Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case
bbc.com
bbc.com
It's not clear to me what the difference is between a government censoring someone directly and a government making it impossible for anyone to find a piece of information. Right to Be Forgotten only works if it becomes prohibitively expensive for a company or individual to locate past articles. So who cares whether or not the original source has been taken down?
It's not clear to me why it's not troubling to European citizens for their government to be in charge of what information is and isn't relevant to the public. Whenever I ask people about this, I get the response "well, that's why we have courts." I dunno, Europeans must trust their courts a lot more than I trust mine.
It's not clear to me why this problem couldn't be solved more elegantly by creating anti-discrimination laws around criminal records. If a company gets 90% through the hiring process, runs a background check, and then immediately says "no", then you sue them.
It's also not clear to me that this will be enforceable in the future. I consider distributed site indexing to be an unsolved problem, but I don't think its unsolvable, and people are actively working on it. If for some crazy reason a distributed web search starts getting used on par with DuckDuckGo in the next 5 years, what do you do about that? Ban the technology?
Because anti-discrimination laws around criminal records will work about as well as anti-discrimination laws regarding all the other protected classes (race, gender, age, etc.). Companies will very quickly figure out how to work around them, and will find ways to reject candidates for being a member of said protected class without making it apparent that this is the true cause for rejection.
If a company gets 90% through the hiring process, runs a background check, and then immediately says "no", then you sue them.
If this law passes, that will happen about as often as a company telling you to your face, "We're not hiring you because you're {black| a woman| over 40, etc}." What will probably happen is that companies will move the background check step ahead of the interview step. Then, after they've done the background check and had the interview, they can tell you, "Well, sorry, we've decided to go with a different applicant," just as they do today.
The cost of doing interviews to screen candidates is much lower than background checks. Why would a company want to do that step first?
I highly doubt that. An engineer-hour costs roughly $100. A background check probably costs roughly as much as a phone screen, and an order of a magnitude less than an on-site. It'd be pretty easy to do the background check step in between the phone screen and the on-site, and it wouldn't appreciably raise costs to the company.
Also spending money externally appears to the company to cost much more than using internal resources
Subjecting someone to 17 hours of interviews borders on the inhumane.
Plus, interviews are done iteratively; you don't run the whole process for every candidate.
Moreover, background checks are the least likely to actually disqualify candidates, so they are always done last.
A single candidate will do 1-2 screens (this changes over time / role), plus at least 4-5 on-site interviews. That's about 7-8 hours of meetings, minimum. Having interviewed at a number of other SF tech startups, almost all of them had about the same # of interviews.
Once you're past the screen interview, you'll almost always get all 5 interviews in the pool unless you're terrible - it's more efficient to just have the candidate come in once.
Google recommends a 1:1 ratio of prep/feedback time to interview time, so it's ~2 hrs per interview even if you're not involved in the hire / no hire discussion.
The discussion here was specifically that it was likely that background checks would start disqualifying candidates, so maybe it's better to do them up front as that's cheaper than having the interviews done first... I'd say that still makes sense, at least before the pool, if you think there's a reasonable chance they'll get punted.
I have never encountered a situation with 7 interviews.
Bear in mind that many wash out during the phone screen, so no, a fully loaded interview schedule is not that sort of commitment at all.
7 interviews just for the hired candidate (1-2 screeners, 5-6 on-site pool interviews.) Maybe less than 7 hrs if they're cut to 45 mins each.
I think we trust our governments much more than US citizens trust there government. There's a line from Ronald Reagan that goes something like:
"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
The great preponderance of people in Europe simply do not think like this. For a huge range of issues that statement would actually sound reassuring in Europe. Essentially, if you believe in the rule of law and democracy, the government is simply ourselves, getting collectively together to fix something.
Note that this doesn't mean we like any particular politician. We despise many politicians. But the idea of government as a force for good still remains in Europe as far as I can see (UK). Sometimes I think the difference between Europe and the US is that we despise our politicians and quite like the non-political part of our government (civil service, NHS, etc). The US appears to hate the non-political part of it too.
Coincidentally, this is how most Americans seem to feel about their government's foreign policy.
Rule of law being the key part. The U.S. has no rule of law, and our legal system doesn't punish those in power or those with money. For some relevant reading, I recommend Greenwald's book, With Liberty and Justice for Some.
Well, there are some fundamental differences in how we do law in the EU, compared to the US.
We don't do the "jury of peers" thing (and I'm still not sure if this if really true or just stories/TV but, aren't juries specifically selected to have no background in the case matter, or legal matter?). Further, it's not unheard of that the judges and lawyers have technical knowledge for technical cases, or at least read up about it. Moreso than the EU-politicians that made the ruling, anyway, hence deferring to courts to sensibly applying the rulings. There seems to be a "you need to be rich in order to get justice" sentiment that I head Americans openly admit to as the status quo, and what I get from the news. This seems to be a bit less severe in the EU (at least in the Netherlands, that I know of). Certainly, expensive lawyers do increase your chances (unfortunately), but it's not a requirement, and if the law is in fact on your side, an affordable lawyer will do, too. And in addition to that, the "if the law is in fact on your side"-part is also easier to determine beforehand and carries a lot less risk, because of the differences between Common Law (US and most English-speaking countries) and Civil Law (rest of the world, basically) legal systems. Basically it means we codify most of our laws into law-books, using a rather standardised form of "legalese". Because of this, we don't do "precedence" like in Common Law systems. Instead we have "jurisprudence", which is a similar idea, but is used by judges as a guideline in cases where reality is ambiguous with respect to the codified law, so to speak.
