I get what you're saying, but privacy is a huge issue, and figuring out how to protect peoples' historical expectation of privacy and a 'clean slate' by most standards is something the EU is grappling with. It isn't evil, though its implementation may be misguided.

I do not want to live in a world where everything I've done, and every mistake I've made, is indexed and shared across the world. Not everything about the Internet revolution has made the world a better place.

Your comment assumes several things. First, that everyone has a similar level of things to be embarrassed about. Second, that wealthy and powerful people won't simply sue or bribe publishers to withhold or delete the embarrassing material. Third, that living in a panopticon is a good thing.

I'm a little perplexed at how people who find NSA surveillance utterly unacceptable and wish to be able to shield private information from even lawful (warranted) scrutiny nonetheless seem fine with surveillance and publication by private sector, whether that's more-or-less universal publication via search engines or fee-based as in the case of data brokers like Acxiom.

None of those assumptions are made, at all.

First, I asked what the endgame is, not what it is right now.

First, that everyone has a similar level of things to be embarrassed about.

And yet here we're discussing a law that leaves the amount of damage to be done to freedom of information up to the whims of each individual person who thinks they should be able to censor some piece of data, rather than any kind of objective test. Including the "rich and powerful".

Second, that wealthy and powerful people won't simply sue or bribe publishers to withhold or delete the embarrassing material.

That does not work in the real world. The rich and powerful have been trying to restrict information getting out for years. Snowden and Streisand are living proof of this. The continued explosions in the faces of people who try to do this are further proof.

That old saying about the internet interpreting censorship (and we can quibble about the wheretos and the whyfores all day long, but at the end of the day, this definitely fits the definition of censorship) as damage? That doesn't stop applying just because legislators want it to.

Third, that living in a panopticon is a good thing. I'm a little perplexed at how people who find NSA surveillance utterly unacceptable and wish to be able to shield private information..

In every case we're talking about here, it's not "private" information. It's information that's always been there, for free, to anyone who cares to look. Arrests are not private information, neither are blog comments, neither is anything else you do in the public eye. I find it repugnant to suggest that removing that information from one or two places makes it as if those things never happened.

Your post is so self-contradictory and illogical that I see little point in discussing this further with you.

Let me make this simple then, your veiled insults aside:

There is a difference between public and private information, and you don't seem to know what that is.

We're discussing censorship of public information.

Why did you choose to invoke the NSA bogeyman in a discussion about already-public information?

Why do you think the "wealthy and powerful" will be able to censor information when the wealthy and powerful are massive failures at it already?

> seem fine with surveillance and publication by private sector

Remember, the private sector can't enforce their laws and taxes by force like the state can. After all, it's not like Mafia rackets were able to enforce their "protection" rules on small businesses, or drug cartels were able to assassinate the families of informers. The state is the one and only risk to the private citizen, and by definition must be opposed at every step.

Except that that isn't the case. Not nearly everyone ends up getting written about in a blog or a newspaper, as much as that might be the case in your social circle. However, some not-insignificant amount of people do.

The amount of writing and access to that writing has only gone up over time, and that's almost universally seen as a net positive.

I just don't see the positive in a world where actions don't have consequences since the collective unconscious can be selectively edited by legislative meddling.

The idea of a "right to be forgotten" is so fundamentally alien to me, as someone who fundamentally believes in the rights of freedom of speech and free access to infofrmation, as if the subject of a given piece of information somehow has ownership of it, rather than the person who created it.

OK, consider this: in the US, police departments routinely publish 'mugshots' of arrestees. If you surf the web without an ad blocker you've surely seen ads along the lines of 'who's been arrested in (your area of residence)? find out NOW' with photographs of people wearing hangdog expressions. These ads are from companies whose business model is charging people hundreds of dollars to have their mugshot removed from their database. Of course there are multiple firms engaged in this activity so that can turn into an ongoing expense, more so for people who happen to be particularly photogenic or distinctive-looking.

Now suppose you are arrested but never charged due to lack of evidence, or released because your arrest was a case of mistaken identity. Is it OK for mugshot republication firms to make lots of money out of you, or at the very least put you to the trouble of having your mugshot removed from police department websites by legal means? If you're poor and don't have the resources or the knowledge to address this situation immediately, is it OK for search engines to cache that information forever?

There's a reason for the legal concept of a 'statute of limitations'; for most criminal actions other than very serious offenses, we have agreed as a society that criminal liability must expire at some point that's more or less proportional to the sentence one might have incurred if caught and convicted. This benefits a few very astute criminals, which is a downside, but an acceptable price to pay for limiting the prosecutorial reach of the state. Why then should we give private actors free rein to commercially exploit the history of people's interactions with law enforcement, to those people's detriment?

> as if the subject of a given piece of information somehow has ownership of it

And yet the law in some places has this idea already - if somebody takes a picture of a person in some countries and in 27 US states, that person has some rights over the use of that photograph under the concept of "publicity rights" or "personality rights". There's stronger concepts of this across some of the EU. This is why model releases exist.

So the concept of the subject of a piece of information having some ownership of it is not that foreign, although rights to the extent required for the right to be forgotten is something relatively new as far as I can tell.