Defending the Right to Be Forgotten
jacquesmattheij.com
jacquesmattheij.com
As we are moving forward to a society, where everything we do is shared online, not only by us but also by our friends, we suddenly loose the control over how we are portrayed. Of course there is the argument that this has been true with classic media, but from personal experience you always have the chance to rerecord something you said on a interview if it's not live and I pre read a majority of all print articles and interviews, because newspaper have high quality standards and try hard to get everything right.
As copyright holders are (quite successfully) lobbying to enforce their rights to their content globally, we as a society should enforce our rights on how we are portrait globally. This should not be exclusive to europeans and european cyber space, everyone should enjoy the freedom to decide which parts of his past should be forgotten.
[1]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/16/google-ceo-eric-sch...
Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites.
"I mean we really have to think about these things as a society," he adds. "I'm not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things," he says.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487049011045754232...
A quote from Google on the matter:
"we respectfully disagree with the idea that a national data
protection authority can assert global authority to control the
content that people can access around the world."
"search engine results aren’t ‘free speech’ to begin with in my
opinion, they’re re-hashings of someone else’s speech."
What is Saudi Arabia decides to start punishing Google because its image search shows "revealing" images of women, is that just fine because search engine results aren't free speech anyway, and any nation on earth should be able to make laws about search results that apply globally?
Besides, the ruling only applies to information about EU citizens, so a better analogy would be if Saudi Arabia wanted to block revealing images of Saudi women.
Why should France be allowed to control what Google (an American company) does outside of France? It seems fair that the French government should get to control Google.fr. But if they don't like what's on Google.com, then they should simply block the domain, like China does with its Great Firewall or the UK does with adult websites. It's nearly tantamount to censorship, anyway.
Firstly, please excuse my lack of legal knowledge. It seems to me that Google is analogous like a US citizen operating in France, where it is subject to the laws of the US and France. Why, however, should its operations in France be subject to the laws of every other country Google operates in, and vice versa?
According to that logic, why would the US be allowed to control what BP (a British company) does in international waters, as it did with the Deepwater Horizon fiasco? Perhaps because what BP did there affected US soil and citizens?
> Why should its operations in France be subject to the laws of every other country Google operates in, and vice versa?
That is not a requisite for this discussion. Google aggregating and publishing information on French citizens is a French matter. If you need to frame it in legal terms, consider it an export control on personal data. Since the data owner is in France (according to EU law), the governing jurisdiction regarding that data is also French law. So if French law says that Google should no longer publish it, that applies to the local data as well as the exported copies.
When a French user uses Google.com, it's they who are requesting the information. It's not as if Google is actively pushing search results from Google.com into France, like BP's oil pushed itself onto the US coast.
> Since the data owner is in France (according to EU law), the governing jurisdiction regarding that data is also French law.
Again, I have no legal experience with these sorts of issues, but from your argument it seems that the website owner ought to be the one who is responsible for publishing the data. Google search results are merely a reflection of that content, and that reflection is under US jurisdiction.
And if France has no way to force the website owner to take down their content, then why should Google then be responsible, just because it also has operations in France?
Why is it so hard to understand that the condition to allowing them to collect the data in the first place is that they respect the local law about that data?
The question is then, what do you do with people who puts up drive-by malware on websites. Is that something for a international arrest warrant, even if you normally deal with illegal websites by blocking? Is operating such site different from operating some other kind of illegal website? Should we just give computer criminals a free pass from arrest warrants in order to avoid putting global companies under the combined law of every country in the world?
Personally I find that this to be such a complex issues that it would be better if there was new treaties that addressed which kind of crimes should be enforced globally, and in what ways.
I can understand why it appeals to people - their sense of unfairness is triggered, and that is a useful heuristic for finding unjust behavior.. but the actual implementations discussed amount to "make it like it used to be". On the surface it seems like you can design something that might work.. but the trick is, it'll involve a ton of fiddly bits of law. Those fiddly bits are things that lawyers (and therefore corporations and rich people) are very good at playing with, which will inevitably result in a evolving double-standard, just like in finance, health-care, politics, and employment law.
There is a form of the 'right to be forgotten' that makes total sense. Your creations - your journal, your twitter feed, your facebook notes and photo blog - these belong to you in a sensical way, and determining who has access to them might be a reasonable right you possess (though I'm unaware of any legal system that enforces that right).
