Google ordered to remove links to stories about Google removing links to stories | Hacker News Reader

Google ordered to remove links to stories about Google removing links to stories

arstechnica.co.uk

187 pointsPretzelFisch120 comments

The article is misleading and incorrect, possibly written to inflame smart geeks into noticing a crazy recursive loop.

Those news articles about the right to be forgotten mention some private people by name, who have exercised their "right to be forgotten." The only request is that Google doesn't find a hit when someone searches for those people's names. If your search terms don't include those names, then it's ok to find those articles. Just not if you are specifically searching for info on those particular people by name.

It's sad that a journalist would forget to mention the key point. Then people get justifiably upset, and no one wins.

In my mind, this only makes the law itself all the more evidently absurd.

Well, the law has one thing in mind: You should be able to stumble upon knowledge, or if you know where to look, but a future employer, or a neighbor, etc should not be able to find out about crimes you did when you were a teen.

Perhaps the real fix is in not publishing the details of teenagers who commit crimes?

I think that's absolutely the correct solution, but it doesn't help all of the people who already had information about their actions as teenagers published.

If it were illegal, you could then file takedowns from the publishers, and it wouldn't show up in google anymore... Google should not be an enforcement arm for internet censorship... the end.

But the actual newspaper article is not illegal – only the connection from the name to the article is.

That doesn't make the law right or just.

Well, it is forbidden in Germany, but some newspapers will still do it, and then just eat the fine. BILD is very infamous for this.

Maybe the solution is for teenagers to not commit crimes?

Using a popular search engine that abides by EU laws is not the only way to find out about things. Killing the messenger does nothing to the message.

You can tell this to Europeans until you are blue in the face but they will not listen. They think they can impose their censorship on the world.

Yeah, totes weird how Europeans expect companies operating inside Europe to obey European law.

It does no good if you can just use google.com and that will never be censored but pretend is good enough for them.

it's perfectly reasonable for eu companies to say any google service accessed from within eu borders shall be so regulated

If google doesn't like it, they are free to stop doing business inside the eu.

It's not very reasonable to attempt to enforce geo boundaries on the Internet. It's a silly, backwards, approach. It might be something governments are doing, but that's only to be expected of them, always looking to increase influence and control.

If Europe is foolish enough to try then Google will dump them, just like China.

That might be for the best.

> You can tell this to Europeans until you are blue in the face but they will not listen. They think they can impose their censorship on the world.

> Yeah, totes weird how Europeans expect companies operating inside Europe to obey European law

And two good example of people thinking that Europeans/Americans/etc are just one big homogenous organism.

The difference to the US is that the US was actually successful, its called DMCA.

Even Hitler was smart enough to burn books, not just the card catalogue.

The intent is not to make it impossible to find out about things, but to make it sufficiently more effort to find out about things that the harm to the individuals in question is sufficiently reduced.

It is very explicitly a tradeoff where everyone involved understands that the information won't go away, and where the courts have very explicitly said they will not consider trying to make the information go away as that would fly in the face of freedom of speech.

The ease of access to information has a very substantial bearing on how much having the information out there affects peoples lives.

The intent is to deny many someones access to public information for the convenience of one someone. This is censorship by degrees.

You'll have to pardon me. I'll be over here, in the corner, throwing up.

Personally, I find this a dangerous way of thinking. A real "right to be forgotten" law would affect content providers/publishers. Instead this is more "right to de-index". Ease of access is very subjective and the arbiters appear to be the ones holding the gun shooting said messengers. Despite my other concerns with the legislation, the primary reason it works today is because of centralization. The same people fighting for internet privacy and against government censorship will end up making laws like this unenforceable in the future. I wonder what lengths the EU will then go to when the indexing of lawful content is not centralized.

Well, imagine I get suspected of a crime, turns out I actually wasn’t responsible.

Obviously, you can’t remove the newspaper article, even if it is heavily editorialized.

But removing the connection between my name and that article would be possible. If someone searches for the specific article, they’ll find it. If they search for my name, they won’t.

A reasonable compromise (all data is still there and readable, but my name isn’t connected with it anymore).

> Obviously, you can’t remove the newspaper article, even if it is heavily editorialized.

