Do you need to know about their parking tickets or embezzlement, though? Or that time they partied too hard 25 years ago? Outside of specific circumstances, having every mistake you've ever made accessible at a glance is not really good for society.

Um... yes? I'd probably want to know that information. And I'd also know that partying too hard 25 years ago probably doesn't have any bearing on their current behavior. But if they had been to jail for embezzling money? Yeah, I might have a problem with that.

Just give me the information, and let me decide how to interpret it.

The Right To Be Forgotten not only denies me the information in the first place, but it allows someone to selectively curate the information out there about them to tell the story they want to tell about themselves. Sure, maybe partying too hard 25 years ago isn't relevant anymore, but being convicted of child abuse 10 years ago certainly is. If it's just as easy to erase references to the latter as it is for the former, that's a problem. And what perfectly objective and moral party should decide what bits of info are ok to delist, and what should remain? I don't think any of us would trust that such an entity exists.

I can understand the case for allowing someone to have their speeding tickets forgotten, but if you believe that, the correct response is that the government shouldn’t publish speeding tickets.

(I could be wrong, but I think parking tickets are aren’t published in the US, while speeding tickets are).

I don't believe even most speeding tickets are a matter of public record, as citations and not criminal proceedings.

Child abuse? If your child's friend's parent is a known child abuser, why do they have their own child staying with them? It shouldn't even come down to that. You should meet them maybe, or give your children a phone so they can contact you if something goes wrong. Or just don't worry about it so much in the first place.

Either way, I don't see why paranoia should be used as a driver of policy. You can "think of the children" all day long, but most of us have been children and remember it well enough to know we didn't need to be though of that much.

It's not uncommon for children to live with formerly abusive parents. Drugs, alcoholism. The system is supposed to help parents be able to reunite.

(Sexual abuse is almost always another story, though.)

I mean, it's in the police blotter that's published in the newspaper. Assuming you still have a local newspaper, that is.

I'm not specifically aware of whether this is the case, but I would hope that the results of deliberations by criminal courts is public information.

So you're seriously suggesting that someone should have to go to their local library and wade through years of back issues to see if their child's friend's parents have committed a crime? And also travel to whatever other places they've lived to do the same? All because blah blah right to be forgotten, so google etc. isn't allowed to index the relevant articles? That's absurd.

That's almost exactly the opposite of what I'm arguing. I'd argue that previously, all of this information was on file, and accessible, and relatively well-known. Google delisting it is the weird, anomalous development.

> all of this information was on file, and accessible, and relatively well-known

But there is a big difference between having information at your fingertips in a searchable database, and having to go to a library and do the searching manually.

Perhaps google could provide the information after the user solved 1000 captchas :)

So if my local newspaper digitized their archive, they'd suddenly be in violation of user's privacy?