Recently the highest court in Europe said that EU citizens have a "right to be forgotten," i.e. Google, Yahoo, and other search engines can be asked to remove links that refer to a person's scurrilous past. I'm ambivalent toward it. There are plenty of people whose lives are ruined thanks to a minor infraction, perhaps the best example being dog shit girl. But I don't think it's possible to it; even without the links on Google, the webpages are still out there. You can't demand youtube take down a video someone took of you rear-ending someone. And ironically, this entire hearing came from a Spanish man named Mario Costeja, who wanted Google to remove information about the repossession of his house. Thanks to that, there's more information about him than ever. But it's not just pictures of you being drunk one night when you were twenty-three. Some people are asking for serious information about them to be deleted, such as a man's pedophilia, a politician's negative actions, and a doctor's negative review. Admittedly I don't think Google will agree that it's old and useless information, but you know that sometimes this will slip through the cracks.

So what's the current situation? It seems ridiculous that your entire life is judged for one transgression, but simultaneously I'm against the flow of information. Asking search engines remove links about you seems like putting a bandaid on a fatal wound; it'll barely stop anything. Unfortunately I don't think there is any solution to this problem because it would require society as a whole to have a conversation about what's reasonable, and from what I've seen of the internet I doubt that's happening.