Wouldn't it be easier to have a law requiring that if the newspaper article is online, then they MUST have some sort of Editor's Note or retraction in bold before the actual article.

We do, but (a) international media does not have to adhere to that law (for example, a newspaper in Switzerland could still contain such an article), and (b) tabloids like BILD ignore that regulation anyway and even end up showing themselves as the only newspaper that fights against the evil censorship.

None of those points support censoring media that do follow the European regulations. The current "Right to be forgotten" is just an ambiguous law's backdoor that lets you hide information without having to pass through the courts.

Sure, but the aim of the legislation isn't to render it impossible for a sufficiently interested person to find out that you were arrested for allegedly stealing a garden gnome in 1987. It's to ensure that your 1987 arrest isn't the first (and quite possibly only) thing a person associates with your name.

Imposing restrictions on messengers does a huge amount to the message; that's why states also often take steps to restrict political advertising even whilst allowing candidates to say what they want

I'm sympathetic to the goal and the individuals affected, and while the law provides some small benefit to these individuals, I think that benefit must be weighed against the (to my mind) large cost to society at large.

The law places a very large burden on search engines (and who knows, perhaps other platforms in the future) that now must evaluate and remove/deny all requests or risk expensive litigation. I think most companies will err or the side of safety and remove most requests, making censorship easy.

Especially when one John Smith can speak for the rest.

Yes, but it is effectively saying that the "right to be forgotten" means that the right extends to the topic/event covered on the pages as it relates to that person not the pages themselves.

Hopefully this will not extend to all new content created about the past events and the person, because there could at times be a reason for new content on an old topic to be relevant to the public and people should be able to find it then. I fear it will however.

Not really, is just sounds like you have a legal interest in what results from searches for your name. Google is running a de-facto background search service and they're being regulated like one.

That is insane... I want to be found online... so if someone else with my name files a request, people will no longer be able to google my name? You do something stupid online, and regret it? Sucks to be you.

I have a common name, and the idea that someone with the same name could wipe me from all of google's results is ridiculous to say the least. It's a stupid law written by people with no understanding of technical limitations or the competence to think these things through, much like the people using this law.

> the idea that someone with the same name could wipe me from all of google's results is ridiculous to say the least

Yup, it is ridiculous. It is also not what happens, not what the law provides for and not what the article is talking about.

I realize that, but it is what the person I was replying to was suggesting should be the case.

I understand why the DMCA exists -- so that people can't post your copyrighted data (that you necessarily own) without your consent.

I understand slander laws -- so that people can't make up stories about you and present them as facts.

I do not understand the Right to be Forgotten -- if something is true and public information, why should Google hide the data from its search results? An article being about you does not mean that the information inside of it "belongs" to you.

>> "the links relating to a criminal offence that were removed by Google following a request from the individual concerned."

You can't request the BBC or Telegraph to take down true and legitimate articles (nor should you), so on what basis does the EU think that they can order Google to alter their search results?

Your question is covered by the EU's fact sheet on the topic. I found it very readable and clear: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets...

You can indeed request the BBC or Telegraph to take down articles under similar circumstances. For example in most European countries you can't publish a kind of "where are they now?" article that picks a few random '80s criminal cases, and tracks down the whereabouts of the people 30 years later. That kind of article, showing that a certain person (mentioned by name) now works as a web designer in Aarhus, while another person (also mentioned by name) has moved to Germany and is a welder, etc., would be seen as an invasion of privacy by gratuitously digging up and publishing this kind of 30-year-old information without a current public-interest justification.

It doesn't come up often with respectable media outlets, because they have mostly internalized this norm anyway, and wouldn't run such a story. But I could imagine a tabloid or daytime TV show doing something like that, if it were legal.

I don't see what the disagreement is.

Somebody (e.g. Billybob) does something stupid that winds up on the local news sites. 6yr later the court case is long since closed and he wants it behind him because it was a just a drunken mistake. EU says he has a right to be forgotten which he exercises. Google deference the news articles from Billybob's name. Billybob Google's himself and finds a blog about Google referencing search results that mentions him by name and the nature of the result. Since it mentions him by name it's a primary result (you Goggle Billybob and it comes up) and Google should have to remove it per the law.

