Should the public's right to access information surpass news stories subjects' right to privacy?

As I read "A Nation of Voyeurs," I remembered of an issue I had recently seen in the Spanish newspaper El País. I will try to explain it to the best of my ability (my sources are in Spanish).

El País' reader's advocate (that's right, it's an actual position that the newspaper has) Milagros Pérez Oliva discusses in an article the Internet's role in exposing the subjects cited in the daily's news stories.

"If you do a name search using my name on Google, you will see that the second result is a story about me, from twenty years ago, which is not nice and which I don't want my grandchildren to see. (...) I kindly aske you [El País] to remove it." This is a section of a letter written by a Buenos Aires pharmacist that was sent to El País and reproduced by Oliva in her article. In 1998, El País published a story about the Argentine man, who had been arrested for alleged connections with the separatist group ETA.

According to Oliva, El País receives on average three removal requests per week -- all urging the newspaper to remove unpleasant stories from its digital files. "The concern is understandable," she writes. "But it's not as simple as that."

Consulted by the reader's advocate, the legal department of El País said the newspaper cannot change its past. "That would distort history. The files are untouchable. The problem is the ease with which Google or any other search engine makes these stories accessible," writes Oliva, quoting the daily's legal department.

In response, Google's director of institutional relations said it is not the search engine's task to block information. "We just crawl and index Web pages for public access. When someone asks us to withdraw any sort of information, we address the person to the owner of the page, the only one that can modify it," writes Oliva.

In a recent resolution of a lawsuit brought against Google and El País, the Spanish Agency for Data Protection concluded that the ability to freely access a certain news story "directly affects the personal situation of the victim in a justified and legitimate way." The agency ordered that Google removed the information about the lawsuit author from its search index and blocked any access to it. In the name of freedom of expression, the agency rejected the complaint against El País, but noted that the need to publish the identity of story subjects must be better balanced.

What do you think about this? How can we, as (future) reporters, better balance the identity of the subjects in our stories? Is that possible at all?

Should the public's right to access information surpass news stories subjects' right to privacy? I guess most of us would say yes: after all, the information is true and accurate, it did happen, and it's not our fault that those people did what they did (the pharmacist was arrested for alleged connections with ETA; Michael was arrested for DUI). Therefore, all news stories ever published should be open and accessible to the public. But... what if WE were one of those subjects?