Google Rejects 58% of "Right To Be Forgotten" Requests 144
gurps_npc writes CNN Money has a short, interesting piece on the results of Google implementing Europe's "Right to be Forgotten." They are denying most requests, particularly those made by convicted criminals, but are honoring the requests to remove salacious information — such as when a rape victim requested the article mentioning her by name be removed from searches for her name. "In evaluating a request, we will look at whether the results include outdated or inaccurate information about the person," Google said. "We'll also weigh whether or not there's a public interest in the information remaining in our search results -- for example, if it relates to financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions or your public conduct as a government official."
Reasonable (Score:3, Informative)
Google's approach to this is reasonable. Criminals and public officials voluntarily give up a level of privacy due to their voluntary status as criminals and public officials.
Re:Reasonable (Score:5, Interesting)
Ignoring public officials, that seems a very American view on how to treat criminals.
If someone is caught for a petty crime 15 years ago, should it be returned against a search history now if they have never committed another offence?
The law as it stands in most of Europe doesn't delete the record of such a crime having happened, but does hide that information to encourage offenders to rehabilitate and become a non-criminal and regular member of society. Without the prospect of ever being able to live normally once an indiscretion has occurred, what would motivate an offender to stop offending? There's a sweet spot between the first crime and the third petty crime in which you could deter someone from that life of crime, but after that point and after a jail sentence you are unlikely to reform that person. But without the option of rehabilitation you are unlikely to reform *any* offender.
This would also allow nation states to use the increasing threat of police intrusion as a deterrence and counter-opposition tool. Any arrest and any record that can be made to stick would reverberate forwards in time affecting that person in numerous ways... if petty offences cannot be forgotton or moved on from.
Once you accept that for some petty crimes (i.e. drunk and disorderly on a stag do that got out of hand, or something equally likely that it could entrap almost anyone) the search engine should reflect the sensible law that states this should be forgotten by almost everyone (not those in certain positions)... then where is the line drawn?
At one extreme murderers should not be forgotten, nor convicted rapists... but at the other end speeding offences, drunk and disorderly, shoplifting, those shouldn't upend a life. Somewhere between those points is the fuzzy line where stuff on one side should be forgotten, other stuff remembered.
Before this ruling Google ignored that line and treated everyone to the joy of living forever with the consequences of their actions without ever being able to make good. After this ruling, Google are forced to apply some basis for allowing some people to move on.
Then of course... where to start with public officials. Those who wish the world to be a better place and work towards it don't deserve a lack of privacy. They certainly need to be transparent in their roles and to sustain trust in their position, but these are different things. A fuzzy line appears once more, intrusions on the identity of the children of a public official is too much, they never voluntarily agreed to give up a level of privacy, and yet no questioning of the financial situation of an official is too little as their trust should be earned and not presumed.
In both cases, either extreme (no privacy nor right to be forgotten, full privacy and past deleted) is clearly wrong.
Re:Reasonable (Score:4, Funny)
> The law as it stands in most of Europe doesn't delete the record of such a crime having happened, but does hide
> that information to encourage offenders to rehabilitate and become a non-criminal and regular member of
> society. Without the prospect of ever being able to live normally once an indiscretion has occurred, what would
> motivate an offender to stop offending?
You nailed it exactly; if we offer those prospect to former criminals who have paid their "debt to society" then they are likely to not re-offend, which is just terrible in terms of job prospects for police and prison gaurds.
Shit many of our laws and policies exist specifically to create bodies to mill through the system, why would we want to provide any means of escape? Think of the prison gaurd's children!
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In my state they pay them (prisoners) less than minimum wage to compete with private business.
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I bet there are no perverse incentives there. You know its funny, you always hear how big our prison population is, or maybe how much it balooned, 700% since the early 1970s. I was curious, what happens when you look at population growth over that time...surely you would expect some growth....
Turns out about 30%. A 30% larger population has 700% more people incarcerated.
And that is just prison population. Imagine what that means for the much larger population of people on probation and parole, restricted in
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The Europeans should not be attacking Google for indexing what is available on the Internet, they should be talking to the people that put that information on the Internet in the first place.
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In the original case that triggered the "right to be forgotten" ruling, the person did do just that. The argument from the newspaper involved was that a record of fact would not be edited.
The person did not dispute that the fact occurred, merely that by it being published at the top of the search engine placement it's effect had not diminished with time and was still being felt by the person as other third parties took the information to be current and used it against them.
