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Comment by dkarapetyan | Hacker News Reader

I'm saying the concept itself is absurd to begin with. Is all French data kept on French servers? Obviously not. Whatever infrastructure google uses to power their data layer is replicated across continents. So when a French citizen says "Remove me from all your indices because my government gives me that right" google is not allowed to insert some extra phrases in there like "only if the person requesting that data is also French or is asking for the data from servers located in France".

Even if we assume that somehow all French data happened to be located on servers in France then complying with those requests would mean purging the data except it is obvious they are not doing that if a person from another country can access the data. So however you slice it google is either non-compliant or is purposefully misunderstanding what it means "to be forgotten" from their indices.

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Is France the only country that gets this power? What happens when China demands the removal of Tiananmen Square wikipedia article in the name of unity? Or when the UK requests the removal of the Vietnamese napalm girl in the name of decency? Do we just keep taking down results until we're left only with things that no country objects to?

I think you may misunderstand what the right to be forgotten usually refers to. It's not about a user's "data" such as emails or online comments; it's usually about news articles that mention a person.

Surely you would agree that no matter what French law is, there is no way a French judge should be able to force, say, an American company to not display links to American websites (which happen to mention a French person) for American users?

(disclosure: I work for Google, but not on anything related to RTBF, and my views are my own)

The newspaper who wrote an article about the Frenchman has a right to display that article to people outside of France and has a right to have search engines index the article to drive traffic to its website.

The Internet user outside of France has a right to read something critical of the Frenchman to decide whether to do business with him on that basis and has a right to find that information using a search engine.

Right. And what happens when an Internet user in France opens a VPN connection that has an endpoint outside of France, and accesses information that the French government doesn't wish him to see?

You can prosecute the Internet user, of course. That's what happens in China, for instance.

You can try to detect VPNs and make it a crime to even try to create such a VPN. That's also what happens in authoritarian countries.

But is that the right way for France or other EU countries to go? No.

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