Remembering to forget...

With the cost of data storage being so cheap the Internet has the potential to remember everything that is ever posted online, for ever! Whilst historians might relish the idea of a future where the personal details of everyone are searchable centuries back most people like the idea of being able to be forgotten. The European Union is leading the way with legislation that provides a "right to be forgotten" — strictly speaking, a right to have certain kinds of information removed from search engine results. However, in a Kafkaesque twist, my colleague Mark Wilson brought to my attention, the fact that Google in the EU has been ordered to remove links to stories about Google removing links to stories. You can read more about this in this arstechnica story.