The people affected by this don't
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The people affected by this don't seem to be objecting to the past (and historical record existing), but only it's impact on the present.
This is the consequence of bad behavior: People get to know about it, there are repercussions in society for behaving badly. You don't get to behave badly and then demand that people forget about your bad behavior because it in inconvenient for you . That's not the way things work.
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My oldest son (11) seems to be constantly in a state of learning this lesson. He'll do something wrong, get a warning, do it again, and get a punishment. At that point, he'll rail about how unfair it is that he is punished and how we should give him one more chance - conveniently ignoring the one chance he got before.
Granted, my son is 11. At this age, they push boundaries and try to see what they can get away with and what is socially acceptable. One wonders what the excuse is for the grown men and wom
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Granted, my son is 11.
Your anecdotal argument is irrelevant, your son is a young juvenile, which as you well know, are held to different standards that young adults and adults. For young adults and adults who do bad things, there are different consequences than a young juvenile would expect, and those consequences are generally proportional to the bad thing the young adult or adult has done.
But the real issue here is indexing publicly available data. These people that want to be forgotten need to talk to the people that are maki
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Riiight. Because US sex offenders lists contain people who made the mistake of drunkenly pissing against a wall in public... As long as you have those laws, your country doesn't get to be upset about anything regarding people who want to be forgotten.
Not to mention that US laws actually allows the prosecution of minors when their nude shot of themselves gets into the public internet. Because they created child pornography, or so the dubious logic goes.
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Riiight. Because US sex offenders lists contain people who made the mistake of drunkenly pissing against a wall in public...
Bullshit. Cite a reliable news source on that one.
Not to mention that US laws actually allows the prosecution of minors when their nude shot of themselves gets into the public internet.
We're talking about Google's response to the European "right to be forgotten", not US laws.
Can you stay on-topic? Or are you one of these one-topic fanatics that tie every subject into your obsession?
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Bad behavior as a youth shouldn't ruin somebody's whole life, though. There should be repercussions, and (for many offenses) the guilty party should get a chance to start over.
The idea here is that: (1) Young person commits minor crime/files for bankruptcy/something like that; (2) Young person serves time/accumulates years since bankruptcy/whatever; (3) Person getting older is not haunted by that for the rest of his or her life. In the original case, a man had gone bankrupt in the past, and the bankru
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They'd rather attack an American company than look in the mirror.
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That's a hopelessly inefficient way of doing it. Contacting every site, in an age where most just repost material from each other, would be like trying to go to every library in the country to remove their microfiche copies of old newspaper articles. Must better to simply make the information hard to find. That had the added advantage of allowing someone really looking to still find it, if it happens to be important in the future.
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Agree.
But still putting that into the hand of one commercial search engine is the wrong way to do so. That "making hard to find" should also start at the source. My suggestion would be to have the newspaper archive use an additional robots.txt/metadata like X-ARCHIVE:True to indicate that this site may be indexed, but contains out of date information that should NOT show up unless someone does a specific archived/cached search request
PRO:
Available to all search engines. You don't have to go to all serach en
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Thing is, the idea is to make it hard to find in a particular way. If I'm searching for bankruptcies in general, I could find the guy who filed the first case. This isn't a problem. If I searched on the guy's name, the bankruptcy article wouldn't show up. At least that's how I understand it.
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Exactly. And that's what you don't want to turn up if someone does a casual search with your name. On the other hand, he can't expect to have historical facts (like his foreclosure) purged from the historic archives. That was 1984.
And we ALL need to learn that a bankrupcy 20 years ago hardly effects his current financial situation.
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The Europeans should not be attacking Google for indexing what is available on the Internet, they should be talking to the people that put that information on the Internet in the first place.
The problem is that would create a large backlash from a lot of people who, for a variety of reasons, would find such requests unreasonable. Google, and other search engines, are unable to mobilize such responses and thus a more palatable target. That it is a US company is just a bonus.
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Ignoring public officials, that seems a very American view on how to treat criminals.
If someone is caught for a petty crime 15 years ago, should it be returned against a search history now if they have never committed another offence?