Obviously this sort of law creates an incentive for background check services to just crawl every news site imaginable which could create a whole set of different problems but that's beyond this scope...

I think it'll just take time for society to understand that people do stupid shit and ignore it as long as it's irrelevant to the context and "forgetting" events is just a stopgap. Eventually people will realize that racists, political extremists and people with non-violent felonies can still function normally from 9 to 5 and this will be a non issue.

This problem has a lot in common on the technical side with dragnet surveillance and law enforcement. Google needs to determine what is and isn't relevant when returning results for somebody. Some misdemeanor in highschool is of dubious relevance 10yr after the fact and if the person apparently has a lot of results that paint a picture of them having a successful career and generally having moved on. Google could put that on the 3rd or 4th page, after all the "people named $name in $state" public records databases, where it's practically forgotten. Meanwhile the NSA (or whoever) needs to figure out how to filter out and avoid flagging for followup that sound like flags but are actually sarcastic, based on inside jokes, or obvious false positives when considered in context (to avoid wasting their time,wasting our money and violating people's privacy).

> Obviously this sort of law creates an incentive for background check services

Bingo

Yet you'll note that things like credit services are, at least in the united states because that's what I'm familiar with, regulated. You have to be able to see the information and there is a process to contest inaccurate information, with government penalties if the companies don't comply. And there is enforced forgetfulness: negative credit information is removed from your report generally after 7 years. I rather doubt google wants to be so regulated; like many internet companies, they want to have their cake and eat it too.

Still sounds like a boon to the people most likely to send out these requests to me.

Scenario 1. HR scans resume, types name into Google, finds Github profile and a couple of headlines in local newspaper about arrest, discards CV

Scenario 2. HR scans resume, types name into Google, finds Github profile and forwards to dev team. Interview arranged as goes well and offer is made pending background check. Company pays $30 to agency who confirms grades and work history and additionally reveals that you were arrested but not charged for a misdemeanour when you were a teenager

In the second case, there's a pretty good chance the candidate will actually get the job.

Not being a full-time European I find this example fishy. In the USA arrest records of minors are sealed, even in case of trial and conviction. Nobody in the USA is publishing news articles about misdemeanor or even felony arrests of teenagers, unless the crime is very notorious. Is that not the case in Europe?

This is a great comment, and it actually highlights some additional problems with it all.

Let's say your name was "Mike Smith." Pretty common name, right? Even if HR took your Hiring Scenario 1, it will be most likely it will take until the offer-pending-official-background-check is made. Why? Because "Mike Smith" brings up hundreds and thousands of results even with a geolocated search. Living in a city of several million is a boon to reformed misdemeanor teen Mike Smith. That's not even considering the legitimate criminal Mike Smith's that need to be ignored for our innocent Mike Smith's sake.

Now, if your name was "Quincy Brouwer" (Dutch Surname), its easier for this arrest to pop up.

The reality of the situation, at least from what I've seen, is that there is a hybrid of Scenarios 1 & 2 that actually go on. they will do some rudimental Googling on your name, but it won't be until the offer is about to be made that they'll do the formal, paid, background check and look into your credit history and other things.

Unfortunately on the other side of the coin, for developers in particular, many will go through several rounds of sometimes grueling technical interviews only to find out a silly mistake they made as a youth disbars them from the job.

> I think it'll just take time for society to realize that people do stupid shit and ignore it as long as it's irrelevant to the context and "forgetting" events is just a stopgap

This is a great point and it ties into a relatively new change in the cultural landscape from "no news is good news" to "_any_ news is bad news." Search Engines are often the culprit, as well.

Not a fully accurate example, but it describes the situation - Suppose CS student BillyBob got drunk out with his freshmen friends at a bar night, and he really needs to pee. he climbed the fence into a construction area and was soon arrested for trespassing along with charges for being drunk in public / whatever else is related to the charge. To his dismay, he ends up on several public news site, despite the judge writing off the offense and letting him go free. He finished his CS degree with honors.