Now, I didn't really study law, except for a single course (crash course into IP/tech law, part of my CS curriculum) a decade ago, and stuff I read on Wikipedia. So some of the above might not be 100% accurate, and the conclusions are obviously my opinion. But even then, that's at least some reasons to place some trust in our courts :)
I do think that American courts have a problem with this, and I do wish Americans cared more about it. It's fairly standard to hear people over here talk about whether or not something is legal and say "Oh, but I'm not a lawyer, make sure you consult with one before making any decisions."
That always irritates me. Our laws ostensibly exist for the common people, not lawyers. It reminds me of the stereotypical olden churches where only a few people would get to read or understand the Bible. It feels dirty.
Folks say "you should consult with a lawyer" when the topic is something that's too obscure or marginal to be obvious to a non-lawyer... that doesn't mean the laws are overly complex, just that there are always going to be marginal situations.
I absolutely love how our laws are relatively small, how precedent is from the Supreme Court only, and how most people don’t have any contact with lawyers in their entire life.
We have elements of common law in the US code, and you can definitely have binding precedent that doesn't involve the Supreme Court. As for most folks not having any contact with lawyers... I'm not sure I've met any adult who hasn't.
That's how US Constitution was written (not that it helped a lot - there's still hot debate about what "abridging the freedom of speech" or "to keep and bear arms" means). But most of the other laws are about as readable to the common man as a patch against dense APL code is readable to a seven year old. You may encounter some words you think you recognize. And then there are bylaws and regulations, which most people don't even know exist and some are impossible to get without paying money (yes, really). And then in common law system there's caselaw which is court decision having the power of law. Common man has the chance of a snowball in a nuclear reactor.
You're not going to use a VPN to search "from another country" unless you already know or suspect something but can't find any information on it and suspect the reason is because you are searching from the EU rather than the USA!
The EU has pressured Google to censor its results globally, as I recall. But Google has prevailed on that, at least. So far, anyway.
When China or Russia does it, it's at least "censorship", and probably also "dictatorship".
But Google would probably say "no" to many of them.
That would suck.
and they lost the case in 2014 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Spain_v_AEPD_and_Mario_...), and 'interpreted it' as 'we'll just limit the results from Europe'. This was a landmark case, and they just keep losing them.
Edit: So yes, I see https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/respect-european-law-goog...
So what, Google could nuke all of its business operations in the EU, I suppose.
In general it is always impossible to have this conversation because the idea of "free speech" is very different in America compared to Europe.
Is there something I'm missing about Right to be Forgotten then? Why is this needed if it's already illegal to discriminate against someone over minor crimes or scandals?
Does the law not have much teeth or something?
Case-in-point: Facebook. Most people don't believe that when you ask a company like Facebook or Google to delete your account, they actually delete your data. Sure, you no longer have access to it, definitely, but most people seem to assume that it's not entirely gone.
RTBF ensures that companies whom you provided information to delete this information if asked to politely.
Or I'm a, 18 year old caught in a Romeo & Juliet, with my face plastered across Facebook as a "sex offender", but it's later overturned (or, as I call it, sanity prevailed). Should I have a right to be forgotten?
Or... the list of possibilities continues.
A real con artist can just fake someone's ID, for them it's pretty trivial.
The issue is less than 1% of convictions ever make it to the Internet, and those people currently will be stigmatized forever, unlike the other 99%, unless they have this mechanism. Google's plea was 'we will self police, but we won't tell you how. We will ignore court orders, because we choose to'. The court objected to that approach.
If you are convicted of new crimes, no matter how long ago, then your sentence may be significantly increased as a repeat offender.
So, employers don’t get access to criminal records, and generally, newspapers can’t republish information about people in a way that would harm their life today. Even criminals whose cases were public when they went into jail have a right to a normal life after they’ve finished their sentence – sometimes this is included with a change of name, but ideally, it’d be better if we, as society, would just forgive, or forget.
> solved more elegantly by creating anti-discrimination laws around criminal records
Such laws have a terrible record. What happens in reality is not that company says "screw it, we'll take a risk of hiring a criminal since we can't run a background check" but "we'll use next available statistical heuristic for being a criminal and if you have it we won't let you nowhere around 90% - we'd fail you much earlier and we'd build the process in a way that you can prove nothing". And if you're familiar with statistical heuristics they'd use - and note they're not trained statistician so they wouldn't go into such details as "bad sign for the whole population but good sign for this particular tiny subgroup", especially if they hire for a position where they have a large pool of candidates - you can imagine how discriminatory it would be in practice.
I feel it is basically a cultural issue. Many Europeans (including me) believe that the "right to be forgotten" is real, i.e. we want that right. Company with american cultural roots feels differently, so there's a clash. The main problem is that Google doesn't want to submit to our European culture; which is fine, they can fight in court.
We had that in Russia since 2016, and your guess how it works is exactly correct (e.g. see Skrynnik vs Yandex case).
What I don't understand though, is how this is supposed to help. If you want a fact to disappear, shouldn't you work that out with the publisher? Until you do that, it isn't really forgotten... just kind of badly remembered. I mean, people can still access that story as long as it's on the internet.