The law as it stands in most of Europe doesn't delete the record of such a crime having happened, but does hide that information to encourage offenders to rehabilitate and become a non-criminal and regular member of society. Without the prospect of ever being able to live normally once an indiscretion has occurred, what would motivate an offender to stop offending? There's a sweet spot between the first crime and the third petty crime in which you could deter someone from that life of crime, but after that point and after a jail sentence you are unlikely to reform that person. But without the option of rehabilitation you are unlikely to reform *any* offender.
By that logic, it might actually be best to have a flat 'privacy until otherwise' requirement from the start--the public record is sealed as to names until the Nth petty offense or 1st major offense by the same person, unless the offender decides otherwise. (The police records can have names, but those shouldn't be accessible by the general public via Google, Bing, or the ilk ever.)
[...]
Once you accept that for some petty crimes (i.e. drunk and disorderly on a stag do that got out of hand, or something equally likely that it could entrap almost anyone) the search engine should reflect the sensible law that states this should be forgotten by almost everyone (not those in certain positions)... then where is the line drawn?
That sounds like more a reason to be able to request the indexed report be at least redacted, which is why I suggest a shield p
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Before this ruling Google ignored that line and treated everyone to the joy of living forever with the consequences of their actions without ever being able to make good. After this ruling, Google are forced to apply some basis for allowing some people to move on.
The problem is European politicians abdicated their responsibility to set clear guidelines for this ruling and left it up to Google to determine who does or doesn't live with the consequences of their actions. If the courts or legislators had set clear standards for applying this rule - such as specifying a period of time, say 7 years, after which records are to be forgotten, I'd be fine with it. As it is, this enormous power is in the hands of individual search companies, each applying their own differing
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So you are saying a person convicted of possessing drugs deserves to keep that criminal status for life? Even for a bit of pot? Absurd thinking.
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So you are saying a person convicted of possessing drugs deserves to keep that criminal status for life?
Unless a judge seals the record, a conviction is a public record. So yes.
Whether or not being convicted of possession of a small amount of pot is important to the person doing the search is another matter.
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Google also complies with 98% of requests from the US government, without really weighing moral implications of US law.
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Then what is the issue with the old record being out there? If Europeans are as eager to forgive and forget past crimes as you suggest, then they won't hold it against someone and no harm is caused.
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I don't know about eagerness to forgive and all that, but surely the search results aren't limited to Europeans? So also people who presumably aren't eager to forgive and move on would also see the results, which would be seen as an issue. Or does Google return wildly different results (assuming the query is specific enough) depending on the user's country?
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They've made no bones about blocking various content in various countries due to laws like the DMCA.
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This is about google complying with european law, and it selectively enforcing european's rights based on its own perogatives, basicly its rather American view on criminal justice which revolves around the witch hunt, and very harsh black and white theories, that people are either good or bad, and its really a waste of time trying to reform criminals.
Again, they don't challenge American l
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So I get it you're going to be cheerleader when some copyright crusaders want to install a public database of everyone they catch filesharing?
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Google's approach to this is reasonable. Criminals and public officials voluntarily give up a level of privacy due to their voluntary status as criminals and public officials.
I agree, but I dislike this whole "right to be forgotten" thing. Yes, for some people it sucks to have bad/old information on the internet, but in effect what's happening here is various people demanding censorship of information about themselves, and then Google deciding whether or not to comply. Are we sure we know what their standards are, and that they will be applied fairly? The opportunities for bias are obvious: will a request to remove (say) an old bit of dirt on someone associated with a cause or p
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Furthermore, how long until a company decides that Google should remove those bad reviews of their products because they are insulting to the company and cast the company in a bad light? Never mind that the product is garbage and possibly harmful... Those mentions of this fact online need to be suppressed!
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Google's approach to this is reasonable.
Absolutely,
Also note that the results are not fully removed, they just won't show up for some keywords.
It's really quiet reasonable that a rape victim can has not to have an article about incident show up, when you google the victims name.
In particularly important when the victim decide to look for a job 10 or 20 years down the road.
Keep in mind the article may still show up googling the perpetrators name...
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If you are violating an unjust law, then why would you want to hide the fact that you were standing up for your rights? I'm assuming by the time you are considered a criminal, you are already known by the authorities.
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If you are violating an unjust law, then why would you want to hide the fact that you were standing up for your rights?
Because not everyone who violates unjust laws wants to be the leader of a movement or risk being destroyed. Some people just want to get on with their lives while occasionally ignoring ridiculous laws.
