Image: Robert Scoble/Flickr
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On the other hand, people are very worried about the violation of privacy, especially by technological development and companies like Google.The web is full of legal issues. And that’s a direct consequence of the fact that people can publish things themselves without having the information checked by an editorial office. Quite a bit of what’s published on social media, and especially pictures, is just plainly illegal in Europe. Small and large violations of privacy are commonplace.An important question is what role the law can play in making up the balance. I think it’s dangerous to take a shortcut by making Google responsible for these kinds of things. I think it’s inevitable that there will always be sharp edges on the internet. Nonetheless I think it would be fine to check if there are some specific cases in which a search engine should delete results."The people newspapers write about often don’t agree with that. It’s a really big problem if the law tries to prevent those kinds of problems."
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It’s crucial to have the right to be vulnerable, to show things about yourself without it being abused. But it’s also partly a problem that’s being projected even though it doesn’t exist. People somehow think that if something ends up on the internet, it will be there forever. That’s just complete nonsense. The digital environment is extremely dynamic and suffers from severe amnesia.I also don’t think it’s right to propose that there shouldn’t be any conflicts about what information is published. The people newspapers write about often don’t agree with that. It’s a really big problem if the law tries to prevent those kinds of problems. That shouldn’t happen.Do you think the ruling is dumb?I think the ruling is quite devastating in how the Court interprets freedom of speech. They give the impression that they don’t want to discuss that, as if they assume that everything is fine, and that is very troubling.It’s a discussion we definitely should have, and this ruling has a catalyzing role in this, but pretending to solve a problem by making search engines filter information, that’s not smart."It’s also partly a problem that’s being projected even though it doesn’t exist."