- the fact you were member of X and you done some comments gets a good Page Rank
- X becomes very unpopular, people that believed in X ideology are seen as idiots,racists,violent
- you got older and smarter and you realized your mistake
- you made some other good things during your life, like maybe won chess tournaments, volunteered,donated to charities,raise children
And the problem will be that your mistake will be on the top results on web search wile your good stuff will probably not be online or if it is will be on 3rd or 4rd web search page(the even where you won the chess competition has a bad page rank)
Many issues you can say are a society problem, like a murder, you can argue that the society is at fault for creating them, allowing guns, drogs, bad education.
So for this problem I think there should be some technical solution for affecting the page rank of some pages on Google or other searches in some conditions, and now we need to find some fair conditions when this should happen, maybe google could fix the algorithm to not give such a big page rank to this kind of stories in general.
Every conviction must be declared for a small number of years if asked. After that period it must only be declared if you're applying for a sensitive job (e.g. school teacher) and it resulted in a custodial sentence.
Former cons should be able to get a job, otherwise they'll just end up in jail again. If it's white collar crime then they could be just temporarily barred from that profession as part of the sentence.
There are some jobs where that matters.
What I want is for companies to NOT, outright reject someone because of a google search. After the person is 90% THROUGH an interview process, and the company has spent significant amounts of resources interviewing someone, THEN they can reject them.
The problem isn't rejection for a potentually valid reason. The problem is the immediate instant judgment without giving someone a chance.
That you can't get that question answered through Google is actually good. Just think about it: anybody can add content to Google, and making you look bad is as simple as making a page with a bunch of stuff about you that isn't actually true. And in the age of Google-without-checks that's how it works: a quick Google search has taken the place of a much more thorough background check for important positions and instead it is being applied to pizza delivery people as well.
The reocities project got a lot of mail over the years and a couple of the cases that stood out for me were people that had been targeted by individuals that had gone out of their way to make their lives much harder to the point of some of them thinking of ending their lives. And then there were all the childhood follies that people would rather have the internet forgets.
The 'right to be forgotten' is as much about being in control of the narrative about ourselves as anything else, and that there is some level of recourse here is good: the judge carefully weighed the evidence and decided in favor of the party that brought the suit, it could have gone the other way too.
It is also quite funny to me that on the one hand people argue that those who break the law and pay the price should then be forever haunted by this but at the same time hold corporations to a different standard by allowing them to break the law on an ongoing basis because it suits their purpose.
Seems to me that's an opportunity for regulatory capture: politically-connected companies end up permitted to check on potential employees, while upstarts and outcasts don't — giving an unfair advantage (assuming the hiring criminals is a disadvantage) to the well-connected firms.
I trust the European courts more than I trust American advertisers.
Okay, great, so Google's now required to judge right to be forgotten requests based on whether the criminal has "shown remorse." Yeah, that's not arbitrary or even a little impossible to do at scale.
Let's grant that there are good cases for removing pages from a search index. If this is going to be the rubric, we should let the courts figure it out, and then an order should be issued to search engines to remove the content. This thing where you tell each search engine to remove content, the search engines decide based on, I dunno, court precedent or gut feeling or whatever, then you sue, then you appeal, I just don't see how that can work.
Eventually Google will just start granting every single request regardless of merit because being challenged will get too expensive.
If the right to be forgotten is an important right that Eu courts want to enforce, they should actually enforce it. Not just tell google to get it right.
And if one put themsleves in the shoes of a victim, or even a criminal who has served their time, Google's pagerank is doing them a disservice.
I don't know if expunging records is the right thing to do, but it's worth discussing. There's no guarantee that searching a criminal's name will bring up the recent history where they've done their time, shown contrition, and is contributing to society. Instead it'll be the most highly cited -- likely news about their crime.
As a society, we approve of jail being the mechanism to "forgive" a person's crime. As such, isn't it horrible that Google's pagerank will only turn up what they've done wrong in the past? Again, I don't know if expunging the records is the right thing to do (in fact I believe it's wrong), but I do think it's worth debating.
That's not really true. Serving prison time is neither a way to "forgive" nor a way to "pay debt back to society". Those are just common phrases some people use.
If felons were truly forgiven, they would have their right to vote restored. They wouldn't be denied a passport to travel abroad or denied a firearms license. Convicted felons of financial crime will be denied officer positions such as CFO in public companies. A sex felony will be a lifetime of reporting on the sex offenders registries.
Society has never perceived jail time as truly resetting the scarlet letter back to zero. Therefore, the debate is whether "Google results" is in the same bucket as "sex offender list". For many in society, they think it's wrong to remove those results from Google.
This is a very US-centric attitude and very undemocratic in my view.
In Germany, for example, people in jail are generally allowed to vote. They could even set up a voting booth inside the jail if there were demand. However, there usually isn't and inmates vote by mail.
In the last 25 years, only 80 people, who were found guilty of treason, have lost the right to vote.
However, people whose sentence is at least a year in jail are excluded from running for office for 5 years.
> Society has never perceived jail time as truly resetting the scarlet letter back to zero.
Some jobs here require a so-called "certificate of conduct" which you can get from the police and which lists criminal convictions. The entries in this certificate expire after a certain number of years, depending on the the crime. The maximum time a conviction can be in the record is 10 years after it has been served. Afterwards, it's deleted. (It is not deleted from police records but from what a company could find out in a background check by going through official channels.)
