We Can Forget It For You Wholesale

The European Union court has ruled that people have "the right to be forgotten" online. And as such, they can demand that Google and others leave out the search results relating to a person, if that person so demands. (Though the original information elsewhere on the Internet is not affected; this ruling would only prevent people from searching for the it.)  And fortunately, there's a stipulation that it doesn't apply to a public figure whose actions are part of the public record. So sorry, Silvio Berlusconi, you can't demand that all your exploits be forgotten.

Every now and then European courts put out an idealistic ruling like this. Sometimes it seems like a good counterweight to the U.S. and it's laissez-faire attitude. But other times they seem rather out of touch, offering up impractical judgments for dubious benefits.

This seems to be in the later category. I find it hard to see why a person has the right to be forgotten.  After all, we don't have that right in real life.  I heard your embarrassing clarinet recital in grade six, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Having said that, it is dangerous to extrapolate personal morality to the scale allowed by modern technology.  An example that comes up in surveillance discussions is that just because it's acceptable for a police officer to walk down the street comparing people to a wanted poster, that doesn't imply that cameras on every street should identify every person in public. So try that reasoning: Although you can't count on being forgotten by the people around you, the effect of having so much information about every aspect of your life available online is unfair.

I still don't find that convincing.  I'm all in favour of forgiveness, and allowing a person to have a second chance in life.  But that's not really the same thing as a right to be forgotten. 

Furthermore, the situations in which information about us can do the most unfair harm are not covered here.  A bad credit rating or placement on a no-fly list based on misleading or incorrect information, say.  Or to put it another way, when I worry about the effect of all the information about me in today's world, I worry about information deep in the servers of businesses or governments, not whether someone can Google me.