Google seeks to limit ‘right to be forgotten’ by claiming it’s journalistic

There are other search engines and data aggregators. Making Google hide things just gives victims false peace of mind... The problem is still there.

> If someone feels consequences of an offensive 2007 tweet, just delete it. Platforms should be required to make it easy to delete content.

“Just delete it”.

Except have you ever personally been in the situation that you needed something removed? I have and:

1) You might not even have the password to every random account you created in the past, nor the e-mail addresses that you used when you created those profiles, nor maybe even remember what e-mail address you used for each of them.

2) Turns out that there are a lot of sites out there that copy and preserve a lot of random data from other sites. They do so without regards to the ToS of the site you originally posted to. They do not care about copyright. They do not respond to personal requests for removal of data. They do not respond to DMCA notices. They are outside of the jurisdiction of the country you live in and as are their hosting providers. And even if they are cooperative, there are so many of them that reaching out to all of them and following up on the removal will require much much more time and energy than what you have available.

So then the best you can do is delete what you can and submit the rest for removal from Google.

“Well you shouldn’t have posted it in the first place if you didn’t want it to be public”, right? No, it’s not that simple!

The things you post today can be taken out of context and misinterpreted by someone in the future in ways you would never have imagined today.

We keep posting comments, pictures, videos, creating profiles, liking and sharing posts and information, but most of us rarely delete any of it. As the amount of data increases, so does the room for cherry picking data about you to build up an image of you that while true in the sense that all of it are things you posted, wildly misrepresents what kind of person you are, and on top of this misrepresentation and even more inaccurate image can be painted.

If you had any idea what it feels like to have that happen to you, I think you would want to be able to have some of that information at the very least removed from search results.

Once it’s gone from search, it’s gone from the public eye. And if you are lucky you are able to erase the bits of information that ties the data to you so that even if the data resurfaces in the future it is no longer connected to you, or at least not as directly.

Furthermore, when you are working on having information removed you should first make a list of all of the information, then have it removed from Google ASAP so that 1) it gets harder to find as soon as possible and 2) so that the information is not retained in the publicly available caches of search engines after it’s been deleted from the source sites.

Beyond that, for the information that you could not get deleted but which you were able to have removed from search results, some of it will eventually disappear all together on its own because of bitrot (hardware failures, data management errors, sites going out of business, etc) and some of it will probably stick around forever.

But like I said you want as much of it removed as possible and you want the rest of it to be hard to find and you want as much of it as possible to lose connection to you. And achieving that requires the cooperation of the search engines in removing results.

I'd rather live in a society that is capable of forgetting, accepting that people can change and thus don't condemn others for their past. If we eliminate skeletons in our wardrobes, any little speckle on one's past will be devastating.

> * If someone feels consequences of an offensive 2007 tweet, just delete it. Platforms should be required to make it easy to delete content.

...and I read that tweet in 2007, and quoted it in a blog post on my obscure, low traffic blog. Google will still find it.

> * Uphold social media to the same standards of traditional media, requiring truth and propagation of redactions and corrections. Libel and slander are well-established concepts.

What about the case where the damaging content is true? A key thing here is that what is acceptable changes over time. Something that can be a life ruining social faux pas today may have been pretty normal 20 years ago, and many people today won't accept the "oh, that was normal back then" explanation.

We used to be able to avoid these problems because it took effort to dig up records from 20 years ago, and from low circulation sources like local newspapers.

So, for example, if you did stupid things in your home town that ended up in your high school newspaper, and then 20 years later were applying for a job in a city in another state...the employer would probably not find that high school newspaper, even if you were applying for a fairly sensitive job in an industry like finance.

That's because to find things like that they would have to actually send someone to visit your high school library and comb through their archives of the high school newspaper. That's just too expensive to do routinely for job applicants, except for the most sensitive positions.

Nowadays, all that stuff ends up online from the start, and it is cheap and easy to find.

> * Demand discretion from friends. In college, my group had a strict "no-camera" rule when it came to embarrassing or unlawful shenanigans. My parent's generation had the same rule.

All it takes is one person in the group to slip up, or for you to overlook one third party who is not part of your agreement and who can see you. So really, the rule has to be don't undertake embarrassing or unlawful shenanigans. (And as I noted above, standards for what is embarrassing or unlawful can change over time, so it really needs to be don't do anything that could conceivably become embarrassing or unlawful in the next 50 or so years).

Essentially we used to balance privacy vs. public access kind of automatically, due to the limitations we had in information storage, indexing, and retrieval. We've removed most of those limitations, so the balance has been lost.

Many people arguing against GDPR, right to be forgotten, etc do not support the DMCA at all. In fact, most in my experience deeply oppose the DMCA and even IP in general.