G00gle: Self appointed jury, judge and custodian (Score:2)
They can do this until they get another legal spank once again. Who is Google anyway to decide the "public interest"? Since when the public interest trumps the private interest and how and why Google self-appointed to be the judge and the jury to decide what is relevant or what is not?
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Yup. If this had to be done (I disagree, but let say it has to...), then you need a judge or something to make the call, not some random underpaid bozo making the call. The time it would take would also ensure a lot less requests go through...
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I believe the European courts themselves appointed Google to head this task. They told Google to remove these requested references if they aren't in the "public interest." As far as I can see, there are four options:
1) Google removed everything. There is no filter and no attempts to curtail abuse of the system. If you request it removed, Google removes it, no questions asked. If this option were taken, the Google search index would rapidly become useless.
2) The European Court system handles each and ev
The technology exists and is used (Score:5, Insightful)
Social engineering, political pressure, and the fact that the worst people are most interested in covering up their past means this will be abused. Every sane and pragmatic consideration to prevent abuse will have workarounds well known to scummy specialists, who know who to ask, who to lie to, and how to submit requests.
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Instead it is to manage the mess so that it does not get out of hand.
You personally may choose to live in a world with no one ever cleans up the mess. But the rest of us like having the dirt cleaned up sometimes, even if it never gets rid of all the dirt.
The same thing applies to Forget Me requests.
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Huh? I'm just saying abuse will happen. I guess that does imply an attitude that it shouldn't be done.
And maybe some sort of plan to get around abusers. Not sure how though.
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The problem isn't cleaning up the mess. The problem is throwing away a valuable item when you're cleaning up the mess. This is why I have taught my kids, that if they don't want to throw something away, is to have a place for it, and ALWAYS put it in its rightful place. This creates an Order from which everything else becomes easier.
I've seen shops where everything is left out and never put away. I've seen shops that are nice and neat and everything is in place. Guess which one spends more time looking for
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But the rest of us like having the dirt cleaned up sometimes, even if it never gets rid of all the dirt.
The same thing applies to Forget Me requests.
The point is that it will be manipulated to throw out some heirlooms along with the dirt.
In this case they're heirlooms that someone doesn't like and wants gone, but they're also objects of value to the rest. No, the analogy doesn't work all that well, but it's your (lousy) analogy.
Re:The technology exists and is used (Score:4, Insightful)
The same argument can be made about the death penalty. As the US justice system has shown repeatedly there are quite a lot of innocent people on death row.
Now the question becomes: Do you rather want to abolish the death penalty so that no innocent people are killed - or do you want to make sure that criminals are killed and accept the innocent victimes as collateral damage?
Benjamin Franklin stated: "It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer". I find it interesting that the US have moved into the completely opposite direction.
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The point of cleaning up a messy room or of arresting criminals is not to keep everything spotless.
Instead it is to manage the mess so that it does not get out of hand.
But that's just ass-backwards. Take the example of a person having an article about their rape removed because it contains their name. Well, it also contains the name of the rapist. Congratulations to them; because they did not want it known that they suffered a tragedy, information that people could actually benefit from has been lost. Oh sure, the information is still out there, but how will anyone find it without google? This is managing the mess so that it gets out of hand.
You personally may choose to live in a world with no one ever cleans up the mess.
This is not cleaning up the me
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As I understand it....
John Doe raped Jane Roe, and there was a newspaper article on it. Neither John Doe nor Jane Roe want to be connected with the article, such that the article shows up when they're searched for, but Jane has a good reason and John doesn't. Therefore, Google changes the search index so a search on "Jane Roe" doesn't find the article, but a search on "John Doe" does.
More Importantly... (Score:1)
There is no "Right to be forgotten" (Score:1)
The right "to be forgotten" does not exist — you have no right to affect the contents of other people's brains, notebooks, and databases.
Sure, Google is a "KKKorporation", but you have no more right to demand, they forget about you, than you can you force your ex to forget the good times you've once had together. And, yes, wiping out individual's memories — selectively — is already possible [nature.com].
Switzerland (Score:4, Interesting)
"But in Switzerland, a finance professional who asked Google to remove more than 10 links on his arrest and conviction for financial crimes had his request denied."
Would such a request not already be denied just because Switzerland is not in the European Union?
