| HN Mirror

Right to be forgotten is related to free speech. It's a situation where one person's speech is at odds with another person's privacy. That's why this is mentioned many times in the article I linked.

The first paragraph I quoted earlier.

>Those who oppose the right worry about its effect on the right to freedom of expression and whether creating a right to be forgotten would result in a decreased quality of the Internet, censorship, and the rewriting of history.[5]

>Wikimedia is based in the United States, where the First Amendment protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press. In Germany, the law seeks to protect the name and likenesses of private persons from unwanted publicity.[63] On January 18, 2008, a court in Hamburg supported the personality rights of Werlé, which by German law includes removing his name from archive coverage of the case.[64]

>There is opposition to further recognition of the right to be forgotten in the United States as commentators argue[who?] that it will contravene the right to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, or will constitute censorship, thus potentially breaching peoples' constitutionally protected right to freedom of expression in the United States Constitution.[96] These criticisms are consistent with the proposal that the only information that can be removed by user's request is content that they themselves uploaded.[clarification needed][96][97]

>Major criticisms stem from the idea that the right to be forgotten would restrict the right to freedom of speech.[111][112][113] Many nations, and the United States in particular (with the First Amendment to the United States Constitution), have very strong domestic freedom of speech laws, which would be challenging to reconcile with the right to be forgotten.[114] Some academics see that only a limited form of the right to be forgotten would be reconcilable with US constitutional law; the right of an individual to delete data that he or she has personally submitted.[96][97][115] In this limited form of the right individuals could not have material removed that has been uploaded by others, as demanding the removal of information could constitute censorship and a reduction in the freedom of expression in many countries.[116] Sandra Coliver of the Open Society Justice Initiative argues that not all rights must be compatible and this conflict between the two rights is not detrimental to the survival of either.[117]

>There were concerns that the proposed General Data Protection Regulation would result in Google and other Internet search engines not producing neutral search results, but rather producing biased and patchy results, and compromising the integrity of Internet-based information.[119] To balance this criticism, the proposed General Data Protection Regulation included an exception "for the processing of personal data carried out solely for journalistic purposes or the purpose of artistic or literary expression in order to reconcile the right to the protection of personal data with the rules governing freedom of expression."[70] Article 80 upheld freedom of speech, and while not lessening obligations on data providers and social media sites, nevertheless due to the wide meaning of "journalistic purposes" allows more autonomy and reduces the amount of information that is necessary to be removed.[2]: 9 When Google agreed to implement the ruling, European Commission Vice-President Viviane Reding said, "The Court also made clear that journalistic work must not be touched; it is to be protected."[125] However, Google was criticized for taking down (by the Costeja precedent) a BBC News weblog post about Stan O'Neal by economics editor Robert Peston (eventually, Peston reported that his weblog post has remained findable in Google after all).[126][127] Despite these criticisms and Google's action, the company's CEO, Larry Page worries that the ruling will be "used by other governments that aren't as forward and progressive as Europe to do bad things", though has since distanced himself from that statement.[128] For example, pianist Dejan Lazic cited the "Right To Be Forgotten" in trying to remove a negative review about his performance from The Washington Post. He claimed that the critique was "defamatory, mean-spirited, opinionated, offensive and simply irrelevant for the arts".[129][130] and the St. Lawrence parish of the Roman Catholic church in Kutno, Poland asked Google to remove the Polish Wikipedia page about it,[131] (in Polish) without any allegations mentioned therein as of that date.

>Index on Censorship claimed that the Costeja ruling "allows individuals to complain to search engines about information they do not like with no legal oversight. This is akin to marching into a library and forcing it to pulp books. Although the ruling is intended for private individuals it opens the door to anyone who wants to whitewash their personal history… The Court's decision is a retrograde move that misunderstands the role and responsibility of search engines and the wider Internet. It should send chills down the spine of everyone in the European Union who believes in the crucial importance of free expression and freedom of information."[132]

>In 2014, the Gerry Hutch page on the English Wikipedia was among the first Wikipedia pages to be removed by several search engines' query results in the European Union.[133][134] The Daily Telegraph said, on 6 August 2014, that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales "described the EU's Right to be Forgotten as deeply immoral, as the organisation that operates the online encyclopedia warned the ruling will result in an Internet riddled with memory holes".[135]

> Volokh, Eugene (2000). "Freedom of Speech, Information Privacy, and the Troubling Implications of a Right to Stop People from Speaking about You".

>Portals: Freedom of speech

>Categories: Freedom of expression