But the conceptions of this 'right' I hear discussed all hinge on some variant of 'noteworthy' - that's because a moment's thought of the obvious approach tells you "wait, that will gag the news services!", which we've trained ourselves to think of as representative of goodness and openness. But 'noteworthy' is a context-based definition! The news that is noteworthy to one group is not to another, and that distinction is inherent in society - we can't wrap a semantic game around to solve the problem.
The reality is that the nature of accessible information is changing, and society will need to change with it. It's hardly the first time technology has forced society to change! The right to be forgotten is the right to exist in the world circa 1960 forever.
That would be "Copyright".
I learned this the hard way from a project I was working on that mined and crowd sourced personality information, where we shut down after a loss in traffic in response to a C & D from facebook to not link to photos (which disrupted how people engaged with the site).
What we realized though, was that n-1 people truly don't care about ones own privacy, and because of this, if any laws people create to try to address this aren't reflective of what is possible in reality, it will be toothless (like when me and my friend got a request from CNIL, and basically ignored them with no consequences).
You still retain copyright on it, though.
So while you may retain the copyright, you could very easily have signed over permission to whatever company who's website you used to post it to use it however they want.
Perhaps you should read the Facebook terms and conditions before making arguments based on them ;)
Such things are not actually irrevocable in the US, although they do last a long time.
Starting 35 years after the grant of a transfer or license of copyright, there is a 5 year window during which the author can give written notice of termination, and the transfer or license ends. The author may do this regardless of any agreement to the contrary. This is codified at 17 USC 203 [1] for those who want the gory details. "copyright termination rights" is a good search term to find discussion and articles on this.
Probably not much use in getting embarrassing content removed from a website that you unwisely licensed it to because after 35 years people have probably long forgotten about it unless it is really bad, in which case it has probably already harmed you as much as it can.
It will be interesting to see if the termination right ever affects free/open source software.
I wonder if this could be tested with code assigned to Oracle? I bet there are contributors to OpenSolaris under CDDL that wouldn't mind testing it out.
Even simple parameters are not that simple. Age-based thresholds, for example, would likely ensure family connections and privilege are "forgotten". The fact that one was a stupid teenager doing a stupid thing might be forgettable; but the fact that one got out of trouble thanks to Dad's friends should remain visible. This is impossible, no matter how you slice it.
IMO this is not acceptable and a good application of the right to be forgotten principle. If companies house were not so greedy in selling the data to companies which employ heavy SEO tactics to get hits, the problem would not exist.
However regarding its current implementation, I don't necessarily agree with the fact that private entities are the one judging the requests (and they never asked for it!). If it is some sort of legal requirement, in my opinion, it should be reviewed by some kind of judge, administrative body or peers, that would apply consistently the rules.
Finally regarding the EU vs Global application of the rule, I have to side with Google : you can't comply globally with every specific request from every country or sensibility, because it would mean banning a lot of things (from blasphemy, homosexuality to various disputed historical events, or territories...). I can't see that working practically.
The fact that Google is unable or unwilling to filter Google.com results for particular countries is not the EU's problem.
But really the only thing standing between you and an uncensored search is a trip to bing(|duckduckgo|yahoo|etc).com, rather than google.com.
Just claim copyright on your name and then DMCA the fuck out of all these sites, including Google.
You get the same effect as the right to be forgotten (probably even more disruptive, as this solution also works for companies) but Google has to apply it internationally.
And, the worst thing, many companies actually use DMCA to ban bad reviews already.
Yes, surely it doesn’t work that way, but it’s DMCA. Companies are using it to take down everything with "Pixels" in name, it’s not hard to abuse it.
*EDIT: wrong word
In a nutshell - if someone gains a "right to be forgotten", you're losing the "right to remember".
Or can you suggest a better authority to define them?
Again, that's how you know what rights people in fact have. If you want to decide whether people should have a right, the law is irrelevant. That's an ethical question, not a legal one.
Laws get changed all the time, which doesn't mean the underlying ethics changed.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think the difference between us is that you see ethics as something that "lives" outside of society and I don't. Ethics are not one or universally shared so societies themselves decide which ethical norms are shared widely enough to form foundations for laws etc.
So right can be any feasible privilege that is widely enough shared.
Laws get changed all the time, which doesn't mean the
underlying ethics changed.
If what should happen is defined by what's already law...
