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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

This is such a pittance. $112,000? That's like a parking ticket.

I don't know the details of that particular case but in France, a lot of laws have penalty clauses in them which doesn't leave much at the discretion of the judge. It's a different judicial system.

A drop in the bucket. I'm assuming there's some legal or other reason why they can't charge more.

I also find it funny how Google is trying to take the stance of "freedom of expression". What a joke.

What's so funny here?

For example, if Google gave France the right to censor content based on "right to be forgotten" laws, why not other laws? For example, nazi memorabilia is illegal in fr but not us (or most countries).

And if Google gave fr the right, why not de? Or cn? Or any other country in the world?

It quite clearly states in the article that the laws apply to individuals requesting their personal data to be removed. This is not censorship. I agree there's a fine line that needs to be walked however I'm very sick and tired of the invasion of privacy that's become acceptable today and Google is an offender. I'v made my personal decisions to move away from as many Google services as possible and use pseudonyms as that's my choice and right, however, I do this because in Canada we don't have the same privacy protections that France does. I am well aware that by using Google Services I'm willingly giving up my information in exchange for their use and I've tailored my life around that assumption, however, not everyone is adept at this like I am and I think it's not morally alright to refuse the deletion of data requested by the individual who should rightfully own and control that data.

I'm very, very, sick of the state of privacy today and I wish Google would've been fined significantly more.

EDIT: for grammar

Shouldn't the individuals request that their data is removed from the primary source? If that happens, google will relatively quickly remove those results from their index.

Yes, people should do that.

Here's some thinking from 2010 about right to be forgotten and EU data protection law: https://secure.edps.europa.eu/EDPSWEB/webdav/shared/Document...

    - It is important to highlight the persistent memory of the internet
    regarding the information used for the harassment. This information
    might stay for ever on the web and will be extremely difficult to erase
    completely. This point presents a great challenge for the respect of
    the right to be forgotten or for the enforcement of an appropriate
    and proportionate data retention policy. Here again the providers of
    such platforms are in a position to play a determinant role and their
    role could be driven by the respect of data protection rules which
    can, if properly implemented, mitigate the side effects produced by
    these three factors.

Ignore this next bit - I'm wrong. I'm leaving it here because people have already responded to it. {RTBF arose because a man was a victim of harassment, where the harasser was creating very many websites across the world using fake details to do so with a variety of hosting services who had a variety of responses to the man's legal paperwork.

At that point his only recourse was to go to the search engines and ask them to stop republishing (which is what the search result text snippets are doing) the harassment.}

There are protections built into the RTBF for stuff that's in the public interest.

EU and US have pretty different understanding of rights. US has strong freedom of speech, EU has strong right to privacy.

I don't know where you got that the RTBF came from harassment. The case was about a man who didn't want people to be able to find out that his house had been repossessed by creditors:

" On 5 March 2010, Mr Costeja González, a Spanish national resident in Spain, lodged with the AEPD a complaint against La Vanguardia Ediciones SL, which publishes a daily newspaper with a large circulation, in particular in Catalonia (Spain) (‘La Vanguardia’), and against Google Spain and Google Inc. The complaint was based on the fact that, when an internet user entered Mr Costeja González’s name in the search engine of the Google group (‘Google Search’), he would obtain links to two pages of La Vanguardia’s newspaper, of 19 January and 9 March 1998 respectively, on which an announcement mentioning Mr Costeja González’s name appeared for a real-estate auction connected with attachment proceedings for the recovery of social security debts."

>RTBF arose because a man was a victim of harassment, where the harasser was creating very many websites across the world using fake details to do so with a variety of hosting services who had a variety of responses to the man's legal paperwork.

No, RTBF was invented when Mario Costeja González decided that a perfectly factual archived news article concerning him (http://hemeroteca.lavanguardia.com/preview/1998/01/19/pagina...) was inconvenient.

The ironic thing is the right to be forgotten is about public data, and that is what Google is arguing over. Perhaps there should be a global right to be forgotten, but it has to be implemented in a correct fashion. Opening loopholes for despotic regimes to be an editor over Google search results is not ok.

As for not using the Google services, your comment on the face of it is a nice little narrative. Although ironically the data you share with Google has some of the best privacy protections, and you can delete it at any time you wish. Also it doesn't affect search results, so you are not really doing anything other than taking a moral stand, and limiting your access to services, some of which I personally find quite excellent and good.