And by the way, most of the comments here seem to be unhappy about the fact that Google is making these decisions. Guess what, Google doesn't want this either. They fought this tooth and nail up to the highest European Court, but the court decided to force them to remove requests under certain (but not clearly defined) circumstances. Read more here (I haven't reviewed the article so can't vouch for accuracy though): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... [wikipedia.org]
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That's the thing I find baffling about some of these EU court decisions.
EU: "Google is abusing its near-monopoly position in search. This needs to stop."
Google: "Ok, what exactly do you want us to stop doing?"
EU: "Um, we don't know. Why don't you come up with some suggestions and we'll tell yo
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Google crawls and indexes the public Internet (Score:3)
That's Google's job.
Still, stay with me and compare what Google does with this:
Some company develops a fleet of drones that hover over all public places, record everything that is said or done there and put it into a database indexed with all the metadata, searchable over the Internet. Is this OK? It's just public data!
Some company deploys lots of license number scanners that scan all public streets and record all cars driving through and indexes all that data together with GPS data and makes it available to everyone. Is this OK? It's just public data!
Someone develops an extensive system of crawlers that scan all of the public Internet and puts this into a database, searchable by everyone. Is this OK? It's just public data!
Face it, Google Search is a virtual drone that hovers over you, invisible, where ever you are in the public Internet. This virtual drone notes every page with your name in it and happily delivers to everyone a complete list of every page you wrote something with your name attached to it (or somebody else saying something about you).
Just because Google does what it does not mean it should be free to do as it pleases. If anyone would do the same with public data like license numbers or conversations held in public or all photos from cameras in public places you'd be up in arms.
"The right to be forgotten" should actually be named "the right to not be stalked in the public Internet". Just because something is public does not mean everybody should be allowed to record, scan and index all that data and make it searchable for everyone.
Note that "the right to be forgotten" does NOT mean that any data is removed. It just means that URLs you don't want to be shown when someone searches for your name is shown in the list of hits. Not more, not less. The data itself is still there, and you will even still find it with Google if you search for actual facts instead of the name of that person.
It's like a public search engine for license numbers that does not allow searching for license numbers (and then getting a full tracking profile for that car) but still allows searching for locations and then find all license numbers that drove through this location.
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No need for an analogy, there are companies which gather data on people without their consent and are regulated by the law: credit rating agencies.
The law requires them to not report certain information they have, like old bankruptcies that the law considers no longer relevant. Banks are not allowed to use knowledge of old bankruptcies when evaluating customers, and credit reference agencies are not allowed to report them.
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It's not even about not being able to report them, CRAs are just out and out not legally allowed to even store that information past a certain time. Once that period has elapsed companies must delete that data from their databases.
Data such as county court judgements in the UK are still held on file as part of public record past this point but corporations are not allowed to retain copies of or use that information and are hence not allowed to supply it forward as part of a credit report. I believe the cut
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Your examples are flawed. There isn't a database with a complete record of all license plate movements.
LOL. I stopped reading here. You are so naive. There are multiple [eff.org] different databases [theblaze.com] with a complete record of all license plate movements.
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Your examples are flawed. There isn't a database with a complete record of all license plate movements. Google isn't creating any content, it's telling you where to find it.
And Google does that by building a complete record of all the public Internet. Or do you think Google is going out and crawling all of the Internet only after you've typed a search string?
The public Internet is as public as the license plates that are driven around are public and as conversations in the open are public. What Google does is like scanning all streets all the time or listening in to all public conversations all the time. And then save it and index it and make it searchable for everyone.
These e
Forget (Score:2)
You could forget this latest redesign? Shit, I thought beta was bad.
P.S. If you can't design understandable icons - and you can't, and if you lived three lifetimes you still couldn't - then maybe use an old-fashioned thing called an alt-text.
UX scumbag nonces.
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Maybe because as you said... it is their goddamned search engine. They can do whatever they want with it.
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Maybe you'd like to reevaluate that opinion if someone is out there on a slandering campaign against you and you try desperately to get those photoshopped pics of you out of the system...
Re:What right do they have anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Thanks to a prior ruling (in the same case) the source is explicitly protected by press freedom.
After losing that round at court, that spanish guy who went broke years ago simply kept on sueing the next in line, which happend to be Google.
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Yes. Of course. Try to convince the hoster in the country the name of which ends in -stan that your problem is of any importance.
Hint: You don't pay for the server. The person slandering you does. And, well, that's what you get when you export capitalism without ensuring a stable legal system first...
