Google ruling 'astonishing', says Wikipedia founder Wales
bbc.com
bbc.com
"The ruling confirms the need to bring today's data
protection rules from the 'digital stone age' into
today's modern computing world where data is no longer
stored on 'a server', or once launched online disappears
in cyberspace"
What—and I'm asking in earnest—is that quote even supposed to mean?
The solution might not be beautiful or scalable but removing search results could seriously improve some people's lives'.
I'm not talking about allowing people to remove information pertaining to trying to hide poor behaviour online or bad reviews online. I'm talking about the life ruining things.
Except this case was about a life-ruining thing that was true.
And raises some potential problems: suppose I default on my mortgage and get foreclosed, and you end up buying my house. Now, the fact that I was once the owner and that it changed hands in the foreclosure is part of the chain of ownership of that property, and may become necessary information if your ownership is ever challenged.
Does my "right to be forgotten" preclude your right to prove your ownership of the property?
How about the roughly 485,000 households in the US receiving foreclosure notices in the 2010 foreclosure crisis. I'm sorry, that was in September 2012 alone. If that's a persistent Web record, should that follow them around for the rest of their lives?
Or, in a different context, does a rhinoceros have a right to be forgotten? http://redd.it/25ll1v
One is that the "right to be forgotten" does not exist in a vacuum -- it has to coexist with a bunch of other rights, and weighing how important each of them is in relation to the others is incredibly difficult. And that's without getting into as-yet-uncodified rights (example: making history more accessible via scanning/OCRing of old newspapers, which now seems like it'd have to come with a censorship regime built in to expunge news that's "meant to be forgotten").
Another is the practicality issue, in that information of this sort is actually incredibly hard to destroy, and often is required to be published in order to provide a fair process to everyone involved.
Finally, there's the issue that this is going after Google, but that doesn't actually accomplish the kind of "forgetting" you seem to be talking about. Sure, the general public won't see a newspaper listing about the foreclosure in Google anymore, but the people in a position to use that information to wreak institutional harm still will have access to it, because the databases they use are not publicly accessible, meaning it's not possible to determine if you're even in them in order to sue for removal.
On the weighted importance, one of the interesting elements I've seen said of Xeer (mentioned recently on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7736841) is that there's a concept of increasing obligations with increasing power or wealth (this is hearsay from a reddit comment, the Wikipedia article doesn't touch on this). It's similar to how I feel disclosure rules should operate. Someone with little or no impact on society should fear little disclosure. Someone with a great deal of impact (financial, political, military, religious, cultural power, or with a record of criminal acts causing suffering or death to others) should be obliged to disclose more of themselves.
As for coming up with automatic rules, I doubt that's possible, but then, it's not in law either -- that's why we've got judges.
Your criticism in going after Google has merits, though any law such as the EU one should address not only the access and indexing of such information, but of its use. Though proving someone knows a certain fact or accessed a specific piece of information is at best difficult.
The core part of the argument to the right to be forgotten is to treat some pieces of information as medical information, i.e, private or not your concern. Things that you would rather not be known for they bestow little benefit to you except for you to profit at my expense. A lot of people find this uncomfortable, for good reason.
Should divorce cases be completely public?
That sounds great, but this case clearly shows that's not the case at all. This is information that can be widely and freely reported, just not by everyone. A newspaper could run it as their front page story every day, but some other people can't report it, and, in fact, can't even tell you the fact that someone else is saying something related to the topic you're searching for. That's something very different than treating it as private data.
I haven't read the EU decision yet, nor have I made up my mind as to whether or not it does or doesn't have merits. In general I subscribe to the principle that there's a proportionality appropriate to disclosure: that the greater a person's (or institution's) power and responsibility, the greater the obligation for disclosure of relevant details of their life, most particularly as it might affect others (individuals, organizations, government(s), etc.).
At a high level, I imagine she would support a law that requires all information that can be associated with an individual (google account, ip address, etc) to be stored with metadata tracing it back to that identity and require that companies be able to remove all the data by metadata.
