Over there, being able to disappear from a search engine (eventually) is now a right:
Europe’s highest court said on Tuesday that people had the right to influence what the world could learn about them through online searches, a ruling that rejected long-established notions about the free flow of information on the Internet.
A search engine like Google should allow online users to be “forgotten” after a certain time by erasing links to web pages unless there are “particular reasons” not to, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg said.
Like a Supreme Court Decision, decisions of the Court of Justice can’t be appealed. In the New York Times story linked above, a Harvard professor calls this ruling “a bad solution to a very real problem, which is that everything is now on our permanent records.” But, he and others have not yet consulted the high court of Blogtown.
