[ronsor]

RTBF was a ludicrous concept before AI and these new crawlers.

Only EU bureaucracts would have the hubris to believe you could actually, comprehensively remove information from the Internet. Once something is spread, it is there, forever.

[gsck]

RTBF isn't about having your information wiped from the internet. Its a safe assumption any public information about you is completely out of your control as soon as its public.

RTBF is about getting companies to get rid of any trace of you so they cannot use that data, not removing all traces about you across the internet.

[fsckboy]

>RTBF isn't about having your information wiped from the internet.

your take is misleading enough to be considered wrong. It's "don't use public information about me in search engines, I don't want people to find that information about me", not simply "don't use my information for marketing purposes"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

first paragraph of the article: The right to be forgotten (RTBF) is the right to have private information about a person be removed from Internet searches and other directories in some circumstances. The issue has arisen from desires of individuals to "determine the development of their life in an autonomous way, without being perpetually or periodically stigmatized as a consequence of a specific action performed in the past". The right entitles a person to have data about them deleted so that it can no longer be discovered by third parties, particularly through search engines.

[specialist]

Once demographic data cannot be crawled or cached by 3rd parties, we get RTBF for free.

[fsckboy]

RTBF does not ban crawling or caching. It bans opening up those archives to the public via search engines.

[gsck]

It bans having them in the first place. Not just looking at them.

[gwervc]

> Once something is spread, it is there, forever.

Really depends on the content. Tons of websites are going down everyday, link rot is a real thing. Internet archive or people don't save nearly everything.

Something I should do more often is saving mhtml copies of webpages I find interesting.

[dotancohen]

  > Something I should do more often is saving mhtml copies of webpages I find interesting.

They consume so much disc space. I wish that their was some intermediate format that would have a file size only two orders of magnitude larger than the webpage text, yet provide enough formatting to be useful.

[oersted]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always took RTBF to mean you have the right to be forgotten by any specific service provider: that you can request they delete the data they have that relates to you, and that they forward the request to any subprocessors. That's fairly reasonable and doable, it is enforced by GDPR and a number of other wide-reaching laws already, and it is a relatively common practice nowadays to allow users to make such requests with certain guarantees.

It never meant that you have the right to ask "the Internet" as a whole to scrub you from all possible records, that's indeed ludicrous. And if someone took it to mean that and they were pushing for it, they were just confused, no serious law ever proposed that.

[miohtama]

There is a whole business sector for ”Online reputation fixers”

https://www.mycleanslate.co.uk/

What they usually do

- Spam Google with the name to bury content

- Send legal threads and use GDPR

They have legit use cases, but are often used by convicted or shady businessmen, politicians, and scammers to hide their earlier misdeeds.

[PaulHoule]

Also a neurodivergent person I feel very much discriminated against when a whole continent weaponizes the law to protect scam artists who weaponize their social skills to steal from people. It makes me feel unwelcome going to Europe and for all the handwriting about Europe’s poor economic performance it is yet another explanation of why Europe is falling behind — their wealth is being stolen by people who can’t be held accountable.

[jononor]

Which scam artists are you referring to?

[PaulHoule]

The ones who have filed lawsuits to try to get people in Europe to forget about their crimes.

[jononor]

Do you have some examples? I was not aware that this was a thing. And are we talking about sentences fully served, or before that time?