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Comment by x1798DE | Hacker News Reader

While I think that endorsing the right to "be forgotten" is indeed quixotic and a dubious endeavor in general, for practical purposes enforcing these provisions against the biggest actors is probably enough for most practical purposes. Probably most of the people searching for your name are doing so on Google, Yahoo or Bing, and even then they probably aren't going to be going more than a few pages of results deep. If I had been accused of doing something horrible 10 years ago, I'd probably be pretty upset if googling my name returned news articles about that on the first page, much less so if they showed up on the 20th page, and basically unconcerned if they only showed up on a Thai clone of baidu.

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If I'm searching for someone, perhaps someone I'm starting a romantic relationship with, that horrible thing you were accused of 10 years ago is exactly the type of data I'm looking for.

Then you need to dig into the "deep Web" and not just use Google. But most people do not benefit from that information so they won't see it in a Google search.

Nearly every single woman I know google searches their dates to check for domestic violence or other problematic charges.

I always wondered why my dates play with their phones, then run. I figured they had unplanned server outages to deal with. Your theory is much simpler than "every woman on the east coast is an on-call systems administrator."

So type "deep web search engine" in to google. Then type in their name on that site? A 6 year old could hack that system. If some records should be private then make them private. Adding 1 step to downloading the records on your browser is hardly worth the time to even discuss this silly idea.

To clarify, I was not endorsing "the right to be forgotten", just saying that while it's probably nearly impossible to actually scrub some information from the internet, scrubbing it from the top tier search engines is good enough for most practical purposes anyway, since most people are likely to be primarily concerned about their superficial web presence.

That said, the attitude I'm attributing to your post (and I could be mis-reading you) underscores why people would want to be "forgotten". I specifically said "accused", not convicted or even tried. Anyone can make an accusation and too often there's a "where there's smoke there's fire" attitude which is antithetical to the presumption of innocence. It's exactly the kind of thing that you don't want to show up in cursory searches, because there's no context and usually there's not a lot of context in these stories.

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