I have always thought that was outrageous. I think people should be aloud to vote even while they're in jail. The current system could allow a group to wipe out their political opponents by simply passing a law outlawing a common activity, then selectively enforcing it. I mean that's basically what the war on drugs was about.
You should be made aware that none of those happen in most EU countries. Most people here feel that things done in the US like public sex offender registeries are abhorrent.
Now, should retribution be infinite? Is rehabilitation impossible? Should a criminal be permanently removed from society?
We generally answer no to these questions except in rare situations that are front-page news and enter popular vocabulary. That’s why Google is in the wrong here.
And they know it too - the only reason they want to do it is a few more ad clicks.
This doesn't happen in Europe. Part of the social contract over here is that criminals who have served their sentence have the right to have their fundamental rights restored. That in fact is the justification for punishment in the first place.
A society that takes on the authority to punish individuals must integrate these individuals after they have payed their debt to society. If they wouldn't the punishment would be arbitrary, cruel and serve no purpose.
1. Removal of social offender from society
2. Rehabilitation of non-conforming individuals
3. Punishment enough to deter future offenders
I mean, on the most basic level, a prior offense is an excellent predictor of a future offense. If I want to hire somebody to supervise women or children, I'd like not to hire somebody who (at any point in their life) victimized women or children, because it's not too much to ask!
I, for one, don't think a murderer should be forgiven. A murderer gets to live, and the victim is no longer alive, there is fundamentally nothing you can do to be forgiven for murder. To me, that is as it should be.
At very least, the perpetrator of a crime should not be left to decide whether or not I forgive him, and to enforce that through the courts.
Now Mark is out, looking for a job as a JavaScript developer but when Mark is Googled to check about his involvement in OS projects and personal portfolio before his Github profile the article on CNN from 5 years ago is displayed and apparently Mark is a cookie monster.
Is Mark sentenced to never be employed again? Mark made a mistake but Is He really worse from all these people who commit crimes and never get caught or end up in the news?
Maybe the balance could be to not display Marks convictions until specifically asked for?
I don't say that I have the answer but I really don't understand the concept of unforgiveness.
Maybe we should approach all this from a utilitarian perspective? What's the utility of labelling Mark as a thief years after he paid for what he did?
This is basically the status quo before. But ... the employer is going to background check mark and find them anyway, because they are public record and available in easily searchable databases (see Lexis, etc)
In practice, this stuff simply doesn't affect any employment case (at least in the US). None of the right to be forgotten stuff allows you to avoid any of the above except the "easy google search" (which again, practically doesn't matter).
So the argument you make should be limited to that. (and i think it is entirely reasonable to question whether your neighbors, who won't background check you, but will search google, should find it)
With the pre-Google system, at least Mark gets his foot in the door and has a chance to impress the prospective employer during the interview process. While his conviction may still impact his employment prospects, at least he has a fighting chance.
With Google in place, Mark never receives a call-back. The employer doesn't bother.
How much does this impact Mark in the real world? I have no idea. But, I'd prefer the non-Google system and avoid the potential of Mark never finding meaningful employment.
Are they? I've been involved in hiring people, and I've never seen that. Is it common in the EU?
That doesn't mean that Mark doesn't deserve a second chance at life. But it does mean that, for the first while at least, you are ill-advised to give him the keys to the room where the cookies are kept.
The argument seems to be that because society does pass that sentence already, we who disagree should "fix" it by making sure society doesn't learn that Mark is a cookie monster.
Does that not sound backwards? If the answer to your question is really "no", then we wouldn't need to have this discussion.
I suppose I can see the argument that things are unfair to Mark because other people got away with stealing cookies without having it on the public record.
This is not Google's fault and they should not be the one's being punished. If a government wants to have a say here they can, but in general society will act on information and you can't hide it from them.
Mark needs to be given the opportunity to demonstrate to an employer hes no longer a cookie monster. He needs to rebuild that trust.
He would do this by taking a lower than average pay, agreeing to periodic cookie-tests, and giving the employer the option to terminate his employment at any time without cause.
If mark really isn't a cookie monster anymore he should be fine with this precautions to minimize the company's risk - after a year or so when there is more trust these disappear.
Whew, good thing they wouldn't instead turn to newspapers or libraries, we might have to have information removed there too (or the microfiche or card catalogs respectively). It's unfortunate that ease of access is the primary motivator and we can't just stand on principles. I believe society would adapt, but yes factual information at your fingertips has positives and negatives as do most freedoms.
Who knows what type of medium may arise that allows people to see unfettered factual information. But if people start to make judgments on it, I suppose we better be prepared to have it censored.
To me it reads "we can't control how people judge your information in some forms, so we'll make it harder for people to get information in the first place".
That's not what 99% society believes. The vast majority of regular people (go on the street and talk to any random person, I guarantee you this is what they'll say) will say that life-time ostracizing is actually part of the sentence. They honestly believe that once you commit a felony, anything bad that happens to you for the rest of your life is fair game. They pretty much believe that the official jail sentence is only the beginning, and that even in jail if you get killed it's pretty fair because you were already one of those criminal-types anyway, so oh well no big loss. I've met so many people in jail who were hardened into a life of crime because of the us-vs-them attitude they've been faced with since young adults and even as teenagers, simply because they made one mistake early on, and now they're labeled and discriminated against even by judges and their own lawyers, let alone citizens. People want there to be rehabilitation and re-entry into society, and there are programs out there, but none of them are actually effective (trust me), and the vast majority of society don't want them to be effective. So everything is status quo.
