Right to be forgotten

The European Court of Justice has ruled that individuals have the right to demand that search engines remove any personal data. This would apply even if the data is true. The information would still remain on the Internet but it would just not be so easy to access through Google. This seems to me like a fair compromise between privacy and the right to know - but reading the newspapers this morning you would think that Stalin had shut down all right to free speech.

Newspapers, and the media in general, would do themselves a lot of favours if they didn't have such a knee-jerk reaction to any sort of restrictions on what they get up to. It was pretty obvious to everybody outside the media world that the fourth estate was well out of control in the pre-Leveson world. The refusal of even the  quality broadsheets to acknowledge that anything was wrong was greatly to their discredit. A right to privacy does not mean the end of free speech. Far from it. It simply acknowledges that individuals have rights every bit as important as newspapers and that neither I, nor a newspaper, has the right to know everything about everybody.