Here is a direct quote from the conclusions of the findings:<p><i>Our concern is that the practical aspects work for individuals, so we do not want to set expectations which cannot be met. Going beyond the idea of a search engine, if information is so proliferated on the internet, how would it be practical to remove all that information? As a regulator, we only want to enforce things in a way where we can achieve the end results…<p>We rather doubt whether the Government believe there are "ways to make this practical and workable".</i><p>Nice to see some common sense.
I'd like to bring up the idea of a Jubilee, an ancient idea that might be a guide for how to approach this problem again.<p>Basically, in the old days, people were able to fuck up their circumstances permanently because they lived in a small village where everyone ended up knowing everything.<p>Because that's obviously not conducive to a well-functioning society, everyone agreed to forgive and forget (debts at that time) every so many years.<p>This might be a reasonable way to handle our current data congestion problems. What if companies agreed to flush their user data every ? years?<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical)</a><p>edit: this isn't an explicit plan, just something to chew on. Also it doesn't address Google's issue, so it's kind of a distraction to the thread i admit.
Any future solution to this should still not be Googles problem. If people are going to be able to have history removed from the net, they should have to have it removed from the net and not just from an index. To cover a lot of this, make some restrictions on distribution of criminal, tax, employment, birth/death records. We already have it in the US for medical records. Some of that information is public records, but why do those have to be free and/or indexed by search engines?
The fact that we're starting to see people oppose the idea that "privacy is necessary at all cost" is comforting.<p>I'm really worried about the "solutions" that are starting to emerge to "fix" privacy. It's starting to look eerily like SOPA/PIPA.
I think "Right to be forgotten" should be forced upon the media, not search engines. If the media didn't have the information on their website, then major search engines wouldn't index it.