And it's not like Google is the only way to find things. Should newspapers be required to delete pages about an individual or destroy print copies? What about other search engines such as Yandex or Baidu? Of course anyone could just search on Google.com, too.
Mankind has done perfectly well without a "right to be forgotten" for hundreds of thousands of years.
On the other hand, mankind has done perfectly well without computers, an internet, or indeed indoor plumbing for hundreds of thousands of years.
Sometimes new technologies demand new responses.
While mankind has not needed a right to be forgotten previously, it didn't have the omnipresent Google to deal with either. These are just the opening shots in the Privacy battle that will spread from GDPR.
Other search engines are affected too, but Google has a massive market share and has a long litigation history in Europe.
They did. https://www.gov.uk/exoffenders-and-employment
"It’s against the law to refuse someone a job because they’ve got a spent conviction or caution, unless it’s because a DBS check shows that they’re unsuitable."
> Mankind has done perfectly well without a "right to be forgotten" for hundreds of thousands of years.
Mankind has done without total digital records of everyone's life, too. Now that we have those records, are they going to be used to make people's lives worse?
I feel this would be less controversial if it was "right to be de-indexed": finding a newspaper from a particular date should show the same information, but "find me all information relating to Joe Bloggs" is a much more complicated question.
Because mankind had a de-facto "right to be forgotten" that could be exercised by simply moving to a different community.
In practice, it’s a pointless regulation circumvented by changing the url that imposes huge enforcement costs on big and small companies alike.
But the real problem is that it is top down legislation that tries to fix a symptom, not the disease. What is the problem? Companies won’t give ex-convicts jobs. Why? Because people distrust them and they can afford not to hire them (plenty of unemployed people to choose from). My impression is that the vast majority of employers feel this way. Interestingly, right to be forgotten does nothing to incentivize people to change or punish people for their prejudice. It also does not address the lack of jobs.
It's like if you had a society where 80% of people drive over the speed limit but doing so is illegal. The problem isn't that you need more laws. The problem is that your society has a different set of values. You can't legislate that people have a different set of values. At best you can try to reform a small set of the population that falls out of line.
And you can't legislate prosperity either. Making it illegal to not have a home won't get rid of homeless people anymore than the right to be forgotten will decrease unemployment in the EU.
I cannot be found on Google or Facebook simply due to the massive signal-to-noise ratio. The fact that a minor celebrity and a minor athlete share the name help as well.
I wouldn't be surprised if Legal Name changing becomes even more of a thing as people try to hide their pasts from Google et al.
That's the real injustice. And it happens. It's a career-ender.
It's become cliche to bring racism into unrelated topics, but it's the one thing that makes most of the puzzling things about America make sense. It's too bad many people in tech culture don't give importance to American history (either because they're foreigners who were never taught these things or because of their "pure" engineering mindset [which is itself a cultural product]), so end up aggravating old social ills.
An interesting point, troubling because it seems likely.
Google the names of the team I was in right after I graduated and you would think a games company had employed the director general of the BBC, a famous rugby player, a horror film director and Doctor Who writer, an actor, a CBS news anchor, a cinematographer involved with several Marvel films, the Archdeacon of Harlow, and someone who (according to BBC reporting of the Paradise Papers) hid £28 million.
And before anyone says “oh but it would be ridiculous to mistake us for them”, my mum thought I had made the website belonging to aforementioned Doctor Who writer.
I couldn’t agree more. Public records are technically public, but often opaque and difficult to access. It’s one thing to allow a sufficiently motivated person to find this information out; it’s quite another to make it easy for casual acquaintances and neighbors to do it.
Google makes these records instantly accessible to anyone, and for whatever reason, seems to push more negative results about an individual higher in the search results. One need to look no further than to observe the prominence of Ripoff Report results in Google searches to prove this. The people behind this extortion scheme, which operates under a disgusting perversion of the Communications Decency Act, tout their Google dominance as one reason that their victims should pay them thousands of dollars per month to delete or modify the “reports” against them that appear on the site.
Based on... what?
Google can't search through Facebook data, much less other social networks. It also can't deduplicate common names like Frank Thompson, or Bob Michaels, or even tell you which one is from where. The data set is hopelessly flawed, and from a landlord or employer point of view, it's frankly the worst possible data set they can use to determine the reputation of an individual.
For notable people that have unique names and professions, maybe. But it still doesn't provide enough visiblity into their personal history to be of any use for the functions you suggest.
It's like copyright. Right now, like the early days, you can search warez on Yahoo and find it. No bittorrent, etc. Once search engines got smart, with copyright, the violations just got pushed to smaller sites and decentralized protocols.
If the big search engines suddenly starts letting everyone edit search results about themselves, I bet in 5 years some IPFS / DHT / blockchain based technology that lets people permanently post and search news/rumours/gossip about other people will pop up.
Should this happen? I'm not sure, but with the nature of the Internet maybe it doesn't matter that much positively.
Then anytime a new story comes out with that persons name, the news outlet links to every other related story about them so they get more traffic and ad revenue at the person's expense. If Google and shady local news outlets are going to be the record of wrongs and control peoples careers and destiny, there needs to be some checks and balances.
