8 ms·

We're rapidly moving to a point where an official (government) criminal record is not important to folks you want to interact with -- landlords, employers etc.

We're rapidly moving to a point where an official (government) criminal record is not important to folks you want to interact with -- landlords, employers etc. They will instead turn to Google. As such, Google might as well be the official record for many people. And if one put themsleves in the shoes of a victim, or even a criminal who has served their time, Google's pagerank is doing them a disservice. I don't know if expunging records is the right thing to do, but it's worth discussing. There's no guarantee that searching a criminal's name will bring up the recent history where they've done their time, shown contrition, and is contributing to society. Instead it'll be the most highly cited -- likely news about their crime. As a society, we approve of jail being the mechanism to "forgive" a person's crime. As such, isn't it horrible that Google's pagerank will only turn up what they've done wrong in the past? Again, I don't know if expunging the records is the right thing to do (in fact I believe it's wrong), but I do think it's worth debating.

JonnyNova 8y ago
Google is claiming to be acting in the interests of the public without the same mechanisms accessible to the public for moderating how this ability is used. Today Google can cite public interest, but it is just aligned and not acting purely on the public's interest. Like Facebook holding all user data forever, Google will definitely want to hold all data forever because someone it might make shareholders money.
danielfoster 8y ago
If this is the case, then the government should pass laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of criminal record. Instead they've passed the puck (rather badly) to Google. And it's not like Google is the only way to find things. Should newspapers be required to delete pages about an individual or destroy print copies? What about other search engines such as Yandex or Baidu? Of course anyone could just search on Google.com, too. Mankind has done perfectly well without a "right to be forgotten" for hundreds of thousands of years.
- tonyg 8y ago
  > Mankind has done perfectly well without a "right to be forgotten" for hundreds of thousands of years. On the other hand, mankind has done perfectly well without computers, an internet, or indeed indoor plumbing for hundreds of thousands of years. Sometimes new technologies demand new responses.
  - joqje09309 8y ago
    Computers and internet existed w/o Google We don't need huge information management companies is the argument. They're soaking up our data, but it's largely for their gain, not mine. I have yet to realize one fucking break through due to Google. I use someone else's products, except for search, but I mostly use DuckDuckGo. Tell me why I should be on the side of Google specifically then? FAANG != the be all end all. Shit, 80% of Fortune 500 firms from a generation ago are gone. Yeah let's keep believing that Google has it figured out forever. Man, humans are really just into thinking their 90-ish years on Earth are the start and end of the universe.
- schoen 8y ago
  While I also oppose the "right to be forgotten", I think an obvious reply to your last point is that we also haven't had search engines, the web, newspapers, journalism, or even writing for most of that time.
  - dclowd9901 8y ago
    Counterpoint to your counterpoint: now those who have done heinous things in history can rewrite it. I shudder to think of a terrible leader excising his failed tenure from the annals of history. Google, for better or worse, is a repository of knowledge, the most powerful one we've ever had. We owe it to ourselves to use it responsibly, not hobble it. The problem is a puritanical society that refuses to let someone with a scarlet letter move on with their life.
    - schoen 8y ago
      The way the RTBF is usually formulated includes a notion of proportionality and public interest, so supposedly public officials can't exercise this right in this way, although it then involves a subjective point-in-time judgment about how important information is to history and the public interest.
mrtksn 8y ago
Mark steal cookies, gets caught and serves his sentence in jail. Now Mark is out, looking for a job as a JavaScript developer but when Mark is Googled to check about his involvement in OS projects and personal portfolio before his Github profile the article on CNN from 5 years ago is displayed and apparently Mark is a cookie monster. Is Mark sentenced to never be employed again? Mark made a mistake but Is He really worse from all these people who commit crimes and never get caught or end up in the news? Maybe the balance could be to not display Marks convictions until specifically asked for? I don't say that I have the answer but I really don't understand the concept of unforgiveness. Maybe we should approach all this from a utilitarian perspective? What's the utility of labelling Mark as a thief years after he paid for what he did?
- volak 8y ago
  The problem is future employers don't know if mark made a one time mistake or is a serial cookie monster. Why would they hire mark over a similar employee with a clean record? Mark needs to be given the opportunity to demonstrate to an employer hes no longer a cookie monster. He needs to rebuild that trust. He would do this by taking a lower than average pay, agreeing to periodic cookie-tests, and giving the employer the option to terminate his employment at any time without cause. If mark really isn't a cookie monster anymore he should be fine with this precautions to minimize the company's risk - after a year or so when there is more trust these disappear.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    This is not a realistic scenario: Pretty much all employers will just hire someone else.
    - volak 8y ago
      If I was HR and I had a choice between a Javascript developer for 50k with a clean record and a Javascript developer with a 5 year old conviction for 40k - I'd actually pick the later. But only if I could fire him immediately if he turns out to actually be a cookie monster.
wooly_bully 8y ago
