Europe’s Right to Be Forgotten

In their never ending quest to be the world’s emo girls, the Europeans passed The Right to Be Forgotten Law, which says if you’re a dumb ass or a crook or both, you can petition to have Google to remove search results for stories where you were portrayed in a negative light. Not unfairly called out, like you were cleared in a court and the top ranking stories are about your guilt. I mean, you actually did something worthy of derision and now you want people to no longer be able to search for it because it hurts your feelings. Like a soccer referee who fixed matches or a Merrill Lynch trader who nearly destroyed the European banking system. Or 50,000 other petitions Google has received to remove results of stories they wish had never existed. Google Europe immediately responded to the new law by pulling down search results of ashamed people, because for a company hell bent on world domination, they sure are weak in the knees.

“It is the equivalent of going into libraries and burning books you don’t like.” — Martin Clarke, Publisher of DailyMail Online

Naturally, it took about two seconds for the smart people to figure out that these unflattering articles weren’t actually unpublished on the net, they just weren’t coming up in Google Europe’s result. So using Google U.S. as your search engine made the Euro-censored results moot.

I can understand why some lonely teen who may have got busted for porking a goat at sixteen wouldn’t want that news of the weird story floating around the net forever more. Back in the day, you could fuck all kinds of farm animals and just move to a new town to start fresh. Now all your slip ups are recorded somewhere for one-touch discovery by the rest of the world. The solution isn’t to allow people to erase their digital footprint, even if that were actually possible. The solution is to stop judging people for minimal indiscretions. Like how people running for President can now lie and say they smoked pot once in college whereas they had to lie even bigger before. People who do really bad shit deserve to have that stuff easily searchable and part of the historical record. And if my sister is dating a guy who used to fuck goats, I want to know so I can awkwardly bring it up at an otherwise boring family Thanksgiving. As a general rule, Europe never has the right answer.