Volokh at Reason: Right to be forgotten?

[Winehole23]

What I do know, assuming the order is authentic, is that a Houston court order purports to institute a "right to be forgotten" as to this particular news story. And this is at least the second such case in the last two years: The first case that I know of is the even more troubling Derek Collier Thorworth matter (https://reason.com/volokh/2017/09/25/mums-the-word-secret-proceedin), where an expungement order seemed to require the media to remove a story about a county constable who had pleaded guilty to abusing a prisoner, and where the constable demanded that a TV station indeed do so, based on the order. (The station fought the order in court, doubtless at considerable expense, and some months later got the order modified to exclude the media.) Some might think that's a sound approach, but it's not authorized by Texas law and not consistent with the First Amendment.https://reason.com/volokh/2018/07/16/tv-station-ordered-to-expunge-archived-s

[Spurminator]

Not sure how this can be enforced since nothing that is ever published online can ever really be expunged. That said, the idea of only removing the information from government records is somewhat archaic when your name can just be Googled in a background check. There should be freedom of the press to report on incidents like this but not sure the First Amendment should cover damaging information about innocent people in perpetuity.

[Winehole23]

the EU has a strong version of this

[boutons_deux]

so (law enforcement) convicts can have the names and crime hidden

but

sex offenders are publically known, name and location, for life?

[Winehole23]

who knows?

just spitballing, 1A hurdles might be too a high a hurdle to clear in the USA.

origin: https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/right-to-be-forgotten/

precedent: https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finnish_court_issues_precedent_right_to_be_forgott en_decision_for_google_to_remove_data/10358108

[Winehole23]

like a matryoshka (https://uxdesign.cc/how-matryoshka-dolls-help-explain-customer-journeys-experience-maps-service-blueprints-and-use-782f484d23e6):


Ten months after our article talking about the NY Times article about Google delinking their story about Thomas Goolnik's legal troubles with the FTC, we received a notification (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150824/13495432050/google-disappears-techdirt-article-about-right-to-be-forgotten-due-to-right-to-be-forgotten-request.shtml) from Google that our article about the NY Times article had also been delinked under a RTBF request. So we wrote about that. A week later, we received a notice that this new article had also been delinked (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150903/12192632159/thomas-goolnik-really-wants-to-be-forgotten-google-disappears-our-post-about-his-right-to-be-forgotten-request.shtml?threaded=false) via a RTBF request.


In that post, in September of 2015, we were extremely clear to anyone from Google looking over that post that it was not about Goolnik's earlier activities (which we still believed were in the public's interest), but specifically about Thomas Goolnik's current actions -- specifically an action to abuse the RTBF process to try to hide the fact that he was credibly accused by the FTC of unfair or deceptive practices, leading to a substantial settlement.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20181003/23545140776/thomas-goolnik-gets-google-to-forget-our-story-about-him-getting-google-to-forget-stories-about-thomas-goolnik.shtml