For the NSA, terrorism > privacy every time. For Karunamon, "censorship" > privacy every time. In both cases, the mechanism is an appeal to security in order to avoid a more nuanced discussion of the issue.

> to scrub the entire internet of information

And this is where the rubber hits the road. "Any possible risk of <bad thing here> means privacy doesn't matter". That's the sort of crap reasoning used by the NSA.

The fact is that the risk of what you're describing is incredibly low, and the good of the law outweighs even a high-magnitude abuse because effectively abusing this law in that manner is highly unlikely to succeed.

This is what I mean. After rejecting the "stop <bad thing here> at all costs!" logic, we can do an actual cost-benefit analysis and take into account the extremely low probability of <bad thing here> actually happening.

The information is still there, but private citizens don't need to pay hundreds/thousands to SEO firms in order to get embarrassing gossip sites off the first page of Google results.

Let's be clear: the dichotomy in this case is between lazy reporter's and SEO firm's right to profit, and an individual citizen's right to privacy. Since I view lazy reporters and SEO as parasites anyways, the choice is clear for me.

Reframing this issue as a "security from dictatorial abuse of power" is playing the same game as the NSA. And worse, it's disingenuous. If the mechanism is abused, Streisand effect always solves back. But there's no reason to go around harming private citizens just because "censorship!"

That is a bafflingly bad reading of what has actually happened.

Nothing has been scrubbed from the Internet. Some articles are harder to find if you include a person's name - but you can still find those articles with that search term if you use google.com with ncr.

In any case, the EU policy specifically excludes public figures. So to the extent that you're correct, s/he's reacting to an fictional interpretation of the law.

Which would be somewhat ironic, given that the premise of grandparent's argument is that an informed citizenry is crucial to the security of civil society.

You seem to believe that search engines are not force multipliers for for-profit gossip mongering; this is demonstrably false.