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> I think it'll just take time for society to realize that people do stupid shit and ignore it as long as it's irrelevant to the context and "forgetting" events

> I think it'll just take time for society to realize that people do stupid shit and ignore it as long as it's irrelevant to the context and "forgetting" events is just a stopgap This is a great point and it ties into a relatively new change in the cultural landscape from "no news is good news" to "_any_ news is bad news." Search Engines are often the culprit, as well. Not a fully accurate example, but it describes the situation - Suppose CS student BillyBob got drunk out with his freshmen friends at a bar night, and he really needs to pee. he climbed the fence into a construction area and was soon arrested for trespassing along with charges for being drunk in public / whatever else is related to the charge. To his dismay, he ends up on several public news site, despite the judge writing off the offense and letting him go free. He finished his CS degree with honors. These news sites do not really care that his charge was far more innocent than, a guy who assisted in something far more malicious, say, the Watergate scandal, and yet his chances of finding future employment are reduced drastically as he easily appears in search results. IMO, the new normal works like a boolean, either flagged or not flagged. This is irrespective of his efficacy as a developer, and the fact that he learned from a college mistake. :ED: Didn't see you updated your post to include a similar situation. In sum, I think the Right to be Forgotten was a good idea, but it was not implemented correctly.

x0x0 11y ago
The same way that software, the nsa, and ubiquitous cameras with facial recognition changed surveillance, google changed knowledge discovery. The laws that were appropriate when surveilling a person meant dedicating a set of human beings to following someone, thus naturally limiting the scale, fall apart when it can all be done electronically at vastly higher scale for very little marginal cost. Similarly, the laws that worked when information was naturally forgotten because we had limited ability to index and discover it, ie you could always do deep background checks on someone, but it was very labor intensive and thus pricey, need rewriting now you can get the equivalent of an fbi background surveillance check by typing a name for tiny effort and cost. Hence jerks like Eric Schmidt suggest people should change their name if they want not to have youthful hijinks follow them around, yet is happy to use his billions and lawyers to keep his mistresses' stories off the internet.

x0x0 11y ago

The same way that software, the nsa, and ubiquitous cameras with facial recognition changed surveillance, google changed knowledge discovery. The laws that were appropriate when surveilling a person meant dedicating a set of human beings to following someone, thus naturally limiting the scale, fall apart when it can all be done electronically at vastly higher scale for very little marginal cost. Similarly, the laws that worked when information was naturally forgotten because we had limited ability to index and discover it, ie you could always do deep background checks on someone, but it was very labor intensive and thus pricey, need rewriting now you can get the equivalent of an fbi background surveillance check by typing a name for tiny effort and cost. Hence jerks like Eric Schmidt suggest people should change their name if they want not to have youthful hijinks follow them around, yet is happy to use his billions and lawyers to keep his mistresses' stories off the internet.