These news sites do not really care that his charge was far more innocent than, a guy who assisted in something far more malicious, say, the Watergate scandal, and yet his chances of finding future employment are reduced drastically as he easily appears in search results. IMO, the new normal works like a boolean, either flagged or not flagged. This is irrespective of his efficacy as a developer, and the fact that he learned from a college mistake.

:ED: Didn't see you updated your post to include a similar situation.

In sum, I think the Right to be Forgotten was a good idea, but it was not implemented correctly.

The same way that software, the nsa, and ubiquitous cameras with facial recognition changed surveillance, google changed knowledge discovery. The laws that were appropriate when surveilling a person meant dedicating a set of human beings to following someone, thus naturally limiting the scale, fall apart when it can all be done electronically at vastly higher scale for very little marginal cost. Similarly, the laws that worked when information was naturally forgotten because we had limited ability to index and discover it, ie you could always do deep background checks on someone, but it was very labor intensive and thus pricey, need rewriting now you can get the equivalent of an fbi background surveillance check by typing a name for tiny effort and cost.

Hence jerks like Eric Schmidt suggest people should change their name if they want not to have youthful hijinks follow them around, yet is happy to use his billions and lawyers to keep his mistresses' stories off the internet.

Well put. The title of the original article is unnecessarily confusing and probably purposely made so for ironic effect.

Regardless of beliefs on the Right to be Forgotten, this feels wrong.

The way that I had previously interpreted it, a person or entity could ask to have all references to them removed. The request in this article isn't that, though - it's a request to cherry-pick, and have subsets removed.

To me, this feels too exploitable. I'm not sure whether I could agree with a Right to be Forgotten in the first place, but if there were one it should be all-or-nothing.

---

EDIT: It appears, per @alain94040's comment, that this is not entirely the case, and that the article was not accurate.

The interpretation that @alain94040 explained, which is that Google would still show the articles in question, just not if the query includes the entity who requested they be forgotten's name (or is it just not weighted by the name? If a name's included, but the rest of the query is sufficiently strong, would it still find the article?) actually seems completely acceptable in the realm of a Right to be Forgotten.

I think this demonstrates the problems with restricting information (Note: Not making a moral judgement of any kind, just stating the problem set is HARD)

Information has basically zero copy cost, and can't be removed once given. So to stop people from knowing, you have to stop them from originally learning. Except that the ability to learn is "cheap".

The same problems result whether we're preventing the spread of how to build a bomb, breed a superbug, or remove naked photos. Somewhere in that continuum will be info that you agree is best not to be spread, but the steps required to enforce that can be a lot more expansive.

It's hard.

I'm surprised no one has discussed an aspect of this decision that I find particularly troubling: it means that if there is a serious abuse of the right to be forgotten law, the articles discussing that abuse may be delisted because they mention the individual involved.

I'm against the law in general, but I have to admit there are cases that I find innocuous when considered by themselves. If Google has to delist an article about a private citizen's minor indiscretions, I disagree, but it's small potatoes. But any law is subject to potential overreach, and to combat it, we have to be able to discuss it. It seems that this decision works to censor criticism of the law as well.

As someone will point out, you can criticize the law and be ok by omitting the relevant facts (is that just the name of the individual involved?) but I think it is bad to put this requirement on any critical discussion of the law.

> If Google has to delist an article about a private citizen's minor indiscretions, I disagree, but it's small potatoes.

There's a reason the "slippery slope" is such a popular phrase in legal discussions. What exactly is "minor"? Who is a "private citizen"? Where do you draw those lines? Everything is a spectrum.

In order to arbitrate in situations where there are shades of gray, we need judges. But laws such as this are impossible to bring before a judge due to their quantity, and there isn't necessarily a single party "damaged" by the takedowns, which makes it even less plausible. There is a public interest in having this information, and it's hard to get individuals in a free society to spend a lot of time and money fighting for public interest.

If you're against this law in some cases, you have to be against it in all cases.

> If you're against this law in some cases, you have to be against it in all cases.

I don't know what this is supposed to mean. Of course, if I am against a law, I think it should not exist. And that covers all cases.

But equally obviously, I can say that there are cases where applying the law has better or worse consequences.

