Insights on the First Three Years of the Right to Be Forgotten at Google

While not an absolute, in general, yes, it's a legal doctrine that quite a few privacy issues and certain rights do end with death.

What harms could happen to someone who is dead?

>Do you think stories about the thousands of judgements against him should have been delisted from the public prior to the election?

Shotgun reaction (knee-jerk, better phrase probably): no but Trump is such an exigent outlier here because of his immense footprint in various financial endeavors. Apply the same scrutiny to every citizen who steps up even to serve on city council, taken to it's extreme conclusion and you have John Q. Public getting grilled over his financials because someone found out he accidentally bounced a rent check in 2001 when he was in college.

But that's also why I made the qualifier of someone with a fiduciary responsibility to certain public trusts. Trump clearly fits this as someone with vetted interests in a very large (private) corporation and other business interests.

Don't get me wrong here: I definitely agree and value a thorough review of a candidate's worthiness for office, I'm still incredulous about the path we have to go down when we start looking at an individual's finances as an indicator of public service to the extent of running for office.

Said a better way: I'm looking at the extremely long view of this and having reservations about our ability to remain objective on the matter. So if we scale back from the extreme conclusion of Mr. Public and his bounced rent check from 2001, what does the middle ground look like and what is the framework for how the logic ladder works over asking candidates running for public office to disclose their financial 'worthiness' (read: I'm using this separately from the obvious disclosures that one may already be morally obliged to turn over such as relations one's business may have to government entities they would invariably preside over) and you may end up convincing me to change my mind.

Given two headlines:

- "foo suspected of sexual misconduct" @t=0

- "foo proved to be innocent in sexual misconduct case" @t+1 mo/yr/whatevs

Guess:

- what people will consciously or subconsciously remember when scanning through Google results

- which one will get the most clicks/views/pagerank at various points in time

That is, if they ever continue and look for the second one. And even if it were the last one, many (most?) people will be subconsciously biased anyway by the shock effect of the foo <-> sexual misconduct tie, which obliterates the "innocent" part.

This makes sense, but you also have to think of the other side; there are a lot of people who have been victims of sexual misconduct but there was not enough evidence to convict the perpetrator. Don't those people have the right to REMEMBER what happened to them, and tell people about what happened to them if they want to?

The weak need privacy to learn, organize, and so on. But as they become powerful, they lose some of their right to privacy.

I agree with that in the interpersonal realm. There are downsides to over-sharing. But maybe it was confusing for me to frame it as trusting. It's more like permission to be investigated. Or the absence of penalties for investigation. That is, reporters and police have the right (and indeed the duty) to investigate the powerful.

I.e., the tools will make up a plausible story, such as the story that best fits the available evidence excluding the forgotten bits? That's not very reassuring for those who worry about the loss of history.

>…few decades old has in no way been proven to be 'better'.

As long as someone can leverage such information for any sort of 'gains', the incentives to store/collect information with these capabilities will persist and grow (esp as it becomes cheaper to do so).

It will be interesting to see in the future what kind of databases pop up that with information on those who seek to scrub themselves from sites. I know the project I was working had companies wanting to pay us to remove information we mined/crowd-sourced about people (which we declined on principle that we found that it was increasingly valuable to people to be able to leverage this information on whatever contextual basis they chose to view it through).

The Google's and Facebook's have had to comply since they ultimately take money from advertisers based in the EU (i.e. have assets with exposure to EU political risks that may entail when banking/employing workers in the EU when engaging with these sorts of actvities), future organizations/platforms (from relatively centralized to decentralized) that monetize their traffic/platforms by mining crypto on their users platform won't have to though.

Should those people have the 'right' to be remembered, falsely, as child abusers? Should anything and everything every written about the case be expunged? Should individuals be responsible for purging their diaries of such information too? Why not? Someone might upload it to the Internet in the future and, because everyone else officially 'forgot', who will remain to remember that this is officially prohibited information?

Does Google have a public API to check for URL delisting, or are you thinking about bending the search API for that?

Google takes active counter-measures against the sort of automated queries that this would involve. It's also against their TOS, and might be considered criminal in some places.

I'm not so sanguine -- lots of RTBF requests come from aggregators, same as copyright take-down notices. So it's easy to imagine that a startup could start to get a large fraction of the ones sent to google/bing.

Strictly speaking, the EU's Court of Justice was just applying the EU Data Protection Directive's rule that organizations mustn't process more personal data than necessary, for longer than is necessary. That's a freestanding obligation that exists regardless of whether someone makes a request or not. It just so happens that in practice courts/regulators tend to view act/enforce it when someone has had to remind a company that they're failing to comply with that obligation, and the company hasn't complied. Hence it looks like something that companies only need to act on if they receive a request. Practically, if you're a search engine, that's the only pragmatic outcome anyway - how are you supposed to know, for each and every entry in your database, whether or not they satisfy the criteria for them to be "forgotten"? Better to have people flag potentially problematic ones, for you to then evaluate.

Ok, but do people have a right to remember, too? If you murdered my daughter 30 years ago, I have a right to keep telling people about what happened, including about the person who did it. I shouldn't be censored from talking about what happened to me, just because the person who killed my child wants to forget about it.

What you all described is the nice sounding part of RTBF.

You can then use the same mechanics of those laws to censor things you don't like, as an organization or a government.

It's the age old argument of spirit vs letter of the law.

The spirit might be privacy, the mechanical letter is actual censorship. It is why I don't think something like RTBF wouldn't stand up in the USA, since the law probably wouldn't survive a 1st amendment challenge.

Sorry, I wasn't particularly clear and I was talking about a slightly different angle on the right to be forgotten.

If there's a news site that reports on something old and normally irrelevant -- like a decades old conviction that's spent -- then you can ask Google not to return that report when someone searches for your name. Google won't go and take down the original page, though, and won't stop it appearing in other searches.

The analogy I was given -- which I like -- is that before online searching, everything was reported in the newspapers. If you knew when something happened, you could quickly look it up in the archives, and if you wanted to know about someone in particular, you had to spend a week trawling. Without the right to be forgotten, small things that previously would be forgotten are much more easily remembered. The original right to be forgotten (pre-GDPR) is about fixing _that_. But the archive would still be there, to be trawled through if required, and even in the GDPR there's an exemption for things like news sites.

The GDPR adds extra protections that are being lumped in the same bucket but are more in line with what the DPA in the UK already required: the right to ask a company to delete personal data they hold on you. GDPR also expands the scope of what counts as personal data that the company would have to delete. But at the end of the day, Google's not going to remove anyone else's pages.