I agree and I'm not debating the harm that can be done. (My comment got many downvotes so I assume they think I believe felons should never be given a 2nd chance.)

No, my comment is specifically about the framework for arguing. I'm saying that phrases such as "forgive" and "pay debt to society" are unconvincing since society has never universally believed that. Consider even the EU country like UK where Google lost this case. If UK truly "forgives" crimes after a felony sentence is served, why do they have a sex offender registry? The parent I responded to is apparently based in Canada. Canadian border officers have denied Americans with prior DUI felony convictions from entering the country. That's another example of not being "forgiven". Also, Canada is another country with a sex offender list.

If we want to debate the "harm" to felons, then let's debate that. Do not use "forgive" in the text of the argument because it just leads to an inconsistency. Jail time is about punishment, not forgiveness.

We have a Violent and Sex Offender Register: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_and_Sex_Offender_Regis...

It is not public, it exists to facilitate Police intelligence.

The "police intelligence" gives a misleading impression. Non-police residents can inquire about felons on the list because of Sarah's Law.[1]

In other words... "If I molested a child and served my 10 year prison sentence, I'm not truly _forgiven_ if people can check if I'm on a sex offender registry."

Therefore, don't use "forgive" as the framework. It should be clear that society really doesn't forgive and allow people a clean slate. If serving jail truly meant the "debt was paid to society", felons wouldn't be put on that list after jail was completed. Many defendents refuse a plea bargain of "guilty" because they don't want to be put on that list. To them, the lifetime sex offender list is worse than the jail sentence. It's an ongoing debt that's never repaid.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/find-out-if-a-person-has-a-recor...

> Many defendents refuse a plea bargain of "guilty" because they don't want to be put on that list.

This is not the US.

> Non-police residents can inquire about felons on the list because of Sarah's Law

This is no different than an extended check which any company allowing you to work with children can carry out. The difference is here that vulnerable new partners of the person can enquire if they see fit.

It is about keeping people safe, not punishing people. It's literally a criminal offence to reveal information about someone having to sign the register.

It seems like an inconsistent application of this principle. Sentences are often based on the amount of money involved. So while embezzlement by a CEO at a small company may well result in smaller losses and shorter prison sentences, the intent and conduct is exactly the same as a similar case at a larger company. If the smaller company CEO has a right to be forgotten, so does the larger one.

IMHO, this is an encouraging, nuanced development. There has to be a balance between protecting people against serial offenders and rehabilitation.

Responsible Journalism can’t ignore stuff like this, so I’m not surprised that the Judge would expect google, after making the journalism case, to demonstrate some of that attention to detail.

This is like a network where you can cause a network to waste a GB of data by sending a KB of data.

The only reasonable response in that situation would be to invest only the money available to fight the worst of the worst requests and blanket accept almost everyone's request to silence anyone else.

If you turn it around and make a single request take a few thousand dollars worth of legal fees and many hours of work then worthless requests which are likely to be denied wont be bothered with but the most worthy may still be seen to.

I mean, you're assuming two things:

- That people who want their data removed are criminals. That's hugely not the case. Does a teenager who was plastered all over social media / newspapers have to change his/her name because someone targeted abuse at him/her?

- Even if they were jailed for a transgression, they paid their part to the socienty. For serious transgressions, the authorities keeps tabs on them. For non-serious things, why does it matter? They paid their part.

> The man, who has not been named due to reporting restrictions surrounding the case, wanted search results about a past crime he had committed removed from the search engine.

Any example of somebody being abused/targeted and Google refusing to remove them from search results? The only cases where they fought back were people trying to hide their criminal record (most often politicians, white collar crime).

You need to convince a judge that you have a "good reason". France has only recently loosened its restrictions on what names people are allowed to have.

Story about German murderers suing to get their names removed from a Wikipedia article about the victim. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13wiki.html?_r=0

Let me tell you a little thing called marijuana possession charges and how they make students ineligible for student aid and government loans/grants. Even getting charged with possession of a single joint is enough to bar a student from receiving aid or loans. Such charges or convictions are the reason employers turn people away all of the time.

