Europe Goes Down the Memory Hole With the 'Right to Be Forgotten' - Reason.com:
"...The right to be forgotten recently celebrated its first birthday.
It was introduced last May, when a Spanish man went to the European Court of Justice to complain about the fact that a story about his home once having been repossessed was still showing up when his name was Googled.
This was an infringement of his privacy, he claimed.
The ECJ agreed, and instituted what has come to be known as the right to be forgotten.
It said citizens have a right to demand the erasure of search-engine links to stories containing "irrelevant" or "outdated" data about them.
This means, weirdly, that online news reports about, for example, that Spanish man's financial travails will still exist—Europeans just won't be able to find them, at least not by using Google or any of the other main search engines.
In the year since the ECJ effectively gave us the right to say "It does not exist!" there have been tens of thousands of requests for the rewriting of history.
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