Agree with you on most points. A jail, however, is not supposed to serve the purpose of being a mechanism of forgiveness. It is a mechanism of punishment. We as a citizenry give the government the sole right to jail / punish citizens as a way of enforcing the law. While someone may be reformed as an outcome of serving time, it is not the primary goal. Otherwise, we would see a higher focus on lowering recidivism rates.
- hungrybackspace 8y ago
  It is not expressly a mechanism of punishment. It is expressly a mechanism of debt repayment; it can be argued that that is closer to a mechanism of forgiveness than one of punishment.
- paublyrne 8y ago
  It is a mechanism of punishment. This depends on the jurisdiction. Prisons serve many apparent purposes, the mix of claimed and actual intents varies: punishment, deterrent, removal from society for society's protection, commercial reasons, reformation, historical precedent ... Whatever, I agree that few jurisdictions do a great job of lowering recidivism, putting into place the societal structures to support ex convicts after release in finding stable work and so on.
jasode 8y ago
>As a society, we approve of jail being the mechanism to "forgive" a person's crime. That's not really true. Serving prison time is neither a way to "forgive" nor a way to "pay debt back to society". Those are just common phrases some people use. If felons were truly forgiven, they would have their right to vote restored. They wouldn't be denied a passport to travel abroad or denied a firearms license. Convicted felons of financial crime will be denied officer positions such as CFO in public companies. A sex felony will be a lifetime of reporting on the sex offenders registries. Society has never perceived jail time as truly resetting the scarlet letter back to zero. Therefore, the debate is whether "Google results" is in the same bucket as "sex offender list". For many in society, they think it's wrong to remove those results from Google.
- izacus 8y ago
  This is not how a lot of EU countries function - which is why there's friction there. The American "You are a criminal for life and will eternally be punished!" attitude is clashing with an EU mindset of being able to start a new life. Permanent records are hugely damaging for persons livelihood in these cases.
  - 282883392 8y ago
    Can you not change your name in the EU? Seems like someone changing their name would be able to solve some of these issues.
    - izacus 8y ago
      Why should you be forced to do that? 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.
kodablah 8y ago
> They will instead turn to Google Whew, good thing they wouldn't instead turn to newspapers or libraries, we might have to have information removed there too (or the microfiche or card catalogs respectively). It's unfortunate that ease of access is the primary motivator and we can't just stand on principles. I believe society would adapt, but yes factual information at your fingertips has positives and negatives as do most freedoms. Who knows what type of medium may arise that allows people to see unfettered factual information. But if people start to make judgments on it, I suppose we better be prepared to have it censored. To me it reads "we can't control how people judge your information in some forms, so we'll make it harder for people to get information in the first place".
- greglindahl 8y ago
  Online newspapers are being directly censored by "right to be forgotten", there are people having their names removed from newspaper site search engines.
ben_w 8y ago
> Google might as well be the official record for many people. An interesting point, troubling because it seems likely. Google the names of the team I was in right after I graduated and you would think a games company had employed the director general of the BBC, a famous rugby player, a horror film director and Doctor Who writer, an actor, a CBS news anchor, a cinematographer involved with several Marvel films, the Archdeacon of Harlow, and someone who (according to BBC reporting of the Paradise Papers) hid £28 million. And before anyone says “oh but it would be ridiculous to mistake us for them”, my mum thought I had made the website belonging to aforementioned Doctor Who writer.
Waterluvian 8y ago
A friend of mine shares the name of an alleged rapist (not guilty) from decades ago. She has regularly experienced difficulty because of that.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
> criminal record is not important to folks you want to interact with -- landlords, employers etc Do not assume landlords and employers have access to people's criminal record - it's not the case in most countries!
downandout 8y ago
Google might as well be the official record for many people. I couldn’t agree more. Public records are technically public, but often opaque and difficult to access. It’s one thing to allow a sufficiently motivated person to find this information out; it’s quite another to make it easy for casual acquaintances and neighbors to do it. Google makes these records instantly accessible to anyone, and for whatever reason, seems to push more negative results about an individual higher in the search results. One need to look no further than to observe the prominence of Ripoff Report results in Google searches to prove this. The people behind this extortion scheme, which operates under a disgusting perversion of the Communications Decency Act, tout their Google dominance as one reason that their victims should pay them thousands of dollars per month to delete or modify the “reports” against them that appear on the site.
tboyd47 8y ago
The states that permanently disenfranchise felons are mainly ex-Confederate. It is the legacy of the institutional race-based class system of the South. It was used with racial profiling and fraudulent eye-witness testimony against African-Americans to form Jim Crow v2 after Civil Rights. It's become cliche to bring racism into unrelated topics, but it's the one thing that makes most of the puzzling things about America make sense. It's too bad many people in tech culture don't give importance to American history (either because they're foreigners who were never taught these things or because of their "pure" engineering mindset [which is itself a cultural product]), so end up aggravating old social ills.
fanzhang 8y ago