Do not assume landlords and employers have access to people's criminal record - it's not the case in most countries!
https://news.virginia.edu/content/unintended-consequences-ho...
A jail, however, is not supposed to serve the purpose of being a mechanism of forgiveness. It is a mechanism of punishment. We as a citizenry give the government the sole right to jail / punish citizens as a way of enforcing the law. While someone may be reformed as an outcome of serving time, it is not the primary goal. Otherwise, we would see a higher focus on lowering recidivism rates.
This depends on the jurisdiction. Prisons serve many apparent purposes, the mix of claimed and actual intents varies: punishment, deterrent, removal from society for society's protection, commercial reasons, reformation, historical precedent ...
Whatever, I agree that few jurisdictions do a great job of lowering recidivism, putting into place the societal structures to support ex convicts after release in finding stable work and so on.
"The Court will have to balance the public's right to access the historical record, the precise impacts on the person, and the public interest."
I feel like every single comment on here has missed the point. This isn't about removing relevant information, it's about removing information that disproportionately affects an individual and is of no public interest. For example, if someone famous puts a gerbil up their bottom and gets sentenced for animal cruelty, and that gets widely publicised, it might be true but it affects that person extremely negatively at no cost or benefit to the rest of society. This is the case here: a man served his time and the court ruled that his case was not sufficiently relevant for the public interest to still be publically accessible - he cannot be descriminated against because of his past action. In developed countries this would never happen when the case is relevant for that person or society, for example a high ranking corruption case or if the person becomes a convicted paedophile.
Imagine this case was instead about a Wikipedia article about this guy, and Wikipedia lost the case and was ordered to revert the article and expunge all edit history. Due to the way Wikipedia is cloned by many sources, and preserved by many archives around the world, it will become increasingly problematic to erase information.
If the government can go around ordering archives to expunge truthful public or historical records, it's very problematic IMHO. The notion of truth and objective reality is already under assault since the 2016 election, and the deep fakery and trolling bots will only get worse. What few institutions we have online that can try to weed out and present consensus truth would then be suspect if governments gain global jurisdiction to make edits.
What shocked me was that the first result that Google returned was a smear page against her from her ex boyfriend, something like janedoesisaslut.com or janedoecheats.com with a long essay about what she did, and a bunch of photos of her on it. It was about how, when they were together in college, allegedly the woman had slept with other guys, and the boyfriend got pretty upset about it.
It was mortifying for me to run into it, and I can't even imagine how she must feel when the n.1 Google result for her name is that, forever. This must have happened over 10 years ago, and yet it kept haunting her to that day.
I talked about this with a few lawyer friends and my understanding is that you can't actually be sued for it. Apparently, if you're not lying and just stating actual facts about what happened, you're not liable, and don't fall under defamation/libel category. You could start a JohnDoeWillGiveYouGonorrhea.com and that's totally legal. The person trying to take the site down would have to clearly prove that their lives were seriously impacted by its existence, and quantify the damages, which would be pretty hard to pull off.
Real odd legal corner case.
This is a blunt technological tool to fix a delicate social issue. The information is still there, but behind a service. I believe deleting the information is already not in the public’s interests [1][2], and it looks like the law agrees to an extent[3], but the solution they came up with effective puts a tollbooth in front of it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16822093
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27423527
[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3156779/More-280-000...
[3] see paragraph 3 http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-17-right-to-eras...
The problem is that if I put up a billboard that says John is a thief, they can find me and sue for defamation. If I do a website and use SEO, then it's not so easy, even though it serves similar purpose.
But that is how the world works now. We are able to send information to many people, anonymously, often in a targeted way. That's how politics work, that's how ads work, that's how HN works. The problem is not the information, the problem is trust. It's not easy to solve, but it's doable.
To use your example, whether I put up a website or a billboard with defamatory information is irrelevant. We have laws that protect us, which declare that defamatory speech is not protected. Why does it matter that the speech is online or not when considering the essence of the law? As you stated, if you put up a billboard they can find you and sue you for defamation. Why shouldn't the same be possible online? If I get an injunction against a billboard with defamatory speech the owner of the billboard is required to take it down. Why shouldn't an online provider be equally obligated?
Does running an add linking to the article for anyone interested in that person's name count as defamation? And if so, why would it be different if google chose included it prominently amongst the search results?
I'm not entirely convinced that this should count as defamation, but there is room for debate.
He should be, but in many cases it's just not doable, because governments are local and the Internet is global. I think it should be accepted as a fact. So maybe we need some rethinking. Maybe banning books was never a good idea, even if ideas presented there seemed dangerous, inconvenient and sometimes plainly false.
To me the situation looks like this: A goes to the police station to report that B has stolen something. They are fully aware that there is no chance they can catch B, so they arrest A.
I'm not saying that there is no problem, just that the solution they have chosen is worse than lack of any action.
Whether or not you think that should be allowed, you cant pretend that the search engines are not responsible in some part for the process being possible
That would be insane if that was how the law works. It's not how the law works.
In Germany newspaper are not allowed to name people, especially if they are accused but not convicted. The exception is people "of public interest", which is obviously not a clear line. So, quite literally libraries would have to remove newspapers with your name if you don't like what's written there about you ... unless it is of public interest. I consider this law ok.
This is why the EFF opposes the Right to be Forgotten.
And the bigger questions: why the fuck is Google is soul source of record for things on the Internet. We need other viable search engines that are no subject to this kind of pressure.