> I have to admit there are cases that I find innocuous when considered by themselves

I was referring to that statement. It's never "innocuous" because there's no universal, objective guideline for what is innocuous and what isn't. Something that seems innocuous to you as a spectator may not be for people involved.

"It's never harmful because there's no universal, objective guideline for what is harmful and what isn't".

I think the distinction is that it won't de-index the page for all searches. It will de-index the page when people search for Johnny DidBad.

Case 1 User searches for "right to be forgotten abuses" he finds a webpage about how Johnny DidBad did a bad thing and is now abusing the right to be forgotten law. In this case the right to be forgotten isn't doing anything.

Case 2 User searches for "Johnny DidBad" he won't find the webpage about how Johnny DidBad did a bad thing and the right to be forgotten abuses.

I'm not saying I agree with the law but I don't think it limits the ability to discuss the law, and potential abuses of it.

Well, this is a reasonable distinction, but think about how much people look for high profile examples in political discussions.

If it deindexes it for all searches that involve the user name, then if someone has heard of a particular abuse with the name, and attempts to search for "Johnny DidBad right to be forgotten abuses", presumably the results will be the same as for "right to be forgotten abuses" -- which might bury the results they are specific searching for, making accessing information related to discussions of the law -- which specific cases held up as examples certainly are -- more difficult.

An ACLU article from The Onion comes to mind.

http://www.theonion.com/article/aclu-defends-nazis-right-to-...

I know it's still quite a controversial topic, and I have not yet come down on whether or not I like the current implementations, but I am a fan of the notion of a Right to be Forgotten.

At the very least, I like the notion that a person should be able to have some level of control over what companies are allowed to access about them; the control over what information may be in the public sphere is a little more difficult to talk about. E.g., I deeply dislike that most companies operate on an opt-out system for information collection; I would rather information collection (particularly anything dealing with personally-identifying information) to be universally opt-in with some reasonable attempt (not an EULA) made to offer the user an informed decision.

Search-engines are tricky because they provide a public service for finding information but are, themselves, a company that often profits from the collection of information both in the usership of their service and in the data they crawl to aid their users in finding content.

My current opinion (which is not yet fully formed) is that it is wrong to order Google to unlist results; but, on the other hand, it should be completely legal to order Google to remove what is essentially a dossier that they have on a particular user (at that user's request).

I am still mulling this whole thing over; but, at the very least, it is obvious that the issue isn't a simple one.

I don't see how anything like right to be forgotten can be implemented without essentially internet censorship.

Does a corrupt politician have a right to be forgotten forgotten? Former politician? Bank executive? Hedge fund manager? Barbara Streisand? How about those who donate to political causes? The trend seems to be going the other way on that one, at least in the US.

What is the criteria and who decides? I can't imagine how such subjectivity would not be abused.

I believe there should be a framework in place, but that it should be strict yet accessible. An easy example is someone that is arrested but not convicted of a crime. Arrests are public information, and very often people assume that only the guilty are arrested. Combine that with the regular practice of Googling new hires for every job and someone's life could easily be quite literally ruined.

If a community cares about this, it seems more appropriate to address this at the community level by not publishing arrest records. Far fewer thorny issues are at stake with that decision that there are in censoring data that has been public at some point.

Collectively, we've never really seriously dealt with information that was historically public but which historically also took considerable effort/interest to access--e.g. it was in a dusty file cabinet in the office of some town clerk who only worked for a few hours on Tuesday and Thursday. Furthermore, it took even more effort/interest/even money to link together such information with other information sources.

While there are, in general, a lot of good reasons for transparency in society, there are probably good arguments for keeping certain types of information private now that they're so much easier to access.

One person's guilty looking circumstances are another person's innocent daily routine. Does the picture of the devout Jew carrying a ham qualify?

Criminal or civil? Should we scrub the internet of OJ Simpson? What about when a trial is taking place, can reporters report on it and then have to purge it from their servers immediately after acquittal?

I just don't think it's practical.

