EU Court Sets Limit On 'Right To Be Forgotten' In Company Registers (reuters.com) 28
The European Union's top court ruled in May 2014 that people could ask search engines, such as Google or Microsoft's Bing, to remove inadequate or irrelevant information from the web results produced from searches for people's names. Today, the court is limiting the so-called "right to be forgotten" principle, ruling that individuals cannot demand that personal data be erased from company records in an official register. Reuters reports: In Thursday's ruling the European Court of Justice said that company registers needed to be public to ensure legal certainty and to protect the interests of third parties. Company registers only contained a limited amount of personal information and, as executives in companies should disclose their identity and functions, it said. This did not constitute too severe an interference in their private lives and personal data. However, the court said there might be specific situations in which access to personal data in company registers could be limited, such as a long period after a company's dissolution. But this should be determined on a case-by-case basis.
Lack Of Sense (Score:3)
Re:Lack Of Sense (Score:4, Insightful)
I think this is more about censoring (or whatever preferred euphemism Europeans are using to justify this) search results rather than individual hits. It would not be that sites cannot publish the things in question (yet), but rather that sites like Google, Bing, or Yahoo would have to remove all hits for a certain name if requested. In other words, the thing is still there, you just can't find it through conventional means.
Re: (Score:1)
This is actually pretty untrue. If something goes viral it's almost impossible to get rid, but there have been thousands of people such as victims of revenge porn who have managed to get it eliminated from the 3 or 4 places it was present on the internet and such that videos or pics of them can no longer be found from Google search.
Is it still on someone's hard drive somewhere? Maybe, but it's besides the point. If all they want to achieve is that it's hidden from casual searches by friends, family, employe
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It is hard to believe that no one has mentioned that once something is on the net it is next to impossible to get rid of it.
Except for that technical guide that was posted 3 years ago that you want to look into now. Not only has the guide been removed, the entire server is shut down.
Re: What the heck are company registers? (Score:2, Informative)
A company register is a list of organizations/businesses in the location/area/country they operate within.
In the U.K. all companies are required to appoint one, or more, director(s). The minimum number is dependent upon the company type a(there are four types of companies within the U.K.
Limited information is available to the public regarding a company - directors, named company secretary, Place of business, legal financial judgements from U.K. Courts, etc.
An example would be the BBC:
https://beta.companiesh
Finally a bit of sanity. (Score:3)
If something is false, libelous, or otherwise defamatory; it should be sued (if necessary) and removed at the source (after which it will fall out of the index the next time the originating site is spidered), not by attacking Google, or any othersearch providers.
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Ever tried suing someone in another country? Courts tend to defend their own citizens.
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If something is false, libelous, or otherwise defamatory; it should be sued (if necessary) and removed at the source (after which it will fall out of the index the next time the originating site is spidered), not by attacking Google, or any othersearch providers.
The original ruling is not "the right to be forgotten", it is just confused with that by journalists. The ruling basically amounted to that laws apply to the internet. It is a diverse set of laws in different countries, some of which prohibits indexing certain things after a certain time. So for instance you can't index people as criminals 25 years after they finished their sentence. Since it applies to indexing, not original articles, those laws apply to Google. Note none of the preexisting laws used in t
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The original ruling is not "the right to be forgotten", it is just confused with that by journalists. The ruling basically amounted to that laws apply to the internet.
The original ruling was an attempt to apply a horrible local law to entirely new circumstances and on an international scale. No one cared about the so-called "right to be forgotten" until they tried to apply it to major international web service providers. It was an equally bad idea before that, of course, but at least the impact was limited. The Internet has the effect of amplifying the global impact of misguided local laws outside their original jurisdiction. As a result, the world now has a stake in fig
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As I said "the right to forgotten" is a completely separate thing, and is the potential right to force something like facebook to delete data that you gave to them. It has nothing to do with google and other indexers. As I said journalists have just been confusing the two things for a long time.
BeauH1B (Score:2)
What?
Re: (Score:2)
Clearly the power of Trump enables you to draw conclusions from an unparsable sentence.
Fair principle bad practice (Score:3)
Where the information is plain wrong it is reasonable to expect it to be removed. However in many cases the complainants demanding to be forgotten are simply crooks and criminals trying to cover up past transgressions.
A list of BBC stories currently blacklisted by Google.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/int... [bbc.co.uk]
Re: (Score:2)
Where the information is plain wrong it is reasonable to expect it to be removed. However in many cases the complainants demanding to be forgotten are simply crooks and criminals trying to cover up past transgressions.
A list of BBC stories currently blacklisted by Google.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/int... [bbc.co.uk]
Yeah, but the original ruling just ruled that Google is not except from the law of land just because they are on the internet. Since it is not a new law, it doesn't try to balance anything, and it specifically does not address wrong info. It just means that existing laws that prohibit indexing certain things after a certain amount of time (old crimes or bankcruptcies), also applies to Google. Since it is all about indexing and mostly about giving people who have done something bad a second chance, it is alm
Re: (Score:2)
No, it's trying to rewrite history.
Those news articles existed, exist and represent an online record of events. Preventing people from finding or accessing them distorts and changes perception of those events.
The original ruling was wrong, stupid and is something I'll be inviting my MP to overturn in the UK following the exit from the EU.
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No, it's trying to rewrite history.
Those news articles existed, exist and represent an online record of events. Preventing people from finding or accessing them distorts and changes perception of those events.
The original ruling was wrong, stupid and is something I'll be inviting my MP to overturn in the UK following the exit from the EU.
I would disagree with the ruling being wrong. Though I agree with you on the rest, but is the laws that are wrong. The European courts do not have the power to change or make new laws, so they have to apply existing laws and can only make judgement call when multiple laws conflict eachother.
Things had to change. (Score:2)