Google Search Results: Dictator Not Found
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Edit: There is a huge gulf between Hitler and a juvenile crime or since-paid debt.
Does he have the "right to be forgotten"?
Even credit reports are barred from reporting older than x years acts.
This implies some sort of public record - to provide transparency of the requests and check for abuse. This could not be indexed either because it would reveal the information that people were trying to stop being revealed.
Dilemma.
The rest of the article is just manipulative association that would make Godwin blush.
The EU court does not disagree with you, no matter how hard the anti-privacy lobby tries to make it look that way.
While the right to forget is socially beneficial for society, there are technical problems that make it inconvenient. There is the problem of whether it is censorship to force a neutral party whose mandate is merely to store historical copies of data to remove it. Or is it Google's responsibility to just 'forget' that the copy exists in the web archive?
Do defaced websites get indexed by the internet archive? Does illegal information get removed from the internet archive?
I also disagree that the "right to forget" is socially beneficial. It may benefit individuals who have negative thing about them that they want expunged, but for society as a whole, we are the worse off because if everyone can have their image cleaned of their past, predators and destructive people will have an easier time hiding and preying on others.
The first paragraph alone reads like the kind of paranoia I would expect from the Tea Party.
"Google has to scrub any material that a user wants taken down, as long as removing it doesn’t hurt the public interest."
It's a lot, a lot more nuanced than that.
Also, the EJC is nowhere near the equivalent of the US Supreme Court. The EU is not a federal state.
The rest of the article basically goes into a Godwinesque directions, only for this occasion we're using Franco's fascists instead of Hitler's Nazi's.
If you read the entire article, you'll note that the post-Franco era discussion is mostly backstory for how the whole issue of public forgetting is particularly relevant in Spain, and in fact why this test case came from Spain. The article itself then goes on to mention how no fascists have (yet) asked for a Google scrub, however it does imply that someone might eventually try.
And it's a good point to raise, as all this "nuance" will require some sort of system of rules and arbitration to decide what is "in the public interest" on a case by case basis. Such a system could be quite burdensome, or prone to abuse.
In contrast, countries with strong free speech protections have a rather simple set of rules for when you're allowed to force others to remove true statements from the internet: you dont.
Even though the EU is not a federal state, the decisions of the ECJ still overrule these of member states. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_v_ENEL
It's blatantly obvious that a historically significant event such as a dictator needs to be kept as part of the history books because of the impact it had on many different people.
At the end - the argument that anything that is published and is true as a reason why we should not allow people to delete things about themselves is deeply disturbing and sets a dangerous precedent. Just because something is true does not mean it should be broadcast for everyone to hear and see. If you go to the toilet and leave a big dump - not everyone needs to know this, when you did it, its mass.
Lossless public record is something that people do not understand the full implications. I am predicting a collision course with the precedence from this case with anonymous gossip sharing applications like Secret. No good comes from allowing people to publish things about others with the intention to harm and no recourse for victims.
What the forgetting laws is for is to help a young person delete embarrassing content from the modern day equivalent of Geocities or Bebo. People are screened for employment online - why should a child whose transgressions in a previous generation would have been transient be stored for eternity? What utility does that provide?
EDIT: If you disagree - use the reply button.
If Europe wants to have a right to forget they need to create a specific legal framework that tells companies what they need to do. They can't just say "People have the right to be forgotten, lol you deal with it google et. al." Is Google and every other indexing website now meant to either comply or face a legal battle for every single request they get? That's ludicrous.
Yes, that means that European courts can come to any company and demand any information to be deleted as soon as "public interest" requires so. That's not the flaw - that's the whole point of it. That's control.
The solution here is to regulate hiring practices, not access to information.
For example, in the US, it is not legal to base a hiring decision on whether an applicant is married. Anybody can search newspaper archives for marriage announcements, but we don't ban newspapers.
People like you with your rosy view of the world make it hard for people with real problems to get by.
It is bewildering that you can't see why Europeans might think that personal privacy might be a significant issue.
As for personal privacy, new-world Anglo countries (where I am, and where most of the people on this site are) don't hold a candle to the history of pogroms that old-world countries have had, with the exception of treatment of first peoples. It's not just the Nazis and the Holocaust here, but a long history of terrorism and vigilantism. Europe still has wars (and similar) based on ethnicity - for example the Balkan states in the 90s, or eastern Ukraine going on right now. The last significant internal conflict in the new-world Anglosphere was 150 years ago. Europe has had a significantly different experience, which should be taken into context when understanding their decisions around privacy.