Jimmy Wales and all these other people decrying the decision are incredibly stupid. The central question, which they never address, is whether a massive change of ease of discovery of information is a quantitative or a qualitative change. Much of this information was always available -- eg for minor criminal history, if you had the resources to go county by county and check. Pretending that it's somehow inherently true or obvious that when a 2 second effort on google unearths the same information that the same rules should apply is simply stupid. There's a real debate we should have about what information should be available, about whom, for how long, with what expirations, etc, and Jimmy and Eric Schmidt and the founders of google aren't obviously right. Also, we should just in general be wary of rich assholes; all those people won't suffer consequences whereas plenty of non rich people do suffer consequences.<p>Also, saying that a very powerful privacy tool that forces google to forget certain information makes it hard to make "real progress on privacy issues" makes one wonder what exactly he thinks privacy is. And you can see below that he deliberately conflates freedom of speech -- which individuals will continue to enjoy -- with the instant and easy availability of all information (as commercially selected by Google, etc).<p>And again, fta, we see that Jimmy is another rich asshole -- just like Eric Schmidt -- that thinks he should have privacy, but you shouldn't:<p><pre><code> Back in 2005, Wales admitted to editing his own Wikipedia bio — a practice
frowned upon by the site. And, it must be said, a little eyebrow-raising
given his outspoken views on the imperative of free speech online. *Wales
passed up on the opportunity to explain how his own views about personal
revisionist history might have evolved since 2005*. But he did agree to
answer our other questions about the committee’s role and his personal views
on the ECJ ruling. [bolding added]
</code></pre>
just like eric Schmidt, who tried to get google to delete information and has used his lawyers and billions of dollars of wealth to force at least one former mistress' blog offline. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7820978" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7820978</a>
Here we go.<p>> I don’t think the view that this decision is correct is in any way consistent with any serious person’s understanding of freedom of expression.<p>> Wales: A part of the outcome should be the very strong implementation of a right to free speech in Europe — essentially the language of the First Amendment in the U.S.<p>As a european, a find this downright insulting and imperialist.
One of the interesting things about the ECJ case was that Google Spain was forced to remove links to the information, but the Spanish Newspaper was allowed to keep the information.<p>A cynic might see it as territorial favoritism. Google's the foreign group, so it has to watch itself. The Spanish paper was local, so the man can't exercise any right to be forgotten against it.<p><a href="http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014-05/cp140070en.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014...</a>
Obviously this is a censorship move by the EU, but they had to sell it somehow. So they framed as a "we're protecting your privacy from evil corporations". Not surprising though, considering a pretty horrible track record for free speech in most of Western Europe.