France fines Google over 'right to be forgotten'
reuters.com
reuters.com
The problem is that Google gets hundreds of thousands of these requests, and over 50% of them are deemed to be invalid - a doctor removing links to a malpractice suit against him, for instance.
The search engine must make the call on whether the request is valid or not, based on very vague standards. If they don't remove something and is later found to have been wrong, they could be fined up to 4% of their annual revenue or €20M, whichever is greater (that's under pending legislation)
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mediapolicyproject/2015/12/18/the-fin...
Dandy. Next China will ask the same thing globally of other results. How can you do anything on the internet if you must follow all laws everywhere at the same time?
a) it should not be limited to the internet: one should be able to request to be forgotten by a certain group or by the humanity altogether. This is not possible.
b) it is not practical: to what extent does it apply (in essence, not in practice)? I grab pdf-prints of articles sometimes. Am I guilty if an author wants their online presence removed? More, there are many search services, many other services that index and archive online content, which of these would have to respond to such requests? And if the right is not limited to the internet, how it is possible to do, practically? Well, it's impossible.
c) it is a right that conflicts with the freedom of thought: It should be at one's own will to forget something or not, this is a state intervention into peoples knowledge and memories.
d) it has implications on posthumous publications of work: after someone is passed away, who decides if they shall be forgotten or not? Or does anybody have the right to?
e) it has implications on the collective knowledge of the man: if, say, Stephen Hawking wanted to be forgotten, we'd have lost some important part of it.
f) it has implications on derived works and citations: If one quotes person A, in, say a blog post, and if that person A wanted to be forgotten, what will the citing author would have to do? Anonymise the quotes? Remove them?
I guess this right to be forgotten is either not a right, and is an example of a freedom that violates others' freedoms. It's unbelievable that serious, smart people (!) got convinced enough about this that this became a law. Publicising something is completely at one's will. Will brings responsibilities, and one should either take the responsibility for what he publishes, or live with the consequences. Because if there is a right, it applies globally, i.e. equally to the non-digital realm, and the right to be forgotten would have really bad consequences.
And if France does, does China? ISIS? Trump? Me, too?
Say someone published a book of peoples names and photos, complete with a description of the worst thing they have done during their lifetime. Sure, if your a doctor and you had some malpractice problems then it's a good thing that people can see that, but that time you got drunk and did something stupid that ended up in the news? Should that be the first thing that pops up when searching for you? Wouldn't that effect your employment prospects, your future? Is there any actual value to anyone in that being only a search away, other than it matches a particular query for your name?
Google is being truthful in saying "this is a page that exists", but does it have to if the person the page is about has a legitimate reason for wanting it removed? The actual page still exists and can still be accessed so nobodies freedom of speech is being curtailed, this just gives citizens a right to say "maybe I don't want the fact I was wrongly convicted of something to follow me around forever".
If anything this is giving citizens the freedom of speech to say "I want this to be forgotten, it's not me and shouldn't haunt me forever".
The "right to be forgotten" is one of them.
Sure there is, be lucky enough to have a common name (or one shared with a celebrity) and wait until enough news piles ontop of your bad news that nobody will ever find it.
Google's freedom of speech is being curtailed. I thought I addressed this, but maybe not. Whether you think they're being jerks in exercising that right is entirely beside the point.
> If anything this is giving citizens the freedom of speech to say "I want this to be forgotten..."
A thousand times no. Freedom of speech is the right to literally say/write/etc "please let this be forgotten." You can say that until you're blue in the face and your fingers fall off. What is being discussed here, the government stepping in and forcing that request to be honored, is nothing more or less than censorship at the whim of the individual, or maybe a judge. This is not free speech, it is the exact opposite.
And don't try to tell me, "but I said only legitimate reasons!" That's a fantasy. A legal mechanism like this is 100% guaranteed to be abused. The DMCA is supposed to only be used for legitimate reasons too.
If we get used to Google being muzzled in this manner, eventually it will be common knowledge that you can't get the full truth on Google, so they will go elsewhere. Are you going to start filing "right to be forgotten" requests on everyone who mentions your malpractice suit except the original source? Every search engine, every aggregator built to get around precisely this law? Good luck if someone comes up with a peer-to-peer solution. How long do you really think it will be before someone gets upset that the source document is still available and demands that it be taken down too? Not long, if people start taking the right to be forgotten seriously.
We're already getting used to the idea that our actions have chance of becoming widely known, and that most people have some kind of stupid gaffe in their history. If you let things progress naturally, we'll get more used to it and reach some relatively sane equilibrium. Censorship throws away the chance to reach that point.