I'm on my phone now, so my google-fu is limited at the moment, but if remember correctly this system had been abused by corporations and politicians as well. Edit: Yeah.
This is really interesting to me which is why I posted the article. It's a strange struggle between advocacy for privacy in the digital age and advocacy for free speech and the right to information. Reading the article and the link you've shared, I'm definitely more in the camp for a right to information. Deleting news links seems to be a broad abuse of power and fairly overbearing. That said, I do think there's a case to ensure that user data can be "forgotten" after a user deletes his/her account with an organization. But that doesn't seem to be what this is about.
Are you referring to my last paragraph? That's not what I was saying. I was not talking about links in search engines. I was referring to say a Google user with a Google account wanting data Google has, in regard to their account, to be wiped. Replace Google with Facebook, etc depending on who the user had the account with. Like I said, that's not what this is about though
Oh I totally agree with that, I wasn't referring to your last paragraph. I think there were some efforts a few years ago on that front but I'm not sure if anything came of it. http://ejlt.org/article/view/75/144