Even if you believe there is some theoretical framework that would not put undue hardships on all to comply and only be applicable to those causes in which we overwhelmingly agree upon, this isn't the framework that will be applied. The fact is I won't be involved in designing this framework and (presumably) neither will you. In fact, I will likely never even understand the framework. The people who will be involved will be the people with the most at stake and the most amount of money. They will know how the framework works and will be integral in designing it to benefit those same people. Classic regulatory capture. Intentions are not results.

Completely agree. Furthermore, those who seek power will always keep the records - whether it's a black market search engine or various governments, these rights to be forgotten will not fully be forgotten, so what is the ultimate point?

As an interesting aside, http://morph.is is hoping to implement Distributed Search, effectively nullifying arguments like this. Which, in my opinion, is for the best.

morph.is looks like it goes a little beyond Distributed Search:

"When the World Brain is capable of honestly deciding, it may then rule upon my compensation from the Fund from that point and beyond. I will turn over complete control of the Fund to the World Brain once it is legally or de facto capable of asserting such control."

Oh i completely agree, i just meant it is attempting to do that - i didn't mean just that :) (the other project goals seemed less on-topic, so i didn't bring them up)

This is about webpage searches, there's still all of social media for spreading word about public service information. Whereas, if a person is wrongly charged with a crime, should they not at least have a right to not show up in web page searches? No one on social media will want to spread the old, wrong news. So the good the Right to be Forgotten does has no substitute, while what it takes away can be picked up by social media (and search within social media too). That said, I still haven't made up my mind about it.

> No one on social media will want to spread the old, wrong news.

You can't be serious. This is exactly what happens all the time with internet hate mobs.

It's a growing problem, yes, but I see it as a different problem. Social media is by definition people. It's a culture/education problem, because people would spread it on messaging apps (like whatsapp) or even mouth to mouth, so there's seemingly no technological solution to that.

It's also easier to discredit information based on who's spreading it. Meanwhile Google is taken as authority on what's relevant.

So actually there is something to do with tech we could do: transparent trust chains where you know where information is coming from out of your trusted peers and which trusted peers of theirs. It's very hairy, because trustworthiness in one subject doesn't carry over well in many cases, but maybe machine learning will help us there. That would be a nicer scenario than everyone trusting what Google says should be the most important public things to know about a given person. Even politicians suffer from misinformation spread by opposition, so it's not clear cut even in that case.

You assume that the legal system is infallible. I don't think it should purged from the public record or search engines. This whole thing reminds me of 1984, where the government alters events in the past by essentially controlling information.

I don't like that people are wrongly charged with a crime either. I think as more information about people becomes made available, our culture will shift to become more permissive as to appropriate behavior. As the sexual revolution brought about attitudes towards personal relationships, I think eventually society will be more forgiving with the information available online about a person.

Unlike former politicians and Barbara Streisland, the people this legislation is designed to help have nothing on the internet about them save for a reference to something embarrassing (often without less-newsworthy context which later exonerates them of the charge/accusation).

A search on even the worst of corrupt politicians usually surfaces information on their achievements as well as their failings, and probably highlights a notionally "NPOV" article and their own homepage as the top results. And of course, corrupt politicians, being public figures, end up Streisand-ing themselves if they attempt to abuse the legislation to hide particular articles about their past.

As for the actual legislation: there's an opt out for media companies (Google chose not to try to identify as a media company), a public interest defence, and the local "information commissioner" that Google can refer the case to if it doesn't want the cost and risk associated with making its own "right of removal" vs "public interest" evaluations.

I would prefer that society realize people make mistakes and/or change, and allow others a second chance. Then we wouldn't need the right to be forgotten.

As long as the "right to be forgotten" exists, that will never happen.

"Right to be forgotten" is the wrong kind of control to give to people over their private information. I can understand why people may not want to be tracked over the internet, but from what I know "Right to be forgotten" has nothing to do with google storing cookies in your web-browser.

It is a step in the right direction gone to far, stepping over what is actually important.

Well, Google themselves suggested during discussions with the EU that people should just change their name when their old name has too much stuff connected with it.

The Right to be Forgotten is a far better implementation than that, IMO

EU should go after the publishers, instead. Actually fix the problem at the root. But they know that'd never go anywhere as people would see how much censorshil it actually is. So instead, they offload the work to Google and get to keep their heads in the sand.

