Of all the human traits, none has been so greatly magnified by the internet as the capacity to be humiliated. People have always written letters when drunk, tripped over carpets and confided their secrets to gossips. It is only in recent years that they have had the experience of being followed online for an entire lifetime by a crime report or a sex tape. For more than a decade, googling the name of Mario Costeja González has brought up links to a 1998 official notice in Catalan from the big Barcelona paper La Vanguardia, announcing the auction of his home for debts. It was a big deal for Mr Costeja and this week the European Court of Justice brought him a measure of relief. It ruled that Google could be made to remove the links in the name of a “right to be forgotten”.
在所有的人类特征中，没有哪种特征受到互联网放大的程度，比“丢脸的能力”还大。人们总会有在喝醉酒时写字，在地毯上绊倒，或把自己的秘密吐露给爱八卦的人的时候。只是在最近几年里，人们才有了因为一项犯罪记录或一段性爱录像，就一生都要受到网络跟踪的经历。十多年来，用谷歌(Google)搜索马里奥•格斯蒂亚•冈萨雷斯(Mario Costeja González)的名字，搜索结果中就会显示一条链接，内容是巴塞罗那一家大型报纸《先锋报》(La Vanguardia)于1998年刊登的加泰罗尼亚官方通知，对拍卖格斯蒂亚的房产以偿还其债务一事进行了通告。这对格斯蒂亚来说是件大事，上周，欧洲法院(European Court of Justice)给予了他一些补救措施。欧洲法院裁定，按照“被遗忘权”，谷歌可能必须将链接删除。