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Actually, it's more likely that the source is in the US (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, ...). They might comply eventually, but it would remain in the search index of Google for a while.
Plus, if I really wanted to ruin someone's reputation, rest assured that the server I rent would be somewhere in Genericstan.
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If it's Facebook or Twitter, they both have European offices, so would probably comply fairly quickly, and something from ten years ago on either site probably wouldn't be on the first page of Google results.
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Not the norm? You might remember various Google-Bombs involving someone famous, where you would get a ton of other search results on his name yet still it was very possible to connect him with some less than favorable search results. How much easier do you think it becomes when your target has a not too common name? Certainly it would be nontrivial to get the front page for "John Smith" but a name that would usually not return any sensible results except for something akin to firstname.lastname@gmail.com it
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I know Santorum was Google bombed, but that was an ongoing, concentrated effort by a lot of people. Yes, it's possible that for people with interesting names but boring lives could piss off someone who is going to set up an offshore site and then get Google to put it on the front page, but having to have all of those factors means it probably hasn't happened yet even once.
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Removing stuff putting people who don't want to be in the public into the public would do.
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Your strawman doesn't work out too well either. Try again with an example where the victim isn't the culprit of something else.
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This. If they're bound by law to remove results upon request, then they should remove them (assuming the request itself is valid).
They shouldn't be deciding which requests to approve or not beyond a technical / common sense capacity. John Doe obviously couldn't request all results for the generic use of his name to be removed, nor could he request that a specific page for someone else's name be removed.
Anything else should be honored, in accordance with the law.
Re:What right do they have anyway? (Score:5, Interesting)
"The law" tends to have attributes about what is valid that require some subjective assessment. Nominally these are ironed out through extremely legalistic language, and court precedents. In practice, it frequently includes those the law applies to making judgements.
Theft laws, for example, don't preclude my occasional unsolicited handling of your property within the bounds of common sense, like, say, me bringing you your umbrella you left behind by accident.
Re:What right do they have anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is to determine if each request is covered by the law. The problem is that the requests they get are not individually approved by a court, that would make it too easy. Instead, they HAVE to be the judge of which requests are covered by the law.
Personally, I think this is a BS law. If something is legally present on web, ie. a ten year old news story, then it should be index-able. However, if there a a factual problem, or contains private information, then the site owners should be required to correct it or take it down. The idea of going after the index is ridiculous, not effective and lazy.
20 years there was no index (Score:5, Insightful)
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20 years ago if you were caught giving a hand job to a guy in a corner, maybe youw ere drunk or whatnot, maybe it would ruin your life for a year or two but that would be over ... A society which does not forget is one which will not forgive minor transgression.
20 years from now, when the children born into the Internet are now middle-aged and running the show, and everybody will have their childhood indiscretions readily visible, will this still hold? Or will it be so commonplace that nobody will really care? Or will those who don't have anything juicy to show from their childhood be more a curiosity, rather than the status quo?
Re:20 years there was no index (Score:4, Insightful)
Alternately, in a society where nothing is ever forgotten perhaps we can finally relearn to forgive on a social level, and/or simply ignore that which is not relevant. How is a 20-yo public handjob relevant to anything today?
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Maybe individuals who know that person can forgive them, but if any employer has two similar candidates to choose from and one has a conviction for public indecency connected to their name they are unlikely to ignore it.
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I absolutely agree that it's better that things should be forgotten in many cases for many reasons. I do wonder if the search engine is entirely the right place to do the forgetting. Search engines typically index content because it exists. Does right to be forgotten also give a right to have content taken down?.
In this case: Explicitly no. In a related ruling in the same case, the website with the archived newspaper article is explicitly covered by freedom of press and has NOT to take donw anything.
But removing the link from the search engine will at least make uncovering 20 year old sins of your youth as difficult as it was when you had to spend the time in a dead-tree newspaper archive.
Re:What right do they have anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
"assuming the request itself is valid"
This is the sticking point. For example, my name is pretty common. Suppose there was a news story about a Jason Levine who did something bad and searches on my name were showing this news item. Could I petition Google to "forget" my name? (We'll ignore, for the moment, that I don't live in Europe.) Could the criminal with the same name as me do the same? Could I petition Google to "forget" a hypothetical video of me walking into a light-pole while texting? Can a company request that all mentions of a product be removed if said product was a flop?