I want to publish a website with thoughts so far and looking for more brains. What I have in mind is a global, multilayered web of trust. It would be a game changer.
Of course, I don't mean it as a startup, it must be decentralized. I don't care who creates it, I just really want to have it.
I'm sure you know about the small world effect[1]. Example of layer: coding skill. I assign weights to friends I know. Now if I want to know if X is a good coder I check what friends of my friends think about it and multiply it by weights I have assigned to those friends (recursive). But it's much more than just having reasonable opinion about coding skill of somebody who you want to hire or cooperate with.
The crucial thing is that this rating is always relative. It depends on your place in the network. Any global rating can be and will be cheated. Also, it's perfectly fine that for different group of people different things have different values.
It enables trustworthy reviews, trustworthy project dependencies, tenants, online stores, doctors, mechanics etc. Could probably help with scams and spam. If successful it has power to change politics inside out.
I'm sorry I don't have a write up yet and I know that with an analytic mind you probably can find many problems with the potential implementation.
Let's be clear, it's hard. But so very worth it. There are many problems to solve. Apart from bootstrapping it (which could probably be done with help of some other services) The big one to me is privacy. If I assign 2/10 coding skill to one of my friends I don't want him to find out. I've already came up with some potential solutions. But more people, preferably with cryptography background and definitely smarter than me are needed, who are interested in this problem and are willing to spend time thinking about it.
I'm going to try to collect all my notes and thoughts into a website and post it on HN.
(If you were able to deduce enough from this short description, you like it and you're interested, drop me an empty e-mail at wot@comboy.pl, I'll send you a single e-mail when I have some place to point to)
So, basically, your multilayered web of trust is just a popularity contest. Sorry, but I do not think this is a good idea.
It would be, if the ranking would be global and not through the lens of your network.
You can have the most popular coder A, he does lot's of video tutorials and blogs. But you have your finely cured network regarding this technology because you are pro yourself. You know that according to people you trust, A is just good. B on the other hand, who never worked for his popularity and whose skills are only known to few other pros who worked with him, is excellent.
That is what you need web of trust for. That's what you likely use today. It's just without strictly specified protocol, using your brain as a storage and meetings with your friends or conferences as a communication channel. It can be improved and made more efficient.
Once again, using it to "rate coders" is just one of use cases, but I'll stick to it for the sake of this argument.
So you need a DBA. There's one here that could work for you. You can check data online about him, but you don't know who wrote it. You ask your friends around. Some guy you barely knows says he's a fraud. One of your friends says he worked with him and he's good. You're best friend doesn't know him, but his friend, who he trusts, says he's great.
This is how you build your opinion about people (I'm aware it's a simplification but it's not relevant here). The mechanics doesn't change. Just the technology. But it's a leap as big as switching from snail mail to e-mail.
How much you trust some information depends on where it comes from. But it doesn't always come directly from the trusted source. So you use your trusted sources to learn about this information source.
You also learn to lessen your trust in sources that turned out to lead you to some bad information. It's not always easy to keep it all in your head. Business people learn to master that skill because that's the algorithm that works for acquiring trustworthy information and information is money. However not everybody's live revolves about building network of great contacts and staying in touch with them polling for some useful data.
I'd have to agree with you.
Its a dangerous thing to "trust" someone when they'll have that level of control over your future so people use government records and google to know if they could possibly have an issue.
This isn't a privacy issue its a minimizing risk issue.
If you give people better options for minimizing risk then google results will matter less and less. For instance I'd be happy to hire a convict if I could a) pay him less than I normally would (initially) and b) fire him at any time for any reason.
Same for renting. If we draw up a contract with a no-drugs no-weapons clause and allowed me to inspect the place once a month for the first year or so I'd be happy to rent to him.
But these things sensible precautions are illegal. There may be good reasons because of them "evil corporations" blah blah. Sensible or not that's reality - so people understandably discriminate against people based on google results. Its a fairly understandable precaution given the amount of risk involved due to regulation.
Therefore the fix isn't to make google "forget" things - that only increases risk dramatically. The fix is to make these relationships less risky by allowing business owners and landlords more control over their own personal.
That doesn't sound like a society I would like to live in.
The other alternative is that these restrictions would begin with convicted criminals, and spread to the rest of the population. Just because someone hasn't been convicted doesn't mean they aren't a criminal with drugs and weapons in their house after all.
Not at all. It's up to the legal system and law enforcement to handle this. Not up to citizens, and for good reasons.
At least in my country, law enforcement has no obligation to handle anything. Legal systems punish criminals after-the-fact, it's up to individuals to prevent crimes. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule...
I have more of a reason to trust a stranger with a clean record than I do to trust a convicted criminal. Once the later demonstrates hes trustworthy these restrictions disappear.
Both real examples from companies I have worked at.
This is true. The employer always takes a much greater risk to hire you than you take to work there.
Having a bad out come has a greater impact on an individual than say it does to a SME company with 2k employees.
An employee being fired is not that difficult. You can either not list the experience on your resume or take the hit and lower you expected salary. You'll never be un-hirable just because you were previously fired.
And its very easy to fire people for cause - what its harder to do is fire some one for spurious reasons i.e. fired so you can give your nephew the job.
As a generalization: the push against the right to be forgotten seems like a case of information bias. Does more information really help society make decisions? And even more importantly: how do we, as a society, process information like this in a way where it could be helpful (in the common case)?
