What was the case about?

Overall I have some different views about this, and I'm not sure how to react to some of the cognitive dissonance I notice.

On one hand people claim that privacy is paramount, on the other hand they seem to not question what and how becomes a public record, how it is kept and how easily it is accessible.

Overall the tone here seems to be that the "right to know" is as important or even more important than privacy which is a huge cognitive dissonance in my book.

What's worse is that this seem to be a case where privilege prevails, if you are wealthy you can expunge your record the old fashion way - PR and control the news cycle.

If you are not then you are screwed because the 15min of fame are the only thing that the "internet" as a collective seem to care about.

I don't know what happened at the restaurant nor do I know if it was important at the time or if it is still now but relevance can be assigned an expiration date.

The problem is that you can't "update" the internet, a newspaper isn't going to report that everything is nominal and that nothing happens, news by definition are a record of an abnormal event.

I can understand not wanting to have the top result of your restaurant being "4 puppies and a cat found dead, drugs and sign of sexual activity were discovered at the scene" being the top result in Google simply because there has been no "worse" news for the past 2-3 years about the same place.

For the most part I can agree with the concept of having to reevaluate the worth of information at a given time and evaluate does it deem the information "newsworthy" and within the public's right to know, anything else is a matter of historic record and gossip and it can still have effect on you today since no one is looking at the date.

What happens if some one else buys the restaurant? If the case was due to the misconduct of the previous owner should they be forced to change the name? Should the original owner be forced to rebrand just because something shitty happened at the place outside of their control that has no relevance to the performance of the restaurant or the safety of it's patrons today?

Not everything is an important record, saying "you don't know what is important to history" is silly, we can all agree that a war, a presidential election, a huge economic event, a scientific discovery etc. are more important to history than a random local crime or some other misconduct, we can also agree that not having everything available for immediate public access does not equate rewriting history.

Overall the 1984 comments are a bit silly, and are a false equivalency no one is claiming that historic public record should be rewritten, no one is claiming that some information should always be accessible, but claiming that information should be accessible regardless of how much damage vs benefit it does at any given time, and stripping all agency from the individual to control how information is published does not bode well for privacy.

Maybe Facebook should make everything accessible including things you delete, and if you say well Facebook isn't a newspaper then that argument holds less water every day since Facebook is now aggregating and generating news, and if you claim that you as an individual are not a public figure well how famous do you need to be to count as one? own a business? be a mayor? a celebrity? a government official? rich enough?

This is an argument that we desperately need to have and is is a very good sign that this case has been brought up (not necessarily the outcome) because we do need new rules.
Being able to effectively "dox" anyone at a push of a button is going to be a big problem, and if you can about privacy and the real definition of it not the current confusion of privacy and secrecy; which is the agency you have to control what and whom you share information with you should care about this, as much if not more than you care about encryption and other technical controls.