One problem is that the EU regulation is a losing fight technologically. Not that they can't affect the outcome, but that the regulations are going to be only effective in a small subset of cases. It's like copyright. Right now, like the early days, you can search warez on Yahoo and find it. No bittorrent, etc. Once search engines got smart, with copyright, the violations just got pushed to smaller sites and decentralized protocols. If the big search engines suddenly starts letting everyone edit search results about themselves, I bet in 5 years some IPFS / DHT / blockchain based technology that lets people permanently post and search news/rumours/gossip about other people will pop up. Should this happen? I'm not sure, but with the nature of the Internet maybe it doesn't matter that much positively.
Consultant32452 8y ago
I think this type of law is another case of good spirit, bad reality. Companies still don't want to hire criminals, so they try to guess who the criminals are. This results in them avoiding minorities. https://news.virginia.edu/content/unintended-consequences-how-ban-box-backfires-minority-job-seekers https://news.virginia.edu/content/unintended-consequences-ho...
jaredklewis 8y ago
In theory, I think right to be forgotten is the government shirking its own responsibilities and leaving the administration of justice to large mega-corps. In practice, it’s a pointless regulation circumvented by changing the url that imposes huge enforcement costs on big and small companies alike. But the real problem is that it is top down legislation that tries to fix a symptom, not the disease. What is the problem? Companies won’t give ex-convicts jobs. Why? Because people distrust them and they can afford not to hire them (plenty of unemployed people to choose from). My impression is that the vast majority of employers feel this way. Interestingly, right to be forgotten does nothing to incentivize people to change or punish people for their prejudice. It also does not address the lack of jobs. It's like if you had a society where 80% of people drive over the speed limit but doing so is illegal. The problem isn't that you need more laws. The problem is that your society has a different set of values. You can't legislate that people have a different set of values. At best you can try to reform a small set of the population that falls out of line. And you can't legislate prosperity either. Making it illegal to not have a home won't get rid of homeless people anymore than the right to be forgotten will decrease unemployment in the EU.
rdiddly 8y ago
On a tangent, another disturbing usurpation of public functions by private entities is the way you'll often get a quicker & more attentive response from some public agencies by Tweeting than if you go through official channels.
sexoffender 8y ago
> As a society, we approve of jail being the mechanism to "forgive" a person's crime. That's not what 99% society believes. The vast majority of regular people (go on the street and talk to any random person, I guarantee you this is what they'll say) will say that life-time ostracizing is actually part of the sentence. They honestly believe that once you commit a felony, anything bad that happens to you for the rest of your life is fair game. They pretty much believe that the official jail sentence is only the beginning, and that even in jail if you get killed it's pretty fair because you were already one of those criminal-types anyway, so oh well no big loss. I've met so many people in jail who were hardened into a life of crime because of the us-vs-them attitude they've been faced with since young adults and even as teenagers, simply because they made one mistake early on, and now they're labeled and discriminated against even by judges and their own lawyers, let alone citizens. People want there to be rehabilitation and re-entry into society, and there are programs out there, but none of them are actually effective (trust me), and the vast majority of society don't want them to be effective. So everything is status quo.
dhimes 8y ago
As I posted before, you don't even have to go to the point of conviction. If you are looking at several people, as tenants, employees, whatever- and one comes up as having been accused of some terrible misconduct, but was acquitted, why would you take the chance? That's the real injustice. And it happens. It's a career-ender.
steve918 8y ago
The problem I've seen with the current system is that Google is the record of truth even when the accused is proven innocent or the case is thrown out completely. Perception is reality and all people see are news stories about false claims. Someone being accused of a crime is great news, but rarely is an acquittal worth printing. Then anytime a new story comes out with that persons name, the news outlet links to every other related story about them so they get more traffic and ad revenue at the person's expense. If Google and shady local news outlets are going to be the record of wrongs and control peoples careers and destiny, there needs to be some checks and balances.
mondoshawan 8y ago
> We're rapidly moving to a point where an official (government) criminal record is not important to folks you want to interact with -- landlords, employers etc. They will instead turn to Google. As such, Google might as well be the official record for many people. Based on... what? Google can't search through Facebook data, much less other social networks. It also can't deduplicate common names like Frank Thompson, or Bob Michaels, or even tell you which one is from where. The data set is hopelessly flawed, and from a landlord or employer point of view, it's frankly the worst possible data set they can use to determine the reputation of an individual. For notable people that have unique names and professions, maybe. But it still doesn't provide enough visiblity into their personal history to be of any use for the functions you suggest.
odorousrex 8y ago
I used to think I was unlucky to have an extremely common name. (First and Last) Now I consider myself lucky. I cannot be found on Google or Facebook simply due to the massive signal-to-noise ratio. The fact that a minor celebrity and a minor athlete share the name help as well. I wouldn't be surprised if Legal Name changing becomes even more of a thing as people try to hide their pasts from Google et al.
jacquesm 8y ago
Landlords and employers as a rule should not have access to your records. The only exception is employers that have a legitimate concern such as for example security companies or banks.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

