> I don't think it is up to us to decide how long someone should go before "moving on." That is deeply personal, and any length of time we set is going to be too short for some people.
The question of what a persons' internal emotional state should be, is a wholly separate topic from removing online records of an event.
It's like juvenile crimes. The event still happened. People will still remember, and no one will stop them from talking publicly about the topic but past the date of the criminals 18th birthday, but the public records are simply sealed.
RTBF, as it is currently implemented, is extremely similar. The past events still occurred, people can still talk about it publicly, but mentions of them are excluded from public search engines.
Removing online records from public searches is troublesome to me.
From our example, if our accident victim writes a blog post about crime and why they haven't forgiven them, would that have to be removed from public search engines? Lets say the incident in question was some corruption charge (like say, police officers taking bribes), would articles that talk about that corruption have to be purged or censored? If so, that means that we would lose the ability to learn from that history and change our practices (for example, when people say 'no need to worry about bribe taking, Officer Joe Smith is such a nice guy!', we couldn't then read up on the time Officer John Doe, who was also a very nice guy, took bribes)
I really think any attempt to censor or whitewash the past is doomed to be abused and cause problems. Facts need to be able to be shared, no matter what harm they may cause. Hiding the truth is a dangerous precedent to set.
See, going about it rationally makes sense if you ignore human impact of such decisions. If that officer already got punished for his crime and learnt his lesson, why do you want to hold it on his head forever? We want people to learn and we want to give them a second chance.
We also want to be able to protect ourselves from people who are dangerous; how do you know the person has 'learnt his lesson', and is no longer dangerous? Yes, we should give people a chance at redemption, but we need to do it with eyes wide open, being vigilant to protect ourselves from the person doing it again.
The question of what a persons' internal emotional state should be, is a wholly separate topic from removing online records of an event.
It's like juvenile crimes. The event still happened. People will still remember, and no one will stop them from talking publicly about the topic but past the date of the criminals 18th birthday, but the public records are simply sealed.
RTBF, as it is currently implemented, is extremely similar. The past events still occurred, people can still talk about it publicly, but mentions of them are excluded from public search engines.