But I can get behind the use of judge discretion.

That’s truly enough for employers.

A few years ago you had no such facility at all - how did you manage?

Now you have a right to dictate what will be in someone else's mind.

This is a very US-centric attitude and very undemocratic in my view.

In Germany, for example, people in jail are generally allowed to vote. They could even set up a voting booth inside the jail if there were demand. However, there usually isn't and inmates vote by mail.

In the last 25 years, only 80 people, who were found guilty of treason, have lost the right to vote.

However, people whose sentence is at least a year in jail are excluded from running for office for 5 years.

> Society has never perceived jail time as truly resetting the scarlet letter back to zero.

Some jobs here require a so-called "certificate of conduct" which you can get from the police and which lists criminal convictions. The entries in this certificate expire after a certain number of years, depending on the the crime. The maximum time a conviction can be in the record is 10 years after it has been served. Afterwards, it's deleted. (It is not deleted from police records but from what a company could find out in a background check by going through official channels.)

What were they doing? How many independent acts of treason was this?

The German federal statistics office publishes a report every year which lists how many people have lost their right to vote or to hold public office according to §45 (2) and (5) StGB (German criminal law) [1]. Unfortunately, the reports do not distinguish between these two cases. In any case, the numbers are vanishingly small in recent years. I looked at the last 12 years for which there is a report (2005 - 2016) and it's only 15 cases, so a little more than 1 per year. Again, it doesn't distinguish between losing the right to vote and losing the right to hold office.

The people who lost their rights according to this law were mostly convicted for crimes against the state, the public order, or misconduct in office. To make it more precise, the report lists crimes such as joining a terrorist organisation, obstruction of punishment, forcing a subordinate to commit a crime, criminal assault while in office, corruption, etc. The original newspaper article summarized them as crimes against the state which I translated as treason.

However, it seems that the law was applied more often in the past. I found a secondary source [2] which lists 178 cases between 1978 and 2008. The primary source [3] is a dissertation which costs 80 €.

[1] https://www.destatis.de/GPStatistik/receive/DESerie_serie_00..., § 5.1

[2] Sonja Bühler, Die Aberkennung des aktiven Wahlrechts von Strafgefangenen nach § 45 Abs. 5 StGB, Freilaw 1/2017, http://www.freilaw.de/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/0...

[3] Jan Oelbermann, Wahlrecht und Strafe, Universität Bremen, 2011, http://www.nomos-shop.de/Oelbermann-Wahlrecht-Strafe/product...

This is a problem that should be fixed with laws, not with Google.

In many places, an 18 year old who sleeps with a 17 year old is a "rapist". Someone who breaks into a house and forces them at knifepoint to have sex is also a "rapist". One of these is a much greater danger to society and that should be reflected in our laws. And, to a certain extent, it is. Many places have judicial procedures where the first kind of "rapist" can have that offense reduced to a lesser class of crime after some level of incarceration and probation. Google should not be allowed to unilaterally undo that.

We need to quit treating people who go to prison as if they have a scarlet letter even after they have served their time. If they are that dangerous, they shouldn't be let out. The problem is that, in the US, we want to incarcerate people but not pay money for doing so.

I have always thought that was outrageous. I think people should be aloud to vote even while they're in jail. The current system could allow a group to wipe out their political opponents by simply passing a law outlawing a common activity, then selectively enforcing it. I mean that's basically what the war on drugs was about.

It's odd that the USA, which champions democracy, doesn't hold the right to vote as a universal and inalienable right of all citizens.

Wikipedia actually has an interesting map on the subject for the US (below the fold/ToC):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement

Unfortunately, some states (including the United Kindom) wilfully defy the ECtHR on this issue.

But I also don't think it's unreasonable to allow some prisoners to vote, especially where they are imprisoned for short sentences and where it is in the interests of rehabilitating them to do so.

It's not like stabbing someone makes your opinion on taxes less valid. Or drug dealing makes your opinion of the education system invalid.

