But an expiry date, if I'm reading this right, of a few years? Many trial processes don't finish up by then. In my journalism class, I force the students to go on Lexis Nexis and find 10-20 articles in the past decade or older that have been written about whatever they're writing about. Primarily to make them realize that whatever they think is new is not new, and to challenge them to pursue a story that looks at the big picture.
Making it harder to find stories in the past only adds to the dumbification and self-absorption of society.
A John Smith might end up locally famous for a while, regret those Tequila shots leading to nude in the town square, damaging a statue, and a £500 fine. Some years after the magistrate passes sentence it ceases to exist and he's not obliged to tell. If you get three years for something more serious it never expires. If you're John Smith you're in luck having a common name, but if you have a rare name...
In former years the reporting is in some dusty library or newspaper microfiche archive forgotten until he runs for Prime Minister perhaps.
There's lots of cases where an innocent accused, or sometimes even the victim, can suffer significant reputational damage from a widely reported case. The adversarial system, and occasional trials by media, seems to encourage that.
I don't think having older, expired, reports of more minor offences moved to archive that charges to search, or requires you to have journalism ID or something leads to dumbification of anything. It shouldn't cease to exist, just become far less trivial to get at. More an attempt to restore balance, regardless of practicality.
A bad debt, even a lot of bad debt, expires in 5 or 6 years from your credit report, but a minor offence 20 years ago doesn't?
People generally don't care what you did in the ancient past. The only time it matters is when it is a big deal. Like that Republican in the primaries who fabricated an incident involving a knife. Without a public record we wouldn't know.
We need an uncensored public record so we can verify what people say and guide our future decisions.
I am fairly certain his saying "dumb and offensive things" is a huge part of his success. Where I am Trump has about 60% of the voters. When I talk to people they say they like the idea of the wall or that they do want muslims banned. These are each dumb and offensive and as far as I can tell the reason people in my area support Trump.
Whether or not you support Trump, if you understand what he is saying, they are objectively (or at least not much room for subjectivity) dumb and offensive.
For some practical context: I'm the only person in the world with my name. If you google me, page 1 is my professional details, page 2 starts showing ARCHIVED forum posts from a decade ago, page 3 has high school newspaper clippings from 15 years ago. In 5 minutes, you've run through my life. I'm thankful I never had any legal trouble.
In this particular case the trial that was being reported on has not yet finished.
The information will still be kept by legitimate archivists. If it can be kept by them it can be kept by governments. It can be kept by blackmailers It can be kept by accidents in old backups. There will be someone selling this information.
This just hides the issue while creating a massive tool for future censorship and new black market.
Any reasonable person will look back 10 years and see that the person posting stupid stuff on Facebook while drunk has cleaned up their act. Forcing the information to be hidden doesn't help, it just hides that you might be dealing with unreasonable people even if you would rather not.
That's what they get for not investing more into a space program.
Our turn may be next.
ED: One option might be to automatically use a different name. If I stop using "Retric" all my HN posts are divorced from my name. Abstractly, hearing about a 9/11 survivor by name adds nothing vs some made up name. A random picture of someone drinking will be forgotten if it's not linked to your name. Companies often change names to get away from bad publicity.
The result, my wife has had work colleagues ask about it, and one implied that she may have done something wrong to invite trouble.
The victims and innocent in an incident can be affected by reportage too.
We're European, and she tried to exercise the Right to be Forgotten, but Google haven't responded and it remains there when her name is searched. Her career may be being impacted, by having been a victim of a crime. This occurred 5 years ago, and is still mentioned from time to time.
I think "The right to be forgotten" is a ridiculous "right". You don't have the right to dictate what other people know and talk about. Perhaps make laws that prohibit employers from using news stories older than 5 years old against you during the hiring process, with exceptions for certain things. For example, a bank should be able to refuse to hire someone who was convicted of financial fraud 10 years ago, but perhaps shouldn't be able to refuse to hire someone because they got a DUI 10 years ago...
The difference would be if someone intentionally keeps republishing dirt about you with the intent to harass, in which case libel/slander torts could be used to address non-factual information, and harassment torts could be used address irrelevant/dated factual information.
Scrubbing the internet of factual information to protect people's feelings is a very concerning form of censorship. It's obviously abusable and actively being abused, so companies like Google aren't even going to try to comply.
Libel and slander would like to have a word with your opinion.
> Scrubbing the internet of factual information to protect people's feelings is a very concerning form of censorship.
No, its not. People have rights.
Europe likes to try and bully Google; it makes them feel better about their distinct lack of web tech
We really need to draw a firm line about this "blame the victim" behavior. I haven't experienced it in any grave crime, but I had my bicycle stolen and instantly had to deal with a litany of people saying I shouldn't have locked it with a cable lock (I wasn't even using a cable lock), I shouldn't have put it where thieves could see it, etc. We all know it's 1000x worse for other crimes, like sex crimes.
Victim blaming is comforting because it saves the blamers from the knowledge that life deals random blows and it could happen to anyone, including them. They'd much rather think that they are smart and safe, and that the victim did something wrong.
The difficulty here is the mismatch between what people are normally capable of maintaining in their consciousness either individually or local community and what we get from information systems who can record minutiae indefinitely.
Before when records were not accessible across jurisdictions for example, there are now reconstructed records of someone being chased out of town for some misdeed and goes and invents a new life for themselves. This is not possible in today's world, unless you're willing to move to third tier countries.
Now, there is good and bad in that. But there is also good and bad in everyone's history pertinent or not being available to everyone curious enough to execute a search.
People are not machines and I believe should have the right to have some kinds of information about them remain unavailable to other regular people for whom that information has no legal consequence to them.
Its easy to say "these are non-issues" when they're not happening to you.
Now I'm that guy who has scrubbed his Twitter feed, locked down his Facebook privacy settings, does everything possible not to leak personal information online, removes every item I can from my credit reports (good, bad, addresses, employers, whatever; as long as its old enough to be removed, I have it removed), and has paid to have citations as trivial as traffic tickets expunged from my record from years back.
I will do everything I can to leave no trace, as you never know what will be used against you in the future.
Whilst I don't think 2.5 yrs is the right balance, I do think much reporting should expire to an archive. If a restaurant did something wrong 10 years ago, but clean since (that's in the context of the UK with regular, visible, standards checks), who cares about the old offence? If they're still doing wrong they would probably have other, non-expired, offences in the last 10 years.
Here in Europe we have the concept of rehabilitation of offenders. Whilst the UK has a poor reputation for reform (we go for a more US lock 'em up approach), and Gove leaving Justice looks to have put paid to reform for another decade, we have the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act since early 70s. After a varying period past record is considered spent - 2 yrs prison or more is never spent, the rest expire after a period depending on sentence. Fines expire after 7 years I think.
So the stupidity your child gets into at 18, whilst out drinking, doesn't pop up in searches when 30 and applying for jobs. Legally you don't need to mention it again apart from some exceptions like applying to be a judge or joining police.
The internet is starting to make a mockery of that reasonable intent. The law thinks you can become clean, you have been legally for 15 years, but your potential employer finds a BBC page from 1998, and decides to not extend the offer. That's not reasonable either.
Perhaps news should archive in step with laws such as that. Trivia and public order offences expire quickly, 10 year sentences never. Somehow make it a bit less available behind a paywall, or some credentials. I'm talking of intent not practicality. I realise a mirror elsewhere would render that void.
In the 80s and 90s it was only the exceptional who got background searches. Manually by searching through archives. Reporters would dig into some suspect politician only when it was something major. That's also the wrong balance and meant many things that should have been known in the public interest didn't come to light simply because it was difficult to check.