From the Washington Post
I wanted to shame an accused con man. I didn’t realize how much power I had over him.
By Jason Feifer
My cellphone rang. Caller ID: “Unknown.” I answered, and a man with a British accent and a bad connection identified himself as someone I’d tweeted about five months before. “Your tweet is causing me and my wife distress,” he said, and he asked me to delete it. He was at once friendly and businesslike. You sound like a reasonable person, he said. Let’s be reasonable and do what’s right.
But what was right? When is the past worth burying, and who should get to decide? Those questions have launched an international debate, pitting practices in Europe, which recognizes a “right to be forgotten,” against the United States, where the First Amendment dominates....
“The question is: Is this information still relevant, does it have bearing on the individual, and is there still a public interest in this information?” said Deirdre Mulligan, a professor who studies Internet privacy at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information. The European Court of Justice ruled last year that privacy rights should trump the public’s right to know when information is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive.” Some of the other links about my British businessman may have been removed because they were from before his case was settled and led to an incomplete record of history, Mulligan said. Or maybe Google decided that the case was simply so old, and the specifics so obscure, that it was no longer relevant to people searching the Internet....