I'm not saying it is, I'm saying under the model presented above, the statement is meaningless, not just right or wrong. But people do make such statements, and mean something by it.
>This should become obvious if you compare Israel, where holocaust denial is illegal, to the UK, where it is not. Clearly the 2 nations have different opinions on the limits of freedom of speech.
And it would be coherent for someone to say in Israel "we should have the right to deny the holocaust", which shows that "should" is not the same as "it is legal".
>I would have thought that laws change precisely because moral and ethical sensibilities do change.
"moral and ethical sensibilities changing" != "ethics changing".
If you believe murder is right, does that make it right?
>I don't think that's being argued.
I was talking specifically about whether people "should" have rights. If you refer to laws to answer that, you're equating laws with "should".
What evidence do you have that there is any kind of "ethics" outside of what was called "moral and ethical sensibilities"?
If you believe murder is right, does that make it right?
For the person who believes, it does.
I was talking specifically about whether people "should" have rights. If you refer to laws to answer that, you're equating laws with "should".
No one said that laws are why people should have rights. What was said was "society decides", as the group of moral agents that it is. Laws are the result of that decision.
I myself tend towards error theory, but am fluent enough in typical moral thoughts and arguments to partake in them. So I'm not going to claim that I have evidence for objective morals. What I will claim, is that the sense that people have for morals is not satisfied by law.
>For the person who believes, it does.
That's a tautology and not particularly useful.
>No one said that laws are why people should have rights.
Actually, someone asked "Why should you have 'the right to be forgotten'?"
You answered "Technically, because the EU countries are sovereign and can decide what rights their own citizens should have."
Note the word "should" in there; that statement directly implies that law leads to (whatever you mean by should).
>What was said was "society decides", as the group of moral agents that it is. Laws are the result of that decision.
Laws are made by a tiny subset of society and rarely consider other cases implied by but not directly mentioned in the law. Case in point, this law in France was made before Google existed.
Most of us probably do not completely share values of the society we live in. It is up to us to push it in right direction.
This seems to me to contradict the earlier statement by icebraining that you defended
>Technically, because the EU countries are sovereign and can decide what rights their own citizens should have.
This is a dangerous school of thought, authoritarian in spirit - the state as the source of ethics and the ultimate moral authority (Hegel's view).
The opposing concept is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law
Clearly from the same page there is not just one and societies existed and still do that don't share the same underpinning. They could have turned it down and go with something else.
My point is that they didn't because this was close enough to existing shared values. That doesn't mean it matched anyone's perfectly or that you can't move them over time, but they are not imposed.
Well, they may be for a while under occupation of a stronger force, but surely that is not what you argue for.
In your hypothetical example it would mean yes, they don't in that society. Like converting to a different religion can get you killed in some places even if it is completely unimaginable where I am from.
I am certainly not agreeing with or defending choices of every society under sun.
So you mean "rights" in descriptive sense, you're talking about the de facto rights. This obviously excludes rights that are legally violated, but which are still there (from ethical point of view).
If someone asks why people should have a certain right (as nthcolumn did), they clearly mean rights in the latter sense of the word. Otherwise it's not an answer because it's circular logic: why would society grant you these rights? Because society grants you these rights. Well, like every tautology it's true ("technically", as you put it), only it's of no use :)
That situation has changed with the combination of web 2.0 and search engines, so now we need laws to enforce the old, natural situation while we (as a society) work out in which direction we want to go.
And as I understand it, it wouldn't mean banning, as you mentioned, blasphemy, homosexuality etc. but it's the right to be forgotten for a natural person. E.g. ask to remove certain statements about oneself (in case you are an 'unremarkable' person).
Of course this all is not black and white and details have to be discussed / fighted about.
> On the other hand, from the view of an individual that has done something wrong at some point in his or her life and that has through either a fine or a jail sentence paid their debt to society it is kind of annoying that they’ve been declared pretty much un-employable by google or one of their lesser competitors.
The error here is in the behaviour of the society in general. If you use the right to be forgotten as the correction mean, then you prevent society from evolving and changing this wrong behaviour.
We are entering an era of increasing information, society needs to adapt, and we must allow it to adapt, painful as it may be.
I've a nagging feeling that I've misunderstood your post somehow, if so let me apologize in advance for the remainder of my post:
That's exactly what society is doing: adapting. Previously information wasn't as accessible as it is nowadays so society adapted to the new situation, in this particular case by enacting laws that further protect people's privacy.