JonnyNova 8y ago

Google is claiming to be acting in the interests of the public without the same mechanisms accessible to the public for moderating how this ability is used. Today Google can cite public interest, but it is just aligned and not acting purely on the public's interest. Like Facebook holding all user data forever, Google will definitely want to hold all data forever because someone it might make shareholders money.

danielfoster 8y ago

If this is the case, then the government should pass laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of criminal record. Instead they've passed the puck (rather badly) to Google. And it's not like Google is the only way to find things. Should newspapers be required to delete pages about an individual or destroy print copies? What about other search engines such as Yandex or Baidu? Of course anyone could just search on Google.com, too. Mankind has done perfectly well without a "right to be forgotten" for hundreds of thousands of years.

tonyg 8y ago
> Mankind has done perfectly well without a "right to be forgotten" for hundreds of thousands of years. On the other hand, mankind has done perfectly well without computers, an internet, or indeed indoor plumbing for hundreds of thousands of years. Sometimes new technologies demand new responses.
- joqje09309 8y ago
  Computers and internet existed w/o Google We don't need huge information management companies is the argument. They're soaking up our data, but it's largely for their gain, not mine. I have yet to realize one fucking break through due to Google. I use someone else's products, except for search, but I mostly use DuckDuckGo. Tell me why I should be on the side of Google specifically then? FAANG != the be all end all. Shit, 80% of Fortune 500 firms from a generation ago are gone. Yeah let's keep believing that Google has it figured out forever. Man, humans are really just into thinking their 90-ish years on Earth are the start and end of the universe.
schoen 8y ago
While I also oppose the "right to be forgotten", I think an obvious reply to your last point is that we also haven't had search engines, the web, newspapers, journalism, or even writing for most of that time.
- dclowd9901 8y ago
  Counterpoint to your counterpoint: now those who have done heinous things in history can rewrite it. I shudder to think of a terrible leader excising his failed tenure from the annals of history. Google, for better or worse, is a repository of knowledge, the most powerful one we've ever had. We owe it to ourselves to use it responsibly, not hobble it. The problem is a puritanical society that refuses to let someone with a scarlet letter move on with their life.
  - schoen 8y ago
    The way the RTBF is usually formulated includes a notion of proportionality and public interest, so supposedly public officials can't exercise this right in this way, although it then involves a subjective point-in-time judgment about how important information is to history and the public interest.

