[dredmorbius]

It was a 1998 foreclosure. Under US law, items older than 7 years are stricken from credit reports (though other actions may remain part of a record). In a world in which arbitrary reasons for denial exist, being prejudiced by a 16 year old, or 26 year old, or 46 year old financial mishap would seem ... less than just.

How about the roughly 485,000 households in the US receiving foreclosure notices in the 2010 foreclosure crisis. I'm sorry, that was in September 2012 alone. If that's a persistent Web record, should that follow them around for the rest of their lives?

Or, in a different context, does a rhinoceros have a right to be forgotten? http://redd.it/25ll1v

[ubernostrum]

There are several things your over-simplified analysis is missing here.

One is that the "right to be forgotten" does not exist in a vacuum -- it has to coexist with a bunch of other rights, and weighing how important each of them is in relation to the others is incredibly difficult. And that's without getting into as-yet-uncodified rights (example: making history more accessible via scanning/OCRing of old newspapers, which now seems like it'd have to come with a censorship regime built in to expunge news that's "meant to be forgotten").

Another is the practicality issue, in that information of this sort is actually incredibly hard to destroy, and often is required to be published in order to provide a fair process to everyone involved.

Finally, there's the issue that this is going after Google, but that doesn't actually accomplish the kind of "forgetting" you seem to be talking about. Sure, the general public won't see a newspaper listing about the foreclosure in Google anymore, but the people in a position to use that information to wreak institutional harm still will have access to it, because the databases they use are not publicly accessible, meaning it's not possible to determine if you're even in them in order to sue for removal.

[dredmorbius]

Digitizing old newspapers isn't all that great an intrusion -- though it makes old content available, you're still bound by the bandwidth of those original print sources. It means that you might see what had been talk-of-the-small-town splashed around on national or international coverage now. In a levels-of-harm basis, it's not so bad.

On the weighted importance, one of the interesting elements I've seen said of Xeer (mentioned recently on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7736841) is that there's a concept of increasing obligations with increasing power or wealth (this is hearsay from a reddit comment, the Wikipedia article doesn't touch on this). It's similar to how I feel disclosure rules should operate. Someone with little or no impact on society should fear little disclosure. Someone with a great deal of impact (financial, political, military, religious, cultural power, or with a record of criminal acts causing suffering or death to others) should be obliged to disclose more of themselves.

As for coming up with automatic rules, I doubt that's possible, but then, it's not in law either -- that's why we've got judges.

Your criticism in going after Google has merits, though any law such as the EU one should address not only the access and indexing of such information, but of its use. Though proving someone knows a certain fact or accessed a specific piece of information is at best difficult.