In the past your personal history was difficult to dig. Nowadays it is archived on the Internet for anyone to search and read. These laws try to emulate the past environment in the new information age.
Instead, I think we should let information flow. People will adapt to having lots of information available, and the effect of negative signals, that people are so afraid of today, will probably be minor. As an example: who cares if you smoked pot in college when 60% of people also have an online record of smoking pot.
First, lots of people will care if you smoked pot. Or they won't, but they'll care instead about something else that today you think is innocuous.
Second, you're talking revolution rather than evolution. That's always more disruptive and often more dangerous.
How do you manage the case of an unremarkable person removing something, then becoming remarkable enough to lose that right?
To me, the simplest way to fix this is to throw out the right to be forgotten. Nobody has a right to be forgotten. The simplest implementation may not be the best but at least this is achievable.
People (and the sub class 'legislators') should accept that.
If we are arguing that someone needs to be 'remarkable' then I'd be interested in what people think counts as remarkable. You may be remarkable in a certain community, job or geography, but not in others.
In the end, these things mostly work, and that's good enough. Most importantly, most people feel that it is better than refusing to have such rules just because they may be fuzzy.
- Should single owner corporations be treated as corporations or persons? A singer with his own company in his own name might want an article about him removed. - Should a low level government employee be able to have a forum rant about his handling of a case removed? What if the mishandling of a case wasn't the employees fault? - Can a corporation get (pay/threaten) another person to remove an article if that person is mentioned in the article? - What level of politician should be unable to have a link removed? Member of a political party? City counsilman in some small town? - Does the article about a politician have to be about politics? What about a personal/non-work related link about a politician? - Famoust pianists shouldn't be able to have a review removed, but what constitutes a 'review'? - What about people who don't want to be in the public eye - it's not always their choice? - So EU's laws should apply everywhere - what about Iran's? Why are they different?
This just scratches the surface.
edit:Having to click 'accept cookies on every site' is such EU nonsense too - does anyone really think you can't be tracked without cookies?
Why should anyone have any rights? Rights are granted by sovereign nations to their citizens. Sometimes (and this is a good example, the US "right to bear arms" is another good one) different nations give their citizens different rights. When these rights are given by democratically elected governments, it's fair to assess that the people collectively decided they wanted said rights and enacted them.
"I am not sure I want to employ/rent to someone who's been victim of X..."
The actual text of the directive refers to "the use of electronic communications networks to store information or to gain access to information stored in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user". This includes, but is not limited to cookies.
I'll also add that the use of the annoying "implied consent" mechanic that many member states tolerate (probably in order to not scare away advertising money) is not generally sufficient to implement the "right to refuse" demanded by the directive.
If that happened today the driver's name might be permanently searchable and could even cause problems when looking for a job "They hit a 5 year old, that doesn't sound like the type of person we'd want to hire as a delivery driver."
Maybe we can't fix this problem, or maybe it isn't a problem at all but just something we should accept. One thing is certain, we've never been in a situation where everything was recorded so thoroughly before. Can we adapt?
Google isn't the only search engine or gateway to the web. Every year there are more avenues.
If the EU were serious they'd force newspapers to edit and republish back issues - but they're not.
Newspapers are not required to retroactively publish their articles, because the EU directive is about data accessibility, not about rewriting history. The EU is simply codifying that the natural shelf-life of (newspaper) articles also applies to online content.
Yes, you can still find those articles if you're willing to spend the effort. Search engines removed the effort requirement, and the EU decided that this placed a disproportionate burden on their subjects' personal lives.
I'm sorry but that is senseless. Elevating certain rights over others is effectively the basis of any society. To use a crass example: it's widely accepted that your right to not be assaulted is elevated over another's right to assault you.
How is that related to the argument that some rights are indeed elevated versus different rights?
I'm talking about actual rights, not fictitious insane rights like a right to punch people.
At least, I think this is the logic. Not sure if self-defense counts as assault in a legal sense. A similar argument probably applies to police hitting people as well as forms of consensual violence.
We call one solution "practical concordance" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practical_concordance).
The problem is that Americans in discussions with people from other countries usually take "free speech trumps everything" for granted, which is a local peculiarity that no other legal tradition I know of is sharing.
