I agree that most reporting on this are completely ignoring the upside. My mother was wrongfully accused of a crime nearly ten years ago. It took eight years of fighting the charges (going bankrupt in the process) before they were finally dropped.
However, you can still find the charges as soon as you type her name into Google, and that's all it takes. She was a lawyer; now she can't get anything but the most menial work. I wish she could exercise her "right to be forgotten".
The target is wrong. Your mother (and the other people in the EU) should be targeting the newspapers and other places that actually have the information.
Not the search engine.
A newspaper would probably refuse to remove the story altogether, but they might be willing to add a note saying the charges were dropped.
There's a difference between removing false or misleading information (like in your case) and trying to hide your true history (like most of the EU cases I'm hearing about).
I don't disagree with you in principle but, in reality, it wouldn't matter. You can already find that the entire case was dismissed, but the newspapers won't print anything about that, and I doubt it would make much difference if they did. Many people associate charges with guilt, and I can't say I wouldn't be biased against an applicant who was charged with a felony.
I don't know what the right answer is. For me this is admittedly an emotional subject.
Unfortunately, if I'm trying to get an idea of the trustworthiness of a person, I'm probably just going to skim the search results and reject them as soon as I see something related to a crime. It's an imperfect filter, but dismissing someone who has done nothing wrong is less costly than trusting someone you shouldn't.
However, you can still find the charges as soon as you type her name into Google, and that's all it takes. She was a lawyer; now she can't get anything but the most menial work. I wish she could exercise her "right to be forgotten".