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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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