[mike_hearn]

But why do you think the ruling works that way? The justification for suppressing information is that someone isn't in the public interest, the canonical example being a politician that wants to cover up past corruption scandals. Everyone seems to agree that this is a case where data wouldn't get filtered.

But if someone is thinking about becoming a politician, uses their current obscurity to delete the data from a search engine, and then goes on to run in an election, isn't this exactly when we should want to see all that is on the internet about them? So it makes sense that the information would come back.

Your proposed solution to this is that everyone should have to effectively give up modern technology in this case and hope that some journalist, somehow, without any modern tools, finds all the relevant information despite governments helping this person bury it. Why would we give up powerful tools like this? How is that not a Luddite strategy?

I don't see any way this ruling (I hesitate to call it a law because it doesn't seem to be connected to any actual law that anyone knew about) can be applied in any kind of consistent or useful manner. It WILL turn into a giant fight over who is or is not worthy of being censored or not, with lots of people bending over backwards to argue that they aren't really in the public interest. As presumably there are punishments and fines for not censoring enough data, but there's no punishment for censoring too much, this will inevitably hurt not only ordinary everyday people but also democracy itself.

[seren]

Overall, I think it is more dangerous for democracy, if everyone is indexed in a database with their political opinions, religious affiliation, favorite ice-cream flavor, than missing out a few bad apples.

I agree it will cause issues, and create complex cases, but I think it is worth trying. And if it does not work out, it will be canceled or obsolete in 10 or 20 years. It is not such a big deal.

More on UE Data laws : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive

[mike_hearn]

But you're going to be indexed in such a database whether you like it or not because several European countries are already busy building such databases via their intelligence agencies, and the ones that can't afford it have all been striking deals with the ones that can to get access to it.

This "right to be forgotten" conveniently does not seem to apply to governments, only search engines. So from a democratic perspective it's lose/lose.

[seren]

I agree the exception for government agency is inconvenient to say the least...