It’s Not as Simple as Asking to ‘Be Forgotten’ by Google | Hacker News Reader

It’s Not as Simple as Asking to ‘Be Forgotten’ by Google

mobile.nytimes.com

Under this "right to be forgotten" If I were a politician, would I be able to get all the articles and blog posts about my embezzlement/swindling/corruption/what-have-you conviction removed from major search engines before an election?

No, because it doesn't apply to politicians.

Also, you can't use RtbF to remove all your slippery-slope arguments from the Internet either.

It was a serious question. I'm not affected by rtbf --as I live in the United States-- and therefore haven't looked into all the intricacies of the law. Perhaps I could have asked about the limitations of RTBF in a more straightforward manner.

All the reporting I've heard on it over here is broad, you know the kind of reporting where they tell you what a search engine is..., and doesn't cover specifics. I figured someone here could provide a little more insight.

How does RTBF apply to straw-man arguments, future politicians, and Dogpile.com? </s>

Is there a link to this non-politician clause? Are all public figures covered? Only the unwashed masses should have a right to privacy.

I'm not german, so I can't easily find a link in german law for you, but in general privacy law in most of europe provides substantially weaker protections for "public persons", which includes politicians and celebrities.

That's a fairly arbitrary and unsatisfying exception.

Can anyone explain a rational and practical way to achieve the worldview the European courts are looking to impose? Regardless of whether one thinks one should have the right to be forgotten (or whatever one thinks that means), I don't see any path here which actually accomplishes anything other than constraining businesses large enough to care about EU regulators and allowing all other players to do whatever.

While I think that endorsing the right to "be forgotten" is indeed quixotic and a dubious endeavor in general, for practical purposes enforcing these provisions against the biggest actors is probably enough for most practical purposes. Probably most of the people searching for your name are doing so on Google, Yahoo or Bing, and even then they probably aren't going to be going more than a few pages of results deep. If I had been accused of doing something horrible 10 years ago, I'd probably be pretty upset if googling my name returned news articles about that on the first page, much less so if they showed up on the 20th page, and basically unconcerned if they only showed up on a Thai clone of baidu.

If I'm searching for someone, perhaps someone I'm starting a romantic relationship with, that horrible thing you were accused of 10 years ago is exactly the type of data I'm looking for.

To clarify, I was not endorsing "the right to be forgotten", just saying that while it's probably nearly impossible to actually scrub some information from the internet, scrubbing it from the top tier search engines is good enough for most practical purposes anyway, since most people are likely to be primarily concerned about their superficial web presence.

That said, the attitude I'm attributing to your post (and I could be mis-reading you) underscores why people would want to be "forgotten". I specifically said "accused", not convicted or even tried. Anyone can make an accusation and too often there's a "where there's smoke there's fire" attitude which is antithetical to the presumption of innocence. It's exactly the kind of thing that you don't want to show up in cursory searches, because there's no context and usually there's not a lot of context in these stories.

Then you need to dig into the "deep Web" and not just use Google. But most people do not benefit from that information so they won't see it in a Google search.

Nearly every single woman I know google searches their dates to check for domestic violence or other problematic charges.

I always wondered why my dates play with their phones, then run. I figured they had unplanned server outages to deal with. Your theory is much simpler than "every woman on the east coast is an on-call systems administrator."

So type "deep web search engine" in to google. Then type in their name on that site? A 6 year old could hack that system. If some records should be private then make them private. Adding 1 step to downloading the records on your browser is hardly worth the time to even discuss this silly idea.

"Coye Cheshire, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information, thinks part of the solution might be for people to take responsibility for tracking public data about themselves."

The perennial solution in the new neoliberal world: general, pervasive problem that affects everyone systematically? Take responsibility for yourself and damn everyone else!

Oh, his followup is equally daft: "“I don’t believe that, in many cases, people ‘lost’ any control over their information at all, because they never really had any real control even before the Internet existed,” Mr. Cheshire said. “We often conflate privacy through obscurity with inaccessibility, control or security.”"

You used to be able to find out certain information (if for some reason it had been reported on) in records offices or, like, on microfiche at your library ... therefore pervasive data-gathering on everyone in a more or less instantly accessible way hasn't changed anything materially.

Moreover, conclusion "so you never had control anyway" is only one of several possible results here; another is "so there was a problem all along which, since it's now exacerbated, we should really fix".

And the best part is that "taking responsibility" in his view means participating more in social networks, and being proactive about sharing.

It's as if he sees people's concerns about privacy as just being about not having wrong information disseminated. That's not what it's about at all - it's about keeping private information private.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the ruling this article writes about is related to the 'right to be forgotten' law passed recently.

I happen to agree with the right to be forgotten - I should be able to have my information removed from Facebook, etc.

I also sort-of agree with this legal ruling. After you've served for your crime you should have the ability to start over. Europe more sees prison as rehabilitation while the u.s. more seems to want to punish people for life (e.g., not allowing felons to vote, buy guns, etc)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track_legislation#The_Ri...

If you want the actual search results use a VPN so it looks like you are in the states. It's not like it's hard to get around this kind of thing.

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