[cdellin]

I disagree very strongly with your purported equivalence between Karunamon's argument and that of the NSA.

My primary problem with the NSA is that they (a) use their position of power to install backdoors in hardware/software/infrastructure, (b) do it in secret, (c) claim to be in some way "above the law" w.r.t. secret courts, (d) use public taxpayer money, and (e) motivate their behaviour using bogus anti-terror claims. None of these infractions exist in the "right to be forgotten" scenario.

Fundamentally, in the story of the NSA, it is the NSA that is in a position of power that can and will be abused. In this case, it is the power to scrub the entire internet of information by imposing centralized censorship which, in my mind, is simply too much power to put in one place.

[nmrm]

The equivalence is in the rhetorical justification, not the methodology. In both cases, an appeal to security is used to trivialize the importance of privacy.

For the NSA, terrorism > privacy every time. For Karunamon, "censorship" > privacy every time. In both cases, the mechanism is an appeal to security in order to avoid a more nuanced discussion of the issue.

> to scrub the entire internet of information

And this is where the rubber hits the road. "Any possible risk of <bad thing here> means privacy doesn't matter". That's the sort of crap reasoning used by the NSA.

The fact is that the risk of what you're describing is incredibly low, and the good of the law outweighs even a high-magnitude abuse because effectively abusing this law in that manner is highly unlikely to succeed.

This is what I mean. After rejecting the "stop <bad thing here> at all costs!" logic, we can do an actual cost-benefit analysis and take into account the extremely low probability of <bad thing here> actually happening.

The information is still there, but private citizens don't need to pay hundreds/thousands to SEO firms in order to get embarrassing gossip sites off the first page of Google results.

Let's be clear: the dichotomy in this case is between lazy reporter's and SEO firm's right to profit, and an individual citizen's right to privacy. Since I view lazy reporters and SEO as parasites anyways, the choice is clear for me.

Reframing this issue as a "security from dictatorial abuse of power" is playing the same game as the NSA. And worse, it's disingenuous. If the mechanism is abused, Streisand effect always solves back. But there's no reason to go around harming private citizens just because "censorship!"

[IBM]

You've hit the nail on the head. The current "controversy" is manufactured by Google to push back against this ruling.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/04/digital-theatre/

[givan]

But now an appeal to privacy is used to trivialize the importance of censorship, both of them are important, what is more important to you?

[nmrm]

Not at all! I and other comment authors on this thread have mentioned that because of the nature of both the law and the internet, abuse is highly unlikely.

This means that the 100% certain probability that people are currently marginally hurt by search-engine-magnified sleazy journalism far outweighs the almost-negligible probability of high-magnitude abuse of the law.

Other threads on this story have also dealt with other mitigating factors which decrease the probability of abuse, such as the fact that public figures are excluded.

I'm not trivializing censorship; I'm entering a cost-benefit analysis where the importance of an impact is a function of both its probability and the magnitude of the impact, instead of attributing certainty to every outcome and reasoning on impact alone.

Incidentally even the US Supreme Court -- a country where free speech and anti-censorship are (constitutionally) paramount -- does this sort of analysis. Libel, inciting violence, and a slew of other exceptions to free speech have been upheld by that court.

What I'm doing is considering the overall welfare of society, instead of picking and choosing individual issues that always much come first no matter what. In this case, there's a clear and present good done by the law and the chances of bad things happening are minimized by safeguards.

edit: my comments are sometimes living documents. Mostly tweaking of the last 2 paragraphs.

[DanBC]

> In this case, it is the power to scrub the entire internet of information by imposing centralized censorship

That is a bafflingly bad reading of what has actually happened.

Nothing has been scrubbed from the Internet. Some articles are harder to find if you include a person's name - but you can still find those articles with that search term if you use google.com with ncr.

[naturalethic]

The only one that matters there is (d). Without that stolen loot they are doing productive work at a real job.