Google already is censoring content at DMCA requests. And what about privacy? What would you do to remove some unpleasant information about yourself from the internet?

What would you do to remove some unpleasant information about yourself from <some other publishing method>?

Presumably, get a lawyer and sue them for defamation, likely at great personal expense. Up against the corporate lawyers of media empires (or search engines), your chances are pretty slim.

With DMCA requests, the expression is deemed unlawful and the DMCA is used ultimately to take down the actual website. That is not the case here as the websites are allowed to continue publishing to the world without penalty.

> Google already is censoring content at DMCA requests

Google not only alerts you to the fact they removed a link due to the DMCA, they even link to the entry in the Chilling Effects database that contains the actual DMCA takedown notice.

The implementation of the "right to be forgotten" specifically disallows a notification of any kind.

Almost everyone complaining about Right To Be Forgotten is almost completely unaware of it's actual requirements. It protects the privacy of private citizens, specifically if the information isn't relevant to the public interest.

In fact, the EU (and I believe, the United Nations actually), has defined privacy as a "fundamental human right". And I'd definitely argue it's a country's first duty to protect the fundamental human rights of it's citizens.

Shouldn't this right extend to primary sources then?

Technically, it already does. You can already get a lawyer, find a way to try and sue someone for false (or private) information online, such as Hulk Hogan's recent suit against Gawker. But that requires lawyers and a lot of money. Privacy isn't just for the rich, this framework to delist information from search engines to protect people's privacy is straightforward and only requires working with a few companies.

> Technically, it already does.

No, it doesn't

> You can already get a lawyer, find a way to try and sue someone for false (or private) information online

The information is not false and is not private

The EU has defined privacy, along with 117 other things, to be a fundamental human right. However the EU also contradicts that right with another right of "freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority". In the case of "right to be forgotten" EU law is holding that it is more important for an individual to be able to censor information about themselves than it is for other people to be able to share and receive information about that person. The courts also held, uselessly, that each invocation of the right to be forgotten must be individually balanced against that other right to convey and receive information, and that the burden of proof lies with the respondent charged with removing the information by the individual. In other words the right to be forgotten is effectively absolute, because no person or entity could afford to investigate and respond to each such claim, and is forced to simply accept them all as if they were uniformly meritorious. As a result, the public loses their right to receive and impart information, which is guaranteed by the EU Charter.

So you can argue that "it's a country's first duty to protect the fundamental human rights of it's citizens" but in this instance the courts have erased one of those human rights. Also I wonder if you also believe in reciprocal enforcement of all the various rights guaranteed to Americans by their Constitution and by jurisprudence. You might not be aware, for example, that the most fundamental right of free speech in the US extends not only to individuals but to organizations and corporate entities. Are you prepared for American courts to start laying fines on European companies for infringing on the rights of free speech of American corporations?

I will admit the full extent of the Citizens United decision terrifies me. But even then RTBF doesn't affect information of public interest. So any sort of inappropriate behavior on behalf of a corporation wouldn't really be covered.

The protections in the RTBF ruling for public interest are weak, though, because they require search engines to make the determination themselves, and to defend that determination in each individual case before a court. Obviously it will be much easier for the search engines to just throw away the public interest, because there is no penalty for complying with all RTBF requests.

Could not a website also ask a search engine to defend it's determination to remove a website improperly? Sites like The Guardian should presumably also be able to appeal if their public interest posts are censored.

In a proper appeal process (I cannot say if this is currently in RTBF, I don't know), infringed parties exist which could complain for either way a decision goes, so it's in the best interest of the determining party (in this case Google or Bing) to make the decision most likely to be upheld by an appeals court (or data protection agency, as I think it is in this case).

> In other words the right to be forgotten is effectively absolute, because no person or entity could afford to investigate and respond to each such claim, and is forced to simply accept them all as if they were uniformly meritorious.

No, that's not how it necessarily works. The search teams do not like meddling with their search results so it is reasonable to assume they analyze removal requests carefully and proceed with the removal only for the substantiated ones, in the sense of the court ruling. If the request does not qualify, the probability that the individual would drag the big company into court and win is very low. There is no worry of losing in the court then and the search team won't remove the result.

> It protects the privacy of private citizens, specifically if the information isn't relevant to the public interest.

If it protects the privacy of citizens why it doesn't pull the information from the source and just from the search engines?

This was well explained in my comments here already.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11356302

No, you only gave some bad excuses and put the blame in the wrong place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com