I haven't been able to think of a middle ground but there seems like there should be between "I can get rid of embarrassing things as a public official or celebrity on the internet" and "I rather not have websites like mylife.com, doxing me by posting my home address, contact information and personal history without any recourse."<p>Curious if HN has any ideas how to approach that issue?
>That judgment allowed European citizens to ask search engines to remove links to “inadequate, irrelevant or ... excessive” content<p>The critical terms "inadequate", "irrelevant" are dangerously subjective. What's irrelevant to one person may be of great interest to another.
Sorry if this is an ignorant question, but "NGOs" just means "non-governmental organizations"; would it be accurate refer to any arbitrary group of companies (that are unaffiliated with any government) as "NGOs"? While the article does specify that it is a "British-led alliance of NGOs", it seems to me like one could call a group consisting of Google, Facebook, and other similar companies as "NGOs"; what's to say that these NGOs aren't just companies that profit off of the lack of a "right to be forgotten"?
My personal issue with unilateral free speech is that it's kind of self-defeating.<p>To my understanding, the essential value of free speech is that it protects the unpopular voices... but because of how the system works, the ones without power have substantially more difficulty having their ideas heard. Unilateral free speech makes it impossible for anything except the popular opinions to be voiced without being drowned out.<p>I can't think of a solution to this, unfortunately.
<i>Could</i>? By its very nature the soi-disant 'right' to be forgotten <i>does</i> threaten free speech, since governments use it to silence people telling truthful information.<p>This isn't about libel: it's about criminals and wrongdoers wanting the Internet to be wiped clean of evidence of their crimes or wrongdoing.
Good. Because it doesn't threaten Free Speech as understood by virtually all democracies in the Western world, it merely threatens the extremely expansive interpretation of Free Speech in America's First Amendment.<p>Both notions are related, but clearly not the same.