Complaining about the recent decision of the European Court of Justice on the so-called “right to be forgotten,” Google's Eric Schmidt has invoked an intriguing legal defense to justify his company's aggressive business practices: the right to know. The court wants Google to allow users to indicate those search results for their names that are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” so that they can be removed from the search index. Arguing that the issue involves “a collision between the right to be forgotten and the right to know,” Schmidt wants us to believe that the court made an error while the nerdy wunderkinds at Google got the balance right on their first try.

But what is this “right to know” that he speaks of? Who is entitled to it and who isn't? Consider any other business that does not have the luxury of using our collective infatuation with digital technology as a shield against regulation. What company wouldn't want to know more about prospective customers or employees? Banks or insurance companies would love to know everything about us: the more they know, the better for their business.

For example, the knowledge that you drink coffee rather than kale juice in the morning would surely improve their ability to predict whether you might suffer a heart attack in the next five years—an extremely relevant bit of information for deciding whether to give you a loan or insurance and at what rates. One doesn't have to try very hard to discover what we drink at breakfast time. Such information is usually already available on Facebook and Instagram. Many clever companies have sprung up to make such information highly actionable. As Douglas Merrill, the former chief information officer of Google and the founder of ZestFinance, a start-up that looks at more than 80,000 data points to assess your suitability for credit, puts it: “All data is credit data.”

From the perspective of finance institutions, this is undoubtedly true. But a world where all data is credit data is also a world where every decision that we take is marred by paranoia and anxiety over how it will affect our credit rating: only banks and spy agencies would want to live in that world. And they certainly don't have anything resembling “the right to know”—if by that right we mean unconditional and unconstrained access to any information they are capable of grabbing. Otherwise, ZestFinance would be using 800,000 data points, not 80,000.

It's for this reason that some countries strive to prevent their lending institutions from incorporating data from social media into their decision-making. But such efforts are successful only when the decision-making process is itself subject to strict control. How does one enforce a law banning employers from looking up what their prospective employees are up to on social media? After all, one can still do it during off-hours and pretend that the decision not to hire a candidate was due to some other purely subjective factor.