No I like it. I love the idea that an individual could put it to a corporation without putting millions. And I think there is a pure bias here from Americans. I was writing a long comment but I scrapped it, they love free speech and firearms, and there is no way to force acceptance of difference of point of view on them.
And the pianist is not going anywhere, he wrote a letter to the wrong organization (and now he's thrown under the bus). He can only scrub results on the European Google.
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.
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.
I don't think most of the objections are normative (ie, free speech and firearms are good) so much as empirical (ie, the nature of the internet, or of human networking in some more abstract sense, precludes a "right to be forgotten").
Except that for most of human history, except for particularly notable events, things were forgotten relatively quickly. The number of pictures and written records was VASTLY lower, as was their accessibility.
It's a peculiarity of the current age that we can find out so much about people so easily, that trivialities are preserved in photographic quality, and that these records are preserved publicly for extended periods of time.
I think the "right to be forgotten" has always implicitly existed and that we accidentally erased it before we realized what we were doing, and only now are seeing a backlash as the effects of that choice are being felt.
I don't think that's very true. Before a few centuries ago, travel was expensive. Most people rarely strayed far from their birthplace, making them likely to interact with the same group over their lifetime. If they did something embarrassing or stupid, stories would percolate indefinitely. It cost too much to move somewhere else and start a new life.
What's worse is that back then people had difficulty discovering rumors about themselves. At least today, we can do vanity searches.
That's a terrible analogy. We're talking about the difference between a small community and digital information technology in the era of ubiquitous networks. For one, the level of detail is absurdly lopsided; we're comparing high definition audio and video with what, someone's diary at worst? The records kept are essentially incomparable. Second, there is just no comparing a small close knit community to the entire world and instantaneous access.
No one is saying that people don't have a right to their memories. Even communities have the right to remember things collectively. But imagine if you couldn't get a job in your small town because everyone whispered about you being a child molester or something. You couldn't get housing. No one would talk to you. You had to beg for food. My example is a bit extreme but it illustrates the example well because some of these things happen on a massive scale to people whose potential employers web search them.
Yeah, I think that's a good assessment. And the American part might be a belief that the internet represents a completely different age than "most of human history" (I'm not sure if people around the world think that way, but my sense is that many Americans do).
And the pianist is not going anywhere, he wrote a letter to the wrong organization (and now he's thrown under the bus). He can only scrub results on the European Google.