, two 
    prominent results appeared: home-foreclosure notices 
    from 1998, when he was in temporary financial trouble.

That stuff will always be part of his/collective history and important for some purposes, but in the context of this man and the search results for his name it's almost never going to be important or relevant information.

Google and the other search engines offer a standard mechanism for websites to tag such content so it won't be indexed. That's a much better solution for the man in the article. As it is now he has to make a request to every search engine to remove these search results, including new future search engines that might arise. Such victims would be better served if they could go to the source website to have such content deindexed for all search engines at once.

How can this man, and everyone else, be guaranteed the ability to change somebody else's pages to ensure they're no longer indexed by search engines that explicitly dishonor the spirit and purpose of instructions not to crawl pages?

IF that was ever viable the EU wouldn't have forced a solution.

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/robots-txt-remove-url/

> search engines that explicitly dishonor the spirit and purpose of instructions not to crawl pages

If you believe that to be true, then you should be arguing for a solution to that problem.

A robots noindex meta would work perfectly well to suppress an online bankruptcy notice about an individual.

In that video you'll see Matt Cutts from Google's Web Spam team explaining how they've declared indexing a url on google, and crawling a url's content, are apparently separate things so your express wishes can be overridden by any third party linking to your content, resulting in the URL being on google search and in results with inferred content instead of spidered content.

I think this is a problem, but this is not the entirety of the right to be forgotten problem, which just makes what you proposed more efficient because people only have to contact one company with an official procedure.

Crawling and indexing truly are fundamentally different things, and search engines have mechanisms to block both.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en

> You can prevent a page from appearing in Google Search by including a noindex meta tag in the page's HTML code. When Googlebot next crawls that page, Googlebot will see the noindex meta tag and will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it.

For all intents and purposes "indexing" and "crawling" is "appearing in search results", and they conflate these terms themselves in their robots.txt page:

> "You only need a robots.txt file if your site includes content that you don't want Google or other search engines to index."

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en

They do say noindex overrides 3rd party links so that's something, but it's a moot point either way because this was the approach for the last decade. Having to contact each individual person in charge of each individual URL isn't even effective when the MPAA throws money+DMCA at the task, individuals asking nicely never had a chance.

Yep. Bummer for him. Consider the fact that while Google makes this public, all this law is doing is ensuring that unseen data brokers sell the data privately, while you don't know what they know. :-)

Everything exists on a continuum of accessibility. People hold conversations in public all the time, but they don't expect anyone to be recording and publishing that information. The issue of the right to privacy becomes a bit more sticky on the web where information is easy to transmit and store, but I wouldn't call it ignorant. It's people trying to apply an older philosophy on privacy to the Internet.

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