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I have no idea what kind of character mr. Gonzalez is (and suspect neither do you), but how about this hypothetical example. Imagine you were wrongly accused of

I have no idea what kind of character mr. Gonzalez is (and suspect neither do you), but how about this hypothetical example. Imagine you were wrongly accused of child abuse 20 years ago. Charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence. Do you really think information like this would have no influence on your life or that you wouldn't care? I know far too little about this ruling to have an opinion of its impact, but I am not a free-speech absolutist because of cases like the above where lives are unjustly impacted long after publication.

Sanddancer 12y ago
Conversely, imagine you were abused several years ago, and the police dropped the case through incompetence, etc. Would you want information regarding your abuser to be disappeared because it's inconvenient? Being able to make information disappear very well could harm vulnerable people if they knew people in states of power could make uncomfortable facts go away.
- samastur 12y ago
  Of course not, but somebody not me would have no way of telling if the guy legally innocent really is or not. What it would come down to is his perception. It would be very easy for me as a white straight middle class guy to be OK with "eternal memory" since it is unlikely to do me much harm. However it doesn't exactly require a huge leap of imagination to think of all sorts of scenarios or groups of people who can't afford the same attitude. Hence I am not jumping to condemnation before I learn more.
mike_hearn 12y ago
No need for it to be hypothetical - exactly this is happening in the Bitcoin world right now. Someone got elected to the board of the Bitcoin Foundation and once the election was over, people bothered to search for his name (oddly not before?) and discovered he has murky allegations that he was found in a house that had lots of child porn and guns, but it all happened a long time ago and there were no charges filed. So: exactly that situation. Now people are resigning from the Foundation because of that history. The situation obviously really sucks for the guy in question, but is making that information hard to find really the fix? I doubt it - eventually someone would have discovered anyway, and then attempting to get it removed from search engines would merely "seal the deal" in the minds of some people. The problem is not access to information. It's that too many people in our society can't handle this new found power, to discover or read things people did long ago. Look at how people repeat things Mark Zuckerberg said a decade ago as if he couldn't possibly have changed since he was a university student. That's not a problem with search engines or the subjects: it's a problem with all of us.

Sanddancer 12y ago

Conversely, imagine you were abused several years ago, and the police dropped the case through incompetence, etc. Would you want information regarding your abuser to be disappeared because it's inconvenient? Being able to make information disappear very well could harm vulnerable people if they knew people in states of power could make uncomfortable facts go away.

samastur 12y ago
Of course not, but somebody not me would have no way of telling if the guy legally innocent really is or not. What it would come down to is his perception. It would be very easy for me as a white straight middle class guy to be OK with "eternal memory" since it is unlikely to do me much harm. However it doesn't exactly require a huge leap of imagination to think of all sorts of scenarios or groups of people who can't afford the same attitude. Hence I am not jumping to condemnation before I learn more.

mike_hearn 12y ago

No need for it to be hypothetical - exactly this is happening in the Bitcoin world right now. Someone got elected to the board of the Bitcoin Foundation and once the election was over, people bothered to search for his name (oddly not before?) and discovered he has murky allegations that he was found in a house that had lots of child porn and guns, but it all happened a long time ago and there were no charges filed. So: exactly that situation. Now people are resigning from the Foundation because of that history. The situation obviously really sucks for the guy in question, but is making that information hard to find really the fix? I doubt it - eventually someone would have discovered anyway, and then attempting to get it removed from search engines would merely "seal the deal" in the minds of some people. The problem is not access to information. It's that too many people in our society can't handle this new found power, to discover or read things people did long ago. Look at how people repeat things Mark Zuckerberg said a decade ago as if he couldn't possibly have changed since he was a university student. That's not a problem with search engines or the subjects: it's a problem with all of us.