What do people find confusing about the quote? It seems like pretty standard politician to me.
What does that have to do with linking to a factually true news story about a guy? It seems a lot more like she's trying to conflate things for a soundbite.
In any case, making all statements that are about information about someone transitively "personal information" seems like an awfully bad idea. That's great when Google can track an account or an IP address, but where's the metadata for Mario Gonzalez to be found in a newspaper's story about Mario Gonzalez? And considering that news stories are often about more than one thing, what's the balance when a story is about someone who wants the event to be forgotten and someone who doesn't (or it's important that it's not)?
In all seriousness though, in the UK credit record agencies can only keep 6 years of financial information - a search engine is not subject to any regulation around this and could for example return an insolvency event from 16 years ago.
Reding is saying this is a double standard and infringes on an EU citizens rights and that they'd like to regulate this.
In contrast, things on a credit history are dated.
> A stag gore victim who complained that six newspapers made "inappropriate" references to her transgender status has said the press "trampled all over" her private life.
> The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) said the six papers had agreed to amend their online stories.
> Dr Stone, 44, said she hoped fewer people would now face press intrusion.
> She complained to the PCC that the Daily Mail, The Sun, The Scottish Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph and Daily Record had made "irrelevant" references to her gender when covering the story in December.
She is a transgender woman. Six newspapers made undue reference to her transgender status. She claims that it is irrelevant to the news articles and that she has some right to privacy with that part of her life under article 8 of the ECHR.
I tend to agree with her, and if companies operating in the EU ignore her polite validly formed requests she goes to regulatory body, and if they decline her request she goes to law.
The correct target here is the people writing the original factual but intrusive articles, and not the people linking to those factual but intrusive articles.
I'd be interested to see if Google's registration with various data protection bodies across Europe is in compliance with whatever this ruling supposes. This ruling feels like a big change to make Google more responsible for handling personal data than they were before.
I mean, all the articles describing the court case also refer to the very information that the litigant wanted to be removed from the search results.
It seems somewhat contradictory that the reporting of a court case brought to protect his privacy, is simultaneously breaching his privacy.
And yes, that is what makes this ruling so incredibly dangerous.
Whilst personal privacy is important, it needs to be balanced by the right of the broader society to know things. I think this ruling swings to far away from the "right to know".
"The case involved Spanish man Mario Costeja Gonzalez"
p.s.: also read James Ball @ the guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/13/right-t...
The meant you had reasonable privacy from curious and nosy neighbors and coworkers, but if someone actually had an important enough reason to need your information to justify the legwork or the expense to hire someone else to do the legwork they could get it.
http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox/righ...
Safe harbor is an endangered species.
Google and Yahoo should spend a day blurring out every name in search results to illustrate the danger of the ruling.
The shocking thing about this is the actual producers of the data got an explicit walk free pass? I just don't see how that makes any sense.
I just thought the blurred names would be a fun trick that would still let people get to content for a day, might raise awareness without alienating as many users.
Credit cards, social security numbers, copyright work, stolen trade secrets, and other sensitive personal information are different. What this EU ruling seems to say is that if anything embarrassing or uncomfortable has ever happened to you in the past it should be erased from the historical record, as if it never occurred. That is kind of like in grade school, being banned by the teacher for reminding another student that they shit their pants.
That is so oddly specific that I have to ask: were you the kid that shit his pants, or the one who had to be told not to remind the kid that he once shat his pants?
So going after the search engines, advertising networks, hosting providers, and backbone providers makes plenty of sense.
If so, it's created a mechanism for litigiously DoSing opposing businesses.
The NYTimes coverage of that 2009 case includes a hilarious dig at those who expect journalists to fall in line. Read the whole thing:
Got a competitor out ranking you with a page that has comments? Write some personal details, get it approved... then request that page removed.
But it'll probably just stop it from showing up for that persons name (and related queries).