> ‘The right to be forgotten is meant to apply to information that is no longer relevant but disproportionately impacts a person,’ said Jim Killock, executive director, ‘The Court will have to balance the public’s right to access the historical record, the precise impacts on the person, and the public interest.’
‘The public’s right to access the historical record’ seems to me to be an incredibly Orwellian phrase. It seems to me that there is an absolute right to access factual historical information.
- Someone who was the victim of a high-profile crime, not wishing everyone they come into contact with to know about it
- Someone being stalked/targeted, living on a secret address
- Someone who was wrongfully convicted, later exonorated. Here a mandate to publish corrections would be good enough, but I don't think Google would be happy with that, either...
This isn't a comment about the case, or the right to be forgotten, but something quite important nonetheless - Google's search results are not "factual historical information". They're an index of webpages that anyone and everyone can create, saying whatever they like. Google claims their engine ranks pages that more reputable higher than others, but without any transparency around that we can't know whether or not we agree with it's decisions.
I'd argue that the fact that a webpage says something is itself an historical fact, and shouldn't be forbidden to be said.
Who the hell makes that call? That in and of itself should tell you this is a bad law.
What exactly is wrong with judges making decisions? Seems to kinda be their job.
The decision should be made by some independent privacy committee which reviews all the facts, and right to be forgotten requests should go through that committee rather than directly to Google
Then along comes a search engine and doubly punishes someone in what may be a disproportional way; e.g. it's highly unlikely you will come across the convictions of John Smith when you google him, but when you look up someone with a non-common name, it may be the very first search result; disproportionally disadvantaging them for jobs, business and even dating partners.
The issue in this case was Google wanted to be the sole arbiter of what they would remove and what they would leave in, with no oversight from anyone. This would have crippled the GDPR even before it began.
That said, it's early days for the right to be forgotten.
I agree. However people are lazy and subjective and settle with bits of incomplete information either outdated, out of context, or even wrong.
Methods include interviewing them hooked up to a polygraph, and asking their neighbors questions face to face.
All for reasons that seem to me less important then the safety of my child while alone with a babysitter.
And its more likely that a family member is a danger to you child - than say a babysitter who got busted at 15 for smoking pot behind the bleachers with her bf.
"X is worse than Y, therefore you shouldn't worry about Y" is a fallacy.
Which coinsidently would probably be a much harder case to bring because these are generally reputable news sources and not a big US company everyone seems to have a bit of a problem with already.
As I see it, the heart of the matter is that the average person is really bad at placing any random fact they learn about someone (or something) in its proper context. So that means people should have some legal leverage when it comes to all the information (accurate or not) that is available about them online.
Plus it's pretty much technologically infeasible, and will produce a giant layer of disgusting hacks that don't even effectively protect the people they're supposed to. That might have something to do with why the tech community isn't happy.
Whereas owning and using an illicit drug (as one example of the kind of individual rights we support) does not require coercing others (be they corporations or individuals) into doing anything, RTBF does. It requires the state coercing (in this case) corporations into censoring (this this case) true, publicly known information visible on their websites.
Also, your right to be forgotten seems to be infringing on my right to remember.
Others bear the cost and you get the luxury of starting over? After seeing so many serial scammers on the Internet getting away with crime time and again by finding new, naive victims after we catch them, it gets really tiresome when the government gives the scammers tools to force us to take down reviews and warnings.
Where do you put the limit then ?
What if a person is merely accused, but acquitted. Would you hire him/her if you had options?
If one side is unhappy with Google's decision, they can sue. And the court system is almost completely devoted to the sort of question you're asking.
Perhaps there are a couple other types of crimes that could be as well.
It was never an issue for society for a cop to tail someone driving on public roads because they could only follow a few people given the resources necessary to tail someone. Now they can buy a few cameras that track license plates and have real time tracking of _everyone_ on the road with the ability to store the data forever until they decide it's useful, which is has changed the actual results of cops being allowed to track people.
This right to be forgotten used to exist simply because you had to put effort into finding out data about people. People could move to another town and restart their life. The courts in this case appear to be trying to reset tat status quo
I can see how a non violent criminal who has served their time and been punished might not be able to move on with their life when they are only found in Google for the ONE bad thing they did.
This should never be applied to violent criminals.
Serving your time in jail is sufficient to pay for your crimes, IMO. Unless there is a good reason, ie public interest as the law states, we shouldn't rubberstamp all criminals as evil (or all violent criminals).
Part of getting them back into society is rehabilitation which means we give them another chance to integrate and follow the law.
It would make much more sense to remove all web pages (from newspapers etc.) containing the actual data, and ideally Google would forget about it as well soon. But then again, that would be a lot of work and it's easier to just take down the gateway. But it's ridiculous.
I can see the win for freedom of speech there.
Censoring an inconvenient truth seems wrong to me. The whole point of freedom of speech is because someone didn't like the speech.
Google would not be removing false results without RTBF or someone being able to afford a very expensive lawyer. RTBF means anyone can actually have a chance at getting false information removed.
This isn't just a blanket "you can erase things you don't like in the news about you" that some people have made it out to be.
It's sad to see this battle lost but I hope for Europe's sake they figure out it was the wrong move after this becomes abused by the rich and powerful.
I don't know anyone that hasn't broken laws. Hell, they make new laws every day for us to break.