mrtksn 8y ago

Mark steal cookies, gets caught and serves his sentence in jail. Now Mark is out, looking for a job as a JavaScript developer but when Mark is Googled to check about his involvement in OS projects and personal portfolio before his Github profile the article on CNN from 5 years ago is displayed and apparently Mark is a cookie monster. Is Mark sentenced to never be employed again? Mark made a mistake but Is He really worse from all these people who commit crimes and never get caught or end up in the news? Maybe the balance could be to not display Marks convictions until specifically asked for? I don't say that I have the answer but I really don't understand the concept of unforgiveness. Maybe we should approach all this from a utilitarian perspective? What's the utility of labelling Mark as a thief years after he paid for what he did?

volak 8y ago
The problem is future employers don't know if mark made a one time mistake or is a serial cookie monster. Why would they hire mark over a similar employee with a clean record? Mark needs to be given the opportunity to demonstrate to an employer hes no longer a cookie monster. He needs to rebuild that trust. He would do this by taking a lower than average pay, agreeing to periodic cookie-tests, and giving the employer the option to terminate his employment at any time without cause. If mark really isn't a cookie monster anymore he should be fine with this precautions to minimize the company's risk - after a year or so when there is more trust these disappear.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  This is not a realistic scenario: Pretty much all employers will just hire someone else.
  - volak 8y ago
    If I was HR and I had a choice between a Javascript developer for 50k with a clean record and a Javascript developer with a 5 year old conviction for 40k - I'd actually pick the later. But only if I could fire him immediately if he turns out to actually be a cookie monster.

wooly_bully 8y ago

Agree with you on most points. A jail, however, is not supposed to serve the purpose of being a mechanism of forgiveness. It is a mechanism of punishment. We as a citizenry give the government the sole right to jail / punish citizens as a way of enforcing the law. While someone may be reformed as an outcome of serving time, it is not the primary goal. Otherwise, we would see a higher focus on lowering recidivism rates.

hungrybackspace 8y ago
It is not expressly a mechanism of punishment. It is expressly a mechanism of debt repayment; it can be argued that that is closer to a mechanism of forgiveness than one of punishment.
paublyrne 8y ago
It is a mechanism of punishment. This depends on the jurisdiction. Prisons serve many apparent purposes, the mix of claimed and actual intents varies: punishment, deterrent, removal from society for society's protection, commercial reasons, reformation, historical precedent ... Whatever, I agree that few jurisdictions do a great job of lowering recidivism, putting into place the societal structures to support ex convicts after release in finding stable work and so on.

jasode 8y ago

>As a society, we approve of jail being the mechanism to "forgive" a person's crime. That's not really true. Serving prison time is neither a way to "forgive" nor a way to "pay debt back to society". Those are just common phrases some people use. If felons were truly forgiven, they would have their right to vote restored. They wouldn't be denied a passport to travel abroad or denied a firearms license. Convicted felons of financial crime will be denied officer positions such as CFO in public companies. A sex felony will be a lifetime of reporting on the sex offenders registries. Society has never perceived jail time as truly resetting the scarlet letter back to zero. Therefore, the debate is whether "Google results" is in the same bucket as "sex offender list". For many in society, they think it's wrong to remove those results from Google.