Even if you rob someone, your opinion that the poor (a.k.a. probably you) should be financially supported by the government is not less valid.

There can a point be made that you're not exactly participating in society while you're in prison, so if we act like politics always perfectly reflect people's current needs and don't cumbersomely shape over decades, then you could argue that they shouldn't be allowed to vote over other people's society, therefore should only be allowed to vote when they're going to be released in the next legislature period. But that's just not the case. A moron in presidency can and will negatively affect people's lives for a long time after he's gone.

Lastly, I suppose, if you view prison primarily as punishment, then taking away their right to vote just extends that.

Nothing basic about it. The "War on Drugs", as we know it today, was literally started by the Nixon administration as a means to control liberals and minorities.[0]

0 - https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ (the money quote, by Ehrlichman, is in the second paragraph)

You should be made aware that none of those happen in most EU countries. Most people here feel that things done in the US like public sex offender registeries are abhorrent.

Now, should retribution be infinite? Is rehabilitation impossible? Should a criminal be permanently removed from society?

We generally answer no to these questions except in rare situations that are front-page news and enter popular vocabulary. That’s why Google is in the wrong here.

And they know it too - the only reason they want to do it is a few more ad clicks.

This doesn't happen in Europe. Part of the social contract over here is that criminals who have served their sentence have the right to have their fundamental rights restored. That in fact is the justification for punishment in the first place.

A society that takes on the authority to punish individuals must integrate these individuals after they have payed their debt to society. If they wouldn't the punishment would be arbitrary, cruel and serve no purpose.

    1.  Removal of social offender from society
    2.  Rehabilitation of non-conforming individuals
    3.  Punishment enough to deter future offenders

You can certainly justify discriminating against people with criminal records that way. It's by far the best predictor of job performance. High social trust is probably the most important aspect of a society. Letting known criminals get into positions of power is not an ideal way to achieve that.

The main reason we have prisons is justice. The basic human desire for fairness and consequences for wrongdoing. No one wants to see a murderer get away with it. Even if there is some compelling argument why punishment won't increase utility. For instance, people tend to strongly oppose having sentences done by statistical algorithms. That are vastly better at predicting recidivism than human judges. Because they feel unfair.

And that same desire for fairness is also why people prefer criminals get a second chance.

I mean, on the most basic level, a prior offense is an excellent predictor of a future offense. If I want to hire somebody to supervise women or children, I'd like not to hire somebody who (at any point in their life) victimized women or children, because it's not too much to ask!

I, for one, don't think a murderer should be forgiven. A murderer gets to live, and the victim is no longer alive, there is fundamentally nothing you can do to be forgiven for murder. To me, that is as it should be.

At very least, the perpetrator of a crime should not be left to decide whether or not I forgive him, and to enforce that through the courts.

And you should get that - by making an official request for those records, and presenting documents that show that the person is applying to your job which involves supervising women and children.

None of which requires it to be at the distance of a click.

I, for one, don't think a murderer should be forgiven. A murderer gets to live, and the victim is no longer alive, there is fundamentally nothing you can do to be forgiven for murder. To me, that is as it should be.

I, on the other hand, would rather not get robbed because your draconian policies left the murderer alive but unable to get a job.

Sure. But let's make that list formal, with recognised judicial ways of getting on it, and recognised judicial ways of getting off it, rather than just "this newspaper said it", which leaves people without recourse unless they can afford lawyers.

That would make sense if you were never guilty of it, but I disagree completely with the idea that somebody who has been ruled guilty (without a successful appeal) has a right to be forgotten only for having served their time.

> For adults, the rehabilitation period is one year for community orders, two years for custodial sentences of six months or less, four years for custodial sentences of over six months and up to and including 30 months, and seven years for custodial sentences of over 30 months and up to and including 48 months. Custodial sentences of over four years will never become spent and must continue to be disclosed when necessary.

This has been part of UK law since at least 1974. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1974/53

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_of_Offenders_Ac...