When Bad News Follows You

There was a really interesting article in the NY Times on Sunday about the consequences of information floating around forever in cyberspace. Apparently the Times’ aggressive search engine optimization techniques are resulting in old, negative, and sometimes erroneous articles about people surfacing in search results.

Many of these people have requested that the articles be removed from the archive – which, for obvious reasons, is not an ideal solution. The Public Editor doesn’t have any solutions of his own, but offers a number of questions and a few intriguing suggestions, such as an archive programmed to “forget” less important information just like humans do.