I feel sorry for those who legitimately should have stories removed. Falsely accused, slandered, etc. Though if the site takes the time to put the truthful rebuttals up front it would mitigate that.
For those legitimately outed I have no sympathy. With one exception: someone whose criminal record has been expunged. That is a legal proceeding, which carries weight. Of course the site owner opens himself and the site to prosecution for slander. Forget international borders, someone anywhere in the world can sue you in the US for slander.

The underground economy has many faces.
drugs
Theft
worse crime
far less insidious, unreported labor
All these will have serous problems in a cashless world. There are ways around these with some problems. But, it will drive small players out of the market.
Not a pretty picture for some.

When the DMCA laws were first proposed, there was supposed to be a penalty for making a false claim.
Obviously this needs to be re-visited.
Automated or not, someone set up the system. "Oh. I'm sorry. My Automated script did it". Make them pay a fine. One which increases for each false claim.
Another problem is third party enforcement. Rights holders hire companies to do this for them, then wash their hands of it. Make the original rights holders responsible. That's the way is works in the brick and mortar world. Own a building, you're liable. If a contractor does shoddy, you're responsible. Though you may be able to sue the contractor.
As people and companies are claiming (and in many cases justly so) real rights to content on the internet. It's time to bring the other side of that coin into play. If someone wrongly says they own part of your yard, you're entitled to damages.
Get off my yard.

This is just a guess, but I believe your assessment why you were modded down is correct. Making comments that might offend people has consequences.
Your post is off topic, and bashes Microsoft for things not relevant. As for your previous posts, having modded comments, previous posts are pretty much impossible to find. Modding is based on the current comment.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft. I've been playing and working with computers since before Microsoft existed. I've posted on this thread. Canada is the party at fault, Microsoft is just responding to a stupid law.
I love bashing Microsoft, but the pickings have been slim lately, they're failing. They won't go out of business, but their clout is gone.

A security notice for a purchased product could be considered to be of a commercial nature.
Are you willing to bet the farm on it?
Your legal fees will be over $1,000,000 even if you win.
OH! and the idiot that sued you is penniless, forget recovery.

Seemed like a good idea. I don't think so, but someone did.
What an absolute fail of a law.
It might work if the sender could reasonably presume that if the email address didn't end in .ca it wasn't a problem.
The cost. of defense is too high. Canada just screwed the pooch.

There may be a bright side. It will force international law to cross the internet. As this is a Canadian law, only addresses ending in .ca should matter. Of course that opens a much bigger can of worms.

Then again it could just result in an explicit opt in: I AM NOT A CANADIAN! If you check it an lie you are guilty of perjury. NO Canadians allowed.
Perhaps the future of an internet second class.

Of course I'm being melodramatic. But this law is melodramatic. Some idiot with no clue wrote it, and got it passed. It deserves derision.

well, you just described a way to tweak an algorithm.
wouldn't even have to go to a 256 bit key. Doing that into MD5 would probably foil anything less than a concerted financial attack.
No media outlet could afford the computing power to attack that.
I used the same approach, with some further tweaks to secure financial communications a decade ago.

Lack of understanding security doesn't surprise me. I'm an engineer who does. I designed and wrote a suite that passed a 3d party, hostile, security audit.

nope, it has to do with the key. given a tag # and license # you can dictionary attack the hash. especially since the the source data is known, easy to break.

they didn't pre-anonamize the keys

You've elegantly described why stiff federal penalties are needed.

Interesting that when a direct line to someone's pocketbook is defined everyone gets on board, but when it's just a chance someone's drinking water would be tainted with cancer causing chemicals most can't find the connection.
Corporate malfeasance comes in all forms.

Small problem.
Taxi Hack numbers are available in a publicly accessible data base.
A determined individual probably could find license numbers, they may be publicly accessible.
Failure to understand the vulnerability is the design failure.
A simple solution would have been to order the hashes numerically and re-number them cardinally. ie. 1,2,3 ...
Would take less than a minute, for someone than knew how.
Perhaps a few hours if the right person had to be tracked down.
Never release source data.

Using any public hash exposes you to dictionary attacks. Especially when you publish which one you've used.
The quality of the encryption is irrelevant.
Security through obscurity, using a custom algorithm, is the only way.
Taking MD5, it's published, and tweaking a few points (though who ever did this needs to be very competent) would have been sufficient.

Some manager probably said any work for addition security wasn't worth the cost. Ooops!