The EU doesn’t want the information deleted.

Imagine I was suspected as criminal once. Then, if someone searches for the case, they should be able to find it.

If someone just searches my name, they shouldn’t.

The issue isn’t existence of information, but that this information is connected to your name.

No, it is quite simple. You should not gain any right to control information just because the information happens to be about you.

Tough question, but why not?

Freedom of speech.

Leaving aside implementation practicalities (i.e. the great difficulty of putting the genie/information back in the bottle), it boils down to where someone balances an individual right to privacy relative to the right of other individuals/organizations to say/write whatever they want modulo rather narrow constraints (in the US).As a philosophical matter, I'm not sure there's a right answer and the corner cases are always going to be hard. (e.g. the availability of photos of drunken teenager antics do not exactly contribute to public knowledge/culture/etc. but can potentially be quite harmful for the person in question).

> "At the very least, I like the notion that a person should be able to have some level of control over what companies are allowed to access about them"

Yes, but how do the EU regulations in question promote this goal? Background checks still exist, as does the information about you online. These regulations only impose a small burden to finding the information (by eliminating the quickest and most convenient way of finding it). They offer the illusion of control and nothing more.

> "My current opinion (which is not yet fully formed) is that it is wrong to order Google to unlist results; but, on the other hand, it should be completely legal to order Google to remove what is essentially a dossier that they have on a particular user (at that user's request)."

Again, you're confusing things that are related but not the same. The information cannot be deleted. If Google learned something about you from public sources, that information is in the public domain and Google doesn't own or control it (though it may offer access to it). If it gained that information because you used one or more Google services, then Google has a right to use the information for purposes specified in the EULA.

If you want to have control over your information then the only way to accomplish that is to not give it away in the first place. Neither the individual in question nor Google have any ownership over information once it's public. The only question is how easy and convenient accessing that information should be.

It only benefits those who are already powerful to make access to information difficult. For example, a company can still find out if you were charged with a crime even if Google doesn't return results related to that event, but you will have a much harder time finding out if that company pollutes the environment (do you want to dig through EPA files or review past court cases against the company?) if news articles relevant to that topic have been expunged from search engines.

"The Right to be Forgotten" is just doublespeak for censorship. Selling it as an indispensable tool for personal privacy is a sickening irony.

The Right to be Forgotten only applies to people, not to corporations.

The idea is that the stuff you did as teen should not be public for everyone – a future employer, or neighbor, should not be able to find your drunk partying photos on the web (an actual issue currently, where employers openly suggest people to "just stop partying or stop using the web").

No. What you point out are not problems with the theoretical Right to be Forgotten, but rather the current implementations of it (which, like I wrote, I have not decided whether or not I can support at all).

Also, I said that it should be legal to order google to delete its stored profile of a user, not that it should have to delete the sources where it got that information from.

If anyone's interested in listening to a lengthy debate on the "Right to be Forgotten", check this out --

http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/1...

It's a fascinating debate, and a really great listen. For me, I was on the fence at the beginning, but ended up firmly on the side of "No, the 'right to be forgotten' should not be adopted by the United States" by the end of it.

Edit: Oh hey, I listened to the podcast, but turns out there's a video version too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDzW-2q1ZQ

There's an author with the same name as me- if I exercise my right to be forgotten, does that mean he's forgotten too? I can imagine he might not like that.

You can identify specific search results that are about you and ask for them to be removed. If anything I would expect the author to be in favor of this, because now more of the remaining results will be about them.

Well, they should now ask for this link to also be removed...

I think in cases like this, especially if it's recursive, the search should redirect to `//censored.google.eu/?q=...` with a big notice at the top noting that the results excludes links that were specifically censored by EU law, with maybe a link to an article, or two about said law at the top of the page.

Not done yet: https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+ordered+to+remove+lin...

I have a feeling that someone is going to order this link removed.

I'm all for privacy. It just isn't implementable.

Sounds like they google Google at Google.

// You guys had a rough week, huh?

"We need to go deeper."

so now they will need to ask Google to remove links to stories about /(Google being ordered to remove links about stories about)*/ Google removing links to stories.

So nice to see the Kleene star in practice!

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