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Comment by nyrina | Hacker News Reader

What would happen if Britney Spears came along and asked Google and every other search engine to delete everything about her on the internet?

Even if Google went ahead and deleted every link to every story about her today, she would have a new million of articles about her tomorrow (Most likely about the fact that search engines doesn't give any Britney Spears results anymore)

How does this law affect celebrities? Are they considered in the public eye and unprotected? Or are they persons, as well?

Can anyone clarify?

Perhaps Britney Spears is a bad example, as she is a US citizen. What about Till Lindemann, lead vocal of the German Metal band, Rammstein?

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Start from existing data protection rules and procedure: http://ico.org.uk/for_organisations/data_protection/the_guid...

"Information made public by the subject" is exempt, even if the subject regrets that disclosure.

There's also exemptions for news reporting and other purposes: http://ico.org.uk/for_organisations/data_protection/the_guid...

(Those references are to UK law, but this area of law is part of EU harmonisation and should therefore be basically the same in most EU countries)

There is an exception for newsgathering but apparently not for linking to news articles. That was the exact circumstance of the case at hand—the newspaper was left out of the appeal but Google was ordered not to link to the newspaper. An odd result.

"Information made public by the subject"

... Isn't that pretty much the whole internet?

No. For instance, email correspondences are not considered public. Or non-public user account information like DOB, SSN, phone numbers, addresses, etc.

And, importantly, browsing history is not considered public. It's actually PII with the right machine learning.

But everything that Google, Facebook, etc. has indexed on you is public information, no?

Or does this law makes it so corporations have to delete everything they have on you?

"Handing to one other organisation in confidence" != "public"

The answer is potentially yes, if you're handling people's information then they have a right to (a) correct it and (b) delete it. You can't just maintain dossiers on people forever without their consent. However, it may be exempt if it's administratively necessary to keep.

http://ico.org.uk/for_organisations/data_protection/the_guid...

(Really you have to look in the caselaw which is harder to find)

It depends on how you're defining "public information." If you define it tautologically as 'information available to the public' then yes, because Google is crawling public datasets, and Facebook serves information to the public. If you define it legally, then it depends on the jurisdiction.

Public information isn't something established by nature, it's something created by statute.

No.

No Britney Spears is a person of public interest, likewise for example politicians. The privacy law has a exception for person of public interest.

I wonder how one defines a person of public interest in the internet age. Obviously Britney Spears qualifies but fame seems to be a sliding scale more than an absolute now.

Fame always was a sliding scale, that's not something unique to the internet age. It's just gotten easier for some person in country 'x' to become famous in completely unrelated country 'y' but that's just a change in degree.

It's also much easier for a person to become "Internet famous" overnight and without their consent if they, for example, post a video and it goes viral.

If you post a video then by definition that's with your consent, if the video is of someone else then that's a potential problem.

Most virals are fabricated though, which is a pity because 'viral' used to be a mark of excellence. Now it just stand for 'was marketed with enough initial push to overcome the activation energy'.

Right, and that's the conflict. If a person becomes a 'person of interest' if they're famous enough, the law is going to take something that operates as a sliding scale (or, I would say, "a contextual construct") and require a legally-binding global binary threshold to be made of it.

Good luck with that.

This works in Austria and Germany already for a long time. Those privacy laws are common there since the 1970ies (the raise of private computer data)

Laws are not binary. A judge would decide whether someone could be considered famous in the context of the case.

In this case it's pretty specific to someone wanting libelous information removed. If the analogue is a print publication having to retract something it is (almost?) always after a judge has looked at it. If Britney Spears suddenly considered everything ever said about her libelous she would have a tough time convincing a judge of that i would say. Just like celebrities usually have a tougher time getting things retracted now since they are in the public eye more than Joe Average by default.

Defamation is so expensive to defend (and results so variable) that almost everyone folds in the face of a libel claim. Libel is a very effective way for rich people to silence criticism.

It got so bad in the UK that the US passed a law declaring UK libel judgements unenforcable in the US ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPEECH_Act ). UK libel law has recently improved very slightly, although not in Northern Ireland.

I didn't see the allegation of libel in this case. The plaintiff's house was sold at auction and he wanted links to the newspaper listing removed from Google.

Assuming there is a libel element tho (mentioned above in connection with UK law), what about the report of the case where libel was found? That's news, correct?

Well, maybe it's only the libelous statements that must be removed when liability is found - then the public would have incomplete reports of judicial actions. Isn't that a public interest weighing against privacy?

My local newspapers report of this case mentions that the reason the plaintiff wanted the references removed was because the auction publicized the fact that he had debts at the time which was no longer the case. I would guess there are situations where such facts would be a hindrance in later life when easily surfaced through Google.

> I would guess there are situations where such facts would be a hindrance in later life when easily surfaced through Google.

Sure, but that is most definitely not libel.

Indeed, a judge will make this decision. There is a tendency for people (especially online) that laws sould be absolute and binary in their arbitrations, this is not the case. It's humans that decide how the law should apply in each case, and a human has considerably less difficulty in distinguishing the difference between Britney Sears applying for censorship and John Doe doing the same thing.

How can someone disappear if their email is in my inbox? So you can deleted from a search engine, how do we insure its you we delete and not me? Names are not unique, maybe everyone needs to have a unique id? not possible in our current state

The reason I ask about email is that if I use gmail are not some search results I do going to check my mail or is the act of my searching my main in google going to be called out next?

At least in Germany (no idea whether that follows from EU laws or whether there is a similar EU law) celebrities have somewhat lower privacy rights simply due to the fact of them being in focus of media and so on.

The key phrase here is "Person öffentlichen Interesses" or person of public interest. It is a reasonable compromise that has worked adequately so far.

Interesting Question. Just say what happen if there is a same person in EU or UK with the name Britney Spears and ask search engine to delete records?

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