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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

I am a pretty big supporter of Right to Be Forgotten as a thing, and thought this was an excellent summary of how it's gone so far! When you add the 89% of the users being "private individuals", and that the next biggest category, 4.4%, is minors, it seems most of the requests definitely fall within the purpose intended.

Without going into the details, 43% delisting rate seems likely quite fair, it doesn't seem like it's being over-implemented by any means, but a good number of requests are indeed being approved, this is a lot better than I expected, to be honest.

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I'm the exact opposite: I believe that history should never be rewritten nor forgotten. The increasing "transientness" of information is, quite frankly, extremely scary --- when future historians looking back may see only a whitewashed representation of what things were really like.

Besides, Google forgets enough even without being told to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840

I’m sure any future historians working on a scale where these delistings would be relevant would be working with tools that would be able to do the equivalent of a content-aware fill on the missing data.

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.

I’m being slightly tongue-in-cheek, but what history can be researched or delivered in human-digestible form where the histories of the delisted at the scale you’re concerned about wouldn’t be so lossily compressed as to amount to roughly the same thing?

Not everyone will be delisted, the usual tools of extrapolation and demography are still available to the historian, and merely because information is not accessible via Google does not mean it is not available.

> The increasing "transientness" of information is, quite frankly, extremely scary

Information has always been transient, except that which we put great effort into preserving, until very recently. The idea that every bit of data, every photograph, every snippet of text should be immortalized and exhaustively searchable is only a few decades old has in no way been proven to be 'better'.

>…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.

The highlight point is that Right To Be Forgotten is very specific on what types of information should be forgotten. (As shown, only 43% of requests for removal were approved.) If you consider the type of content that is required to be forgotten, this concern isn't really reasonable.

Surely you would have objection to posting your social security number here, and entering it into a never forgotten, permanent pool of information for us to reference and use, right?

RTBF specifically excludes any information that has historical significance or relevance to the public interest, so things like nude photos of you your ex posted is fair game, but the corruption scandal a politician is hoping to cover up is not.

As another commenter pointed out, history of the mundane (such as things RTBF permits removal of) is so voluminous in nature, that removal of some private citizens' data will not meaningfully reduce the historical value of the Internet (or what remains of it) in the future. I'm far more concerned about valuable sites and content shut down due to lack of finance or interest, than the removal of personal information that's harmful to people alive today.

Why should history not be forgotten? It used it be that way all the time before we managed to build information storage large enough to capture this huge amount of data. And at what cost does it come that we never forget? Not all too long ago (1993-1997), there was a large trial against 25 people for alleged child abuse in germany. (1) All were eventually cleared, one person died while in prison before the trial ended. It was one of the largest case of false accusations for child abuse. The names were all over the press. Should those people not have the right to have that memory fade? To have history be forgotten at some point?

> Besides, Google forgets enough even without being told to:

That was not the case when the laws were drafted and enacted.

(Wormser Prozesse, sorry, german only https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormser_Prozesse)

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?

Sorry but I really fundamentally disagree with this line of thought. My existence and my rights, right now, are vastly more important than some theoretical future information-hungry archeologist.

> When you add the 89% of the users being "private individuals", and that the next biggest category, 4.4%, is minors, it seems most of the requests definitely fall within the purpose intended

Not necessarily, from the article:

> The top 1,000 requesters, 0.25% of individuals filing RTBF requests, were responsible for 15% of the requests. Many of these frequent requesters are in fact not individuals themselves, but law firms and reputation management services representing individuals.

As a supporter of RTBF, what do you think about its impact on startup search engines?

I'm advising a startup in Europe -- 3 people, self-funded -- and am not looking forward to them launching and hitting a buzz-saw of RTBF requests.

That seems like a problem such a startup would love to have.

In any case, one cost-saving advice would be to piggy-back on Google's process: simply check if they delisted the search result and follow. I can't think of a specific law this would actually infringe.

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

If I were to try to implement this, I'd safely assume any link I'm asked to delist, Google was also asked to delist. Therefore, if I can't find it in Google Search with a query where the page in question should be the top or only result, it means Google delisted it.

That being said, I don't feel anyone should assume Google's decisions are inherently right, and do something just because Google did it.

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 am not sure how much they need to worry. Bear in mind, they only need to act if they get a request. Consider how successful your startup's search engine would have to be before individuals and companies would start submitting RTBF requests to them!

People are worried about how they appear on Google because Google is people's default. (In Europe, Google's somewhere in the 90% of search range, I think, you'd know better than I.) People don't want the first impression people get of them in the world's index to be unfair. That's why RTBF doesn't really even bother removing the original content from the web, they just want Google's index cleaned out.

I think if the startup you're advising ever has to seriously worry about RTBF, that startup has already succeeded.

(And, as an aside, pass on my best wishes to them. We need more choices in the search space!)

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.

Yes, but you have to be on that company's radar, before they add it to the list. (Something unlikely to happen en masse before your startup is large enough to handle it appropriately.) And in the case of copyright takedowns, the extreme volume comes in part from the fact that Google and other companies of that size have even implemented bulk reporting tools explicitly designed to permit requests of that type and volume that the average user, or even corporation, doesn't have access to.

I don't know the answers to these, but I'd wonder if RTBF would allow for you to set restrictions on who can submit requests on behalf of who, or the volume permitted by a given reporting entity, or the level of automation permitted in reporting. Presumably the EU would much rather than you make reasoned, well-thought responses to carefully considered and submitted removal requests, over a bulk import/bulk decision process that leads to a lot of incorrect behavior.

Do you have a concrete reason why you think it's unlikely? I have a different opinion about how large a search engine company would have to be before being able to "handle it appropriately", but maybe you have a good argument that trumps my experiences.

I don't think I could offer anything solid, no, beyond the general view that the litigious folks generally don't approach a platform before it's significantly large. (Most piracy on smaller mediums goes unharassed, for example, while The Pirate Bay and YouTube gets most of the attention.)

A friend of mine runs a video copyright enforcement company. He provides the ammunition that Hollywood uses to send takedowns to a large number of small video platforms for content posted on them.

For a web-wide search engine, it's even easier: you can send a search engine a takedown for any url anywhere, because search engines index the whole web. RTBF requests are similarly relevant to any web-wide search engine.

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.

RTBF is a nice sounding thing, but feels like it's too easy to abuse to create a censorship regime.

Generally with law, if an abuse is possible, power users will eventually exploit that abuse potential to the fullest extent possible.

>RTBF is a nice sounding thing, but feels like it's too easy to abuse to create a censorship regime.

Privacy is not that alike censorship for the individual. That's not a regime, it's a right.

For public affairs we have all kinds of records from the media anyway.

And people should have the right for their past crimes to be forgotten, even murder or whatever. What you did in your 20s is not necessarily who you are in your 50s.

And since public bias, society gossip/meanness nature will be with us for the foreseeable future, we can at least kill the technology and "permanent records" that feed it.

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.

But that already does not happen under the GDPR right? Criminal record keeping still works the way it used to.

And what about the person who was wrongly accused/convicted of murder? He deserves to have his incorrect history forgotten, does he not?

>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.

30 years on? Why? What good can come out of it? Assuming that the person has served its time (or did it by accident or something)?

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.

I think we have way worse things to worry about our governments than censorship of Google results.

Whereas personal privacy is an actual, very real problem for people.

You think it might apply 'only' to google, but a smart lawyer can make it apply anywhere.

Think of software patents or the DCMA. Sounds nice in theory, a terror in practice. Any tool exposed free to use for the public, including some very wealthy sociopaths, will be abused.

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