The courts, thankfully, didn't tell Google that they had to honor all removal requests. Had they done so, Google might have just saved everyone time and simply shut down their search engine as they would be forced to remove valid search results for inappropriate reasons. The removal requirements the courts gave were somewhat vague so Google is forced to use their corporate judgement as to what constitutes a valid "forget me" request and what is an attempted abuse of the system (and should be denied). If anything, I'm surprised that the rejection rate isn't higher than 58%. The ability to have "the Internet forget" the bad things you did would be very tempting for companies and criminals alike.
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>I'm surprised that the rejection rate isn't higher than 58%
As am I. I suspect "whether the requestor can make our lives difficult" is a significant consideration. Or contrariwise "whether a generous donation to the corporate lounge room fund was included". At the extreme end I doubt any request from Google executives would be rejected, regardless of how invalid it may be. Of course having the courts make the call isn't necessarily a guarantee against such abuses, but if we're asking someone to make
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This. If they're bound by law to remove results upon request, then they should remove them (assuming the request itself is valid). They shouldn't be deciding which requests to approve or not beyond a technical / common sense capacity.
Umm, the court ordered them to decide which requests to remove, based on the vague criteria mentioned in the summary. And they're legally obligated to get it right, too.
Did you miss the big hullabaloo shortly after this went into effect, when Google was accused of removing stuff that didn't meet the criteria defined by the court? The allegation was that Google was intentionally doing exactly what you said they should -- in violation of the order -- and removing everything requested, in an attempt to show
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Re: What right do they have anyway? (Score:3)
This story is about Google operating in Europe. They have their own laws there.
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How is it that Google thinks they have the right to decide who is and is not removed from their results? They should either honor all requests or no requests, not 'play god' like this.
Dear Google,
Attached is a request to remove all results for the 4 billion named individuals hereby requesting the right to be forgotten. I look forward to your expedient honoring of the request.
Sincerely,
Marissa.Mayer@yahoo.com
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But with great power comes great responsibility, aren't they standing up and taking that responsibility now?
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In order to annihilate n KG of matter, you needed n KG of antimatter. You couldn't even annihilate this message on your computer with all combined antimatter, the mass of the memory cells this post is stored on your computer exceeds produced antimatter mass.
(At least I think so)
Re:Creating the "Anti-Search" and Other Dark Matte (Score:4, Funny)
Well, technically it's more some sort of "it-doesn't-matter"...
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Re:What makes them the judge of these matters? (Score:4, Funny)
It's their search engine. Start your own search engine and you will get to decide what's in it.
Blackjack and hookers, duh.
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It's not even a law. It's a court ruling.
a law would at least give some legal foundation. Another court may decide in a few months that some other name should habe not e taken down.
Re:What makes them the judge of these matters? (Score:4, Interesting)
The data protection laws say, in summary, that companies who process peoples' personal information are responsible for keeping that information accurate and up-to-date, and to discard that information when it is no longer relevant.
The court ruling decided that search results on a person's name constituted personal information about that person. Hence search engine indexes are subject to the fore-mentioned laws.
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What? Google didn't even exist when the 1995 European Data Protection Directive was being discussed. This is the law which the courts deemed Google to have breached.
The 2012 refresh is STILL being discussed.
Google is not the final judge in the matter, the courts would be if someone feels Google has not made the correct decision, but as the data controller and data processor Google has a legal obligation to ensure that all personal data which it holds is accurate, uptodate, relevant, and obtained with permis
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They don't just allow them to cherry pick, they require them to.
As an European I would have preferred a middle finger, just to show how stupid the law is.
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As a European you obviously have no idea what the law protects you from if you're saying such a stupid thing.
Have a read here to get an understanding of how important data protection laws are and to understand what you're arguing against:
http://www.dataprotection.ie/d... [dataprotection.ie]
Despite what you say, you probably don't actually want to live in a world without data protection laws and there's no reason to think Google should be some special case that's immune to them.
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I am not saying that the "right to be forgotten" is bad. I'm saying that the law is stupid.
The really stupid part is that search engines have a say in what is and what is not a valid request. It shall be a judge's job.
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Judges do have the final say, but it's impossible for judges to assess every single data acquisition and processing by every company, it would be an impossible task. Companies have to make the first decision as to what is and isn't acceptable, and if a company is believed to have made a wrong choice then that is challenged by whichever party in court where a judge (or jury) does have a say.