izacus 8y ago
This is not how a lot of EU countries function - which is why there's friction there. The American "You are a criminal for life and will eternally be punished!" attitude is clashing with an EU mindset of being able to start a new life. Permanent records are hugely damaging for persons livelihood in these cases.
- 282883392 8y ago
  Can you not change your name in the EU? Seems like someone changing their name would be able to solve some of these issues.
  - izacus 8y ago
    Why should you be forced to do that? 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.

kodablah 8y ago

> They will instead turn to Google Whew, good thing they wouldn't instead turn to newspapers or libraries, we might have to have information removed there too (or the microfiche or card catalogs respectively). It's unfortunate that ease of access is the primary motivator and we can't just stand on principles. I believe society would adapt, but yes factual information at your fingertips has positives and negatives as do most freedoms. Who knows what type of medium may arise that allows people to see unfettered factual information. But if people start to make judgments on it, I suppose we better be prepared to have it censored. To me it reads "we can't control how people judge your information in some forms, so we'll make it harder for people to get information in the first place".

greglindahl 8y ago
Online newspapers are being directly censored by "right to be forgotten", there are people having their names removed from newspaper site search engines.

ben_w 8y ago

> Google might as well be the official record for many people. An interesting point, troubling because it seems likely. Google the names of the team I was in right after I graduated and you would think a games company had employed the director general of the BBC, a famous rugby player, a horror film director and Doctor Who writer, an actor, a CBS news anchor, a cinematographer involved with several Marvel films, the Archdeacon of Harlow, and someone who (according to BBC reporting of the Paradise Papers) hid £28 million. And before anyone says “oh but it would be ridiculous to mistake us for them”, my mum thought I had made the website belonging to aforementioned Doctor Who writer.

Waterluvian 8y ago

A friend of mine shares the name of an alleged rapist (not guilty) from decades ago. She has regularly experienced difficulty because of that.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago

> criminal record is not important to folks you want to interact with -- landlords, employers etc Do not assume landlords and employers have access to people's criminal record - it's not the case in most countries!

downandout 8y ago

Google might as well be the official record for many people. I couldn’t agree more. Public records are technically public, but often opaque and difficult to access. It’s one thing to allow a sufficiently motivated person to find this information out; it’s quite another to make it easy for casual acquaintances and neighbors to do it. Google makes these records instantly accessible to anyone, and for whatever reason, seems to push more negative results about an individual higher in the search results. One need to look no further than to observe the prominence of Ripoff Report results in Google searches to prove this. The people behind this extortion scheme, which operates under a disgusting perversion of the Communications Decency Act, tout their Google dominance as one reason that their victims should pay them thousands of dollars per month to delete or modify the “reports” against them that appear on the site.

tboyd47 8y ago

The states that permanently disenfranchise felons are mainly ex-Confederate. It is the legacy of the institutional race-based class system of the South. It was used with racial profiling and fraudulent eye-witness testimony against African-Americans to form Jim Crow v2 after Civil Rights. It's become cliche to bring racism into unrelated topics, but it's the one thing that makes most of the puzzling things about America make sense. It's too bad many people in tech culture don't give importance to American history (either because they're foreigners who were never taught these things or because of their "pure" engineering mindset [which is itself a cultural product]), so end up aggravating old social ills.

fanzhang 8y ago

One problem is that the EU regulation is a losing fight technologically. Not that they can't affect the outcome, but that the regulations are going to be only effective in a small subset of cases. It's like copyright. Right now, like the early days, you can search warez on Yahoo and find it. No bittorrent, etc. Once search engines got smart, with copyright, the violations just got pushed to smaller sites and decentralized protocols. If the big search engines suddenly starts letting everyone edit search results about themselves, I bet in 5 years some IPFS / DHT / blockchain based technology that lets people permanently post and search news/rumours/gossip about other people will pop up. Should this happen? I'm not sure, but with the nature of the Internet maybe it doesn't matter that much positively.

