[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.