Y12W24WR The right to be forgotten

Design
The writing prompt

Design the specific rule that should govern Australia’s version of a ‘right to be forgotten’ — what it covers, what it excludes, and how it would work in practice.

1Retrieval check

Q1.What did the European Court of Justice’s 2014 ruling establish?

  • AFull anonymity rights online
  • BA limited right to request removal of search results about oneself in specific circumstances
  • CA ban on indexing personal data
  • DCriminal penalties for search engines

Q2.What is the article’s main concern about removal rights?

  • AThey are unenforceable in practice
  • BThey can be abused to hide genuinely important information (fraud histories, abuse allegations)
  • CThey only help the rich
  • DThey slow down search engines
Show answer key

Q1 → B. A limited right to request removal of search results about oneself in specific circumstances.The ruling balanced public accountability against personal reintegration.

Q2 → B. They can be abused to hide genuinely important information (fraud histories, abuse allegations).The balance between reintegration and public-interest information is genuinely hard.

2Prompt deconstruction

Stimulus
The 2014 European ruling; the article’s abuse-risk point.
Scope
Australian version — the rule, not a slogan.
Thinking
Covered information, excluded information, disputed cases, appeal process, default when unclear.
Position
Between full removal rights and no removal rights.
Output
Named rule + stress-test with two hard cases where it produces an uncomfortable result.

3Position nudge

Where on the range does your proposal sit?

Pole A
Pole B

Pole ANo removal rights

Pole BFull removal rights

Commit to a specific point; defend it in your planner.

4Planner — design the thing, then the trade-offs

Covered information
What types of results qualify for removal (with examples).
Excluded information
What never qualifies (with examples) — fraud, professional misconduct, public-figure public-role.
Who decides
The dispute-resolution body and its composition.
Appeal process
How applicants and objectors contest decisions.
Default when unclear
What happens when the case is borderline.
Hard case 1
A case your rule handles uncomfortably — and why you accept it.
Hard case 2
A second case — and why you accept it.

5Sentence stems

  • My proposal is ___.
  • I am grounding this in [researcher]’s finding that ___.
  • The main trade-off is ___: this design gains ___ but loses ___.
  • The most predictable objection is ___, and my response is ___.
  • I would know it was working after [time] if ___.
  • What I am most likely to abandon is ___, so I will build in ___ to prevent that.

6Exemplar paragraph (not about this article)

(1) My proposal is a three-tier removal rule: (1-a) spent criminal records and low-harm personal-life content are removable on request after a cooling-off period, (1-b) professional-misconduct and fraud records are not removable during the period they remain relevant to public trust, (1-c) public-figure public-role content is not removable at all. (2) I am grounding this in the European ruling’s balance and in the article’s specific worry about fraud histories. The main trade-off is administrative load: this design gains calibration but loses the simplicity of a bright-line rule. (3) The most predictable objection is that tier-2 will be weaponised against reformed individuals, and my response is that the test is the ongoing relevance to public trust, not the age of the record — with a formal review every five years. (4) I would know it was working after two years if the dispute body reported its decisions publicly and the reasoning pattern was consistent. (5) Hard case: a person with a spent minor assault record applying for a role with children — tier 1 would permit removal, but a separate working-with-children screening would still surface it; I accept the two-track design. (6) What I am most likely to abandon is the public-reasoning requirement under workload pressure, so I will attach it as a statutory requirement, not a procedural norm.

What this paragraph does, move by move

  1. Names a three-tier structure with specific categories.
  2. Grounds in both the European ruling and the article’s fraud concern.
  3. Handles the weaponisation objection with a relevance test.
  4. Specifies a two-year public-reasoning test.
  5. Works through a concrete hard case and accepts the two-track outcome.
  6. Statutory-locks the transparency mechanism to prevent abandonment.