This just simply isn't true. Most rights do not violate anyone else's rights. My right to privacy, right to fair trial, etc. all do not require any violation of your rights. Similarly my to free speech doesn't violate any of your rights. I cannot violate your right to privacy using my right to free speech unless either you have already violated it yourself by releasing your information, OR I have committed a crime, in which case the crime has violated your rights, not the free speech.
But a right to be forgotten for me necessitates that if you have information on me publicly accessible on the web, your site has to be hidden or removed. That's elevating my right to be forgotten over your right to free speech.
Your right to privacy conflicts with my right to express myself freely, e.g. by entering your bedroom.
As one example.
Of course, if you define rights as what is left after all balancing has already been done, no conflicts arise. That's not very interesting.
This is nonsense. Right to express yourself does not mean right of going anywhere you want.
You're inventing non-existent rights to claim that they are violated. That's not how it works.
We have actual rights that are defined by law, those are the ones I'm talking about.
plonk
Downloading copyrighted material is illegal. Technical solutions exist and individuals are making money off of it. Buying drugs is illegal too. Solutions exist and individuals are making money off of it.
Do not fool yourselves, you won't be forgotten.
For example, a landlord can quickly Google a potential tenant. But I don't think he would try to go to a dark web black market, where he would have to pay in bitcoin some shady people, just to dig something in its past.
It is probably sufficient to "protect" people in most of their everyday interactions.
In Norway basic income tax information is publicly accessible, and have been "forever" at the tax offices. This was considered important for accountability, while the limited access was considered to make it an acceptable loss of privacy. With the advent of the internet this information was suddenly available online, and "everyone" looked up their friends and neighbours. Suddenly the privacy impact was drastically different, and recently there has been new restrictions added to find a balance more in line with the original.
This is what the right to be forgotten is about too: Practices that previously had little privacy impact, and public benefits, now have vastly different privacy impact due to the internet. As a result we need to find new balances. In some cases the benefit of the information will outweigh privacy considerations. In others they won't.
Even then, so far EU courts have made it clear that the original publication is protected: Nobody has been given the right to have information wiped from newspaper archives, for example. But indexing and making that information extremely easily available is a separate issue.
There's no reason for a black market: The information is still there and easily accessible for those specifically looking for that information. It is just not pushed in front of someone "just" doing a regular search for someones name.
* from my experience with the Dutch cookie law, the interpretation is that if you serve or target a Dutch audience, you need to comply; it would only make sense if the same metric is used for the Right to Be Forgotten;
* one interesting moral dilemma I have is whether this right to be forgotten should also apply to the audience in a different country (USA, for example). In other words, when someone from France requests a removal of a search result which was found on a US server, would this still be visible to people from the USA ? I think the answer to this should be yes, according to the laws that currently exist, but would allow someone who really wants to have "unfiltered" results (say, a recruiter) to simply use a VPN or proxy server to circumvent the law.
All in all, an important but difficult topic to discuss.
The first question is going to be "or else what?". Outside of the USA, Ireland and the UK, firms are going to simply choose not to operate there; but due to the nature non-discriminatory nature of the internet, their services will be available there anyway. There's not much that (e.g.) the Dutch government can do, and trying to fight it with blocking will just end up turning themselves into some sort of internet backwater; which I don't think anyone wants.
Also, both this law and the cookie law are EU-wide laws, and I don't think Google will be retreating from all EU countries any time soon. That's how these things work when you're a small country, you work together with others and suddenly they take you seriously.
The only valid reason for the right to be forgotten is because those existing laws are not enforced - news outlets can print falsehoods and leaked celebrity nudes, companies can publish data they know is outdated, and laws that exist to punish them for these things are not enacted.
If such laws were to be enforced, what need is there to be forgotten? Only factually true public scandals seem to remain, and we have laws to protect their existence (freedom of the press, etc.) for a reason.
The landmark case for this issue was Costeja: in 1998, a guy had some debts to Social Security, which forced the sale of some of his property to get reimbursed. More than a decade later, what would have been a record in a library basement, now appears as one of the top results when you search for his name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Spain_v_AEPD_and_Mario_...
In the Costeja case the court ruled that Google could be blocked from displaying the information on the grounds that it was no longer relevant (and did so under existing data protection laws, even if I believe that their application of those laws was misguided). The court also ruled that the newspaper could not be forced to remove the information.
