Right to remember vs Right to be forgotten

In my latest column for the Ottawa Citizen and other Postmedia papers I dissect the significance of the European Court of Justice’s decision to recognise an individual’s “right to be forgotten.” The form this right takes is to order Google to remove links from their search results when the subjects of the links believe information they contain about their past may be injurious to them in the present. Warning: spoiler. The tenor of the article is summed up in the concluding sentences: “For there to be a right to be forgotten, someone must have the power to erase the record. That’s far worse than being remembered.”