Slashdot Mirror
Japanese Court Orders Google To Delete Past Reports Of Man's Molestation Arrest
AmiMoJo writes: The Saitama District Court has ordered Google Inc. to delete past reports on a man's arrest over molestation from its online search results after ruling that they violate the man's personal rights. The man, who was arrested about three years ago after molesting a girl under 18, and fined 500,000 yen (£2600, $4000). "He harbors remorse over the incident and is leading a new life. The search results prevent him from rehabilitating himself," the man's defense counsel said. The presiding judge recognized that the incident was not of historical or social significance, that the man is not in public office and that his offense was relatively minor. He concluded there was little public interest in keeping such reports displayed online three years after the incident. The judge acknowledged that search engines play a public role in assisting people's right to know.
(AmiMoJo spotted the story on Surado, the new name for Slashdot Japan.)
"Not that I don't get what you're saying, but if a woman molested your son (one of the many, many female child molesters) would you hunt her down and presumably kill her?"
My 10 year old son? Yes. My 17 year old son? No. There are many variables. How "under 18" was she?
My daughter was kidnapped when she was 10 years old an suffered a horrific 12 hours with a monster. Over 2 years later the monster still hasn't been to trial but that's coming up soon. He's looking at 3 life sentences + a few hundred years.
A history of sexual predation should never be erased from the public memory. I don't give a rip if this particular guy is "living a new life" -- if your brain is broke in such a way as to be attracted to kids then you should no more be allowed to walk the streets than a lion who thinks kids are tasty.
Stop going after search engines. They index the web. Also, they pop up and go under overnight for the most part. Where is Bing mentioned? Yahoo? Duckduckgo? Literally any of the over 700 search engines available on the internet (in just English, not even gonna get into the thousands in other languages) can or have indexed this information. By making Google remove links...you are just forcing HR departments and the press to use other engines. Its little more than a thinly veiled stab at Google for being so popular OR its a display of massive incompetence by elected and appointed officials worldwide.
If you want to remove information from the web... you must go after the websites. In this instance no, you cannot argue that its undue burden, because there are only a handful of sites that show public arrest information and public court records for each country. Unlike piracy, your average person doesn't care to make their own arrest record index for shits n giggles or as a middle finger to The Man.
The right to be forgotten is pure censorship. If the government wants to approve it though, they need to get a lot more savvy about technology, the internet and what exactly the fuck a search engine actually does. Cause every day the governments of the world only make themselves appear more and more ignorant by doing this kind of crap.