What bothers me about the right to be forgotten is that difference. The information was accurate and legal, but Google displaying that information was not. Why the split? If the information was truly irrelevant, why not have the newspaper remove it (and solve the Google issue in the process)? Why only Google (especially in the wider right to forgotten laws)?
Yet our profoundly good memories allowing us to remember almost everything we experience is one thing that separates from the rest of the animal kingdom. It makes the prisoners dilemma not a dilemma for us at all, but rather turns the history of decisions we make over time into a single fabric into which can be woven all sorts cooperative behaviour.
Fortunately a world where people can demand things they have done be forgotten has been explored by others in much greater depth than is displayed here. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)" is a good starting point.
My example isn't great but hopefully you get what I'm saying.
Bringing the story up again in print, or on a talk show or wherever (in public) should be made illegal as well.
Ok, done. And it wasn't all the cases, just a couple that I missed.
Thanks for the hint!
I was just curious and wanted to share :)
Regarding the article, I disagree with the "evil corporation" test, and also disagree with the "unremarkable person" test. These test seems too specialised, and too representative of a particular worldview, to be of general applicability or usefulness.
Legally, it is an exciting and fascinating case, and really emblematic of the present. Given their history, it's cool that France is the nexus where this is going on. I'm fascinated to see what the courts adjudicate and what the enforcement results are.
At a meta level, making regard to Google's strategy, if I ran Google, I would never ever have given in to any of this, because as I will come to, this is not really about a “right to be forgotten at all.” Europe wants to censor our search results? Ignore. Europe threatens fines? Ignore. Europe makes some effective threat? Respond with a threat to shutter Google services for Europe, and market it, just to further incent the populist outrage, as adhering to principles of freedom for individuals and anti-state censorship ( as they did in China, even tho that decision was, because of different reasons, incorrect ). Then see where the regulators loyalties are, with the “cause of a lifetime” or with their soon to be rescinded tenure?
The antitrust case, and now this, it worked for Google to never have budged an inch on either of these things, but because the legal advice they listened to was all cowardice, they did. A reason contributing to the workability of an unflinching attitude for Google is that this is not really about a “right to be forgotten” for individuals at all, it is really about a “right for Europe to forget the reason their tech sector failed to produce a Google”.
Europe is bitter, that an American company has, again, taken over the world, and left “poor Europe” with the scraps. Rather than owning this, the Europeans would rather pretend that Google has done something wrong, so they can pretend that their failure was, in fact, the result of some injustice perpetrated against them by what they delude themselves is an evil corporation. Europe indulges this fantasy of victimization instead of owning their failure and creating improvements to make their tech sector work. Obviously their attitude is self-defeating and their delusion isn’t helping them create any improvements. It is giving them the fake pay off of pretending they are righteous fake victims of an “evil”, American company, that they feel in their delusion is “too successful to be moral”.
Because the antitrust case and now this is driven by Europe’s meta desire for a catharsis from owning responsibility for its economic impotence, Google should never have aided Europe in indulging their fantasy of victimization. It doesn’t help Europe, and it doesn’t help Google, because, as Ivan Vanko in Iron Man II says, “If you could make God bleed, people would cease to believe in Him. There will be blood in the water, the sharks will come. All I have to do is sit back and watch as the world consumes you.” Europe is poking the Googlebear because Europe, like Ivan, incorrectly blames Google for its own legacy of failure, and is now obsessed with fabricating a narrative that fake justifies their crusade against the American giant.
To paraphrase Tony Stark, “Where will you be watching the world consume me from? Oh, that's right, economic meltdown. I'll send you a food voucher.”
Google should never have budged because there now is blood in the water, and Europe has found a weakness.
To get even more meta, Europe actually was testing Google’s strength. Is Google strong enough to be an inspiration for leadership here, to us? If Google had showed true backbone, and said, “No, this is ridiculous,” Europe would have stepped back, confident they were in the presence of something that really deterministically knew what it was doing, take off their hats, bowed, and said, “Okay, Google, show us the way.” This would have led to greater integration and European collaboration with Google, which would have been great for everybody. Unfortunately, Google caved at the crucial moment, a trend that is disappointingly common in present-day American leadership.
Moving now to the actual ethics, I think there are two basic principles under contention in a case for a “right to be forgotten” :
1) does anyone ( beside the state, which is fine ) have the right to control the contents of another's mind?