Consultant32452 8y ago

I think this type of law is another case of good spirit, bad reality. Companies still don't want to hire criminals, so they try to guess who the criminals are. This results in them avoiding minorities. https://news.virginia.edu/content/unintended-consequences-how-ban-box-backfires-minority-job-seekers https://news.virginia.edu/content/unintended-consequences-ho...

jaredklewis 8y ago

In theory, I think right to be forgotten is the government shirking its own responsibilities and leaving the administration of justice to large mega-corps. In practice, it’s a pointless regulation circumvented by changing the url that imposes huge enforcement costs on big and small companies alike. But the real problem is that it is top down legislation that tries to fix a symptom, not the disease. What is the problem? Companies won’t give ex-convicts jobs. Why? Because people distrust them and they can afford not to hire them (plenty of unemployed people to choose from). My impression is that the vast majority of employers feel this way. Interestingly, right to be forgotten does nothing to incentivize people to change or punish people for their prejudice. It also does not address the lack of jobs. It's like if you had a society where 80% of people drive over the speed limit but doing so is illegal. The problem isn't that you need more laws. The problem is that your society has a different set of values. You can't legislate that people have a different set of values. At best you can try to reform a small set of the population that falls out of line. And you can't legislate prosperity either. Making it illegal to not have a home won't get rid of homeless people anymore than the right to be forgotten will decrease unemployment in the EU.

rdiddly 8y ago

On a tangent, another disturbing usurpation of public functions by private entities is the way you'll often get a quicker & more attentive response from some public agencies by Tweeting than if you go through official channels.

sexoffender 8y ago

> As a society, we approve of jail being the mechanism to "forgive" a person's crime. That's not what 99% society believes. The vast majority of regular people (go on the street and talk to any random person, I guarantee you this is what they'll say) will say that life-time ostracizing is actually part of the sentence. They honestly believe that once you commit a felony, anything bad that happens to you for the rest of your life is fair game. They pretty much believe that the official jail sentence is only the beginning, and that even in jail if you get killed it's pretty fair because you were already one of those criminal-types anyway, so oh well no big loss. I've met so many people in jail who were hardened into a life of crime because of the us-vs-them attitude they've been faced with since young adults and even as teenagers, simply because they made one mistake early on, and now they're labeled and discriminated against even by judges and their own lawyers, let alone citizens. People want there to be rehabilitation and re-entry into society, and there are programs out there, but none of them are actually effective (trust me), and the vast majority of society don't want them to be effective. So everything is status quo.

dhimes 8y ago

As I posted before, you don't even have to go to the point of conviction. If you are looking at several people, as tenants, employees, whatever- and one comes up as having been accused of some terrible misconduct, but was acquitted, why would you take the chance? That's the real injustice. And it happens. It's a career-ender.

steve918 8y ago

The problem I've seen with the current system is that Google is the record of truth even when the accused is proven innocent or the case is thrown out completely. Perception is reality and all people see are news stories about false claims. Someone being accused of a crime is great news, but rarely is an acquittal worth printing. Then anytime a new story comes out with that persons name, the news outlet links to every other related story about them so they get more traffic and ad revenue at the person's expense. If Google and shady local news outlets are going to be the record of wrongs and control peoples careers and destiny, there needs to be some checks and balances.

mondoshawan 8y ago

> We're rapidly moving to a point where an official (government) criminal record is not important to folks you want to interact with -- landlords, employers etc. They will instead turn to Google. As such, Google might as well be the official record for many people. Based on... what? Google can't search through Facebook data, much less other social networks. It also can't deduplicate common names like Frank Thompson, or Bob Michaels, or even tell you which one is from where. The data set is hopelessly flawed, and from a landlord or employer point of view, it's frankly the worst possible data set they can use to determine the reputation of an individual. For notable people that have unique names and professions, maybe. But it still doesn't provide enough visiblity into their personal history to be of any use for the functions you suggest.

odorousrex 8y ago

I used to think I was unlucky to have an extremely common name. (First and Last) Now I consider myself lucky. I cannot be found on Google or Facebook simply due to the massive signal-to-noise ratio. The fact that a minor celebrity and a minor athlete share the name help as well. I wouldn't be surprised if Legal Name changing becomes even more of a thing as people try to hide their pasts from Google et al.

jacquesm 8y ago

Landlords and employers as a rule should not have access to your records. The only exception is employers that have a legitimate concern such as for example security companies or banks.

deleted 8y ago

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