2) what information about a thing ( person, company, entity ) is it lawful to keep secret ?
The answer to the first is no, no one has a right to control the contents of anyone else’s mind beside their own. Every person has perfect mental freedom to discover, learn, think and believe whatever they choose or whatever random chance leads them to. This is obviously to say nothing of expressing those beliefs, or creating consequences from those beliefs in the world. These latter two things are ignored in this present discussion.
The answer to the second is important to define. Some things are lawful to keep secret, and laws are already being or have been introduced to protect people in these cases ( such as the privacy of clinical information, the illegality of “revenge porn”, “sealed” legal proceedings, trade secrets, financial information of private companies, information that incites terrorist violence ( in Britain, at last ), and other things ). There is a lot of scope here for creating improvements, and likely a lot of future caselaw to adjudicate what different places mores and standards are about these things.
So, in light of this, and in light of the internet being a “public space”, and in light of Google being a major gateway to access information, it’s clear that there are __some__ things which are lawful to keep private, and illegal to publish publicly, and therefore, if they have appeared on the internet, have appeared on the internet illegally, and therefore are subject to similar treatment as now effected by DMCA takedown requests. So there is a right to remove some of these things, and that is simply the normal legal apparatus also finding the expression of its effects on the Internet. These things are not legal off the internet, and eventually the law will enforce them on the internet as well. In time, the coordination to strike a balance between different jurisdictions will lead to some “enclaves of permissiveness and iniquity” and also some new cooperative legislation between different jurisdictions to work together to remove illegal content.
So the basic consideration here is that while no one can limit what an individual puts into their head, there are some things that it is not legal to publish, and so in effect, individuals will not be able to put them into their heads.
Calling it a “right to be forgotten” is really just abstruse, and incorrect. You can’t force someone to forget something particular ( unless Eternal Sunshine is real ), and you can’t really even force the internet to forget. You can make some types of information illegal, and effect their removal or prevent their display. Practically tho, just as you can not unsay something said, nor put the dropped tumbler back together in the same way, you can’t rewind thermodynamics and you can never remove information once you have unleashed it online. All you can do, is limit the fallout, and try to limit the scope of dissemination, and try to dissuade people from releasing in the first place. One of the things this difficulty of enforcement suggests is that the penalties, when they are written, will come down on the side of being exaggeratedly deterrent, since their excess must compensate for the lack of a preventative complement.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005009
It sounds like you are advocating the exact opposite in both posts regarding how a global company should treat local laws and culture.
Does anyone think that wouldn't work, or that the cost to Google would be too much? I don't think France would be as willing as China to part with Google.
Would you be ready to use a company service that is willing to switch off its services, even temporarily, when they don't agree with the local law? Using your users as hostage, is a very bad way to create goodwill.
And even from those who don't particularly like the Right To Be Forgotten, many would not take kindly to an American company trying to teach us how we should organize our society. Anti-capitalism, and anti-American-imperialism are still strong ideas in Europe.
This isn't saying "organize your society like this", it's saying "we refuse to operate under these laws we view as restrictive, so as a society, decide whether you prefer to have these laws, or have Google". They have leverage, why not use it?
As for popular opposition, their case is that they shouldn't need to censor things around the world that are only illegal under French law. That seems likely to be well supported (especially if the alternative is "we can't use Google at all anymore").
It's not clear that France wants to censor things around the world. The problem is that Google doesn't censor results even to French connections, if the user accesses Google.com instead of Google.fr.
>We believe that no one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access.
Additionally, if this was all a misunderstanding, I believe it would have been cleared up by now, so the fact that nothing like that has come out in the last ten days tells me that they did understand correctly.
Although the company has granted some of the requests, delisting was only carried out on European extensions of the search engine and not when searches are made from “google.com” or other non-European extensions.
In accordance with the CJEU judgement, the CNIL considers that in order to be effective, delisting must be carried out on all extensions of the search engine and that the service provided by Google search constitutes a single processing.
Nowhere does it say that the problem is that the results are still accessible from other countries; it's specifically about still being accessible on the .com and other domains.
And if it was that simple, why hasn't CNIL come out and said that Google is misinterpreting it?
Also, what they link to is not the notice, which can be found here: http://www.cnil.fr/fileadmin/documents/approfondir/deliberat... I don't read French (and putting it through a translater didn't help much), so can someone who can maybe tell us what it actually says?