Google takes steps to comply with EU's 'right to be forgotten' ruling | Hacker News Reader

Google takes steps to comply with EU's 'right to be forgotten' ruling

reuters.com

38 pointsemrgx37 comments

This asks Google to be the deciders of what information should be free. It's an incredibly bad decision by EU lawmakers, and one that no one - not even Google - wants.

If Google removes public information, it's a loss for everyone. If they don't, they're immediately open to a legal battle.

This is just a horribly rash, poorly thought out law that has little to do with actual privacy, and more to pushing the problem on to Google and their ilk.

What Iran/China/Russian unable to force Google to do, EU is forcing Google to do it now.

How so? It's not requests from the state that are discussed but from individuals. It also seems to be in line with Eric Schmidt's comment about how teens should have the right for a new online identity when they grow up. I really wish people could accept different views here and add arguments to support their point.

How so? It's not requests from the state that are discussed but from individuals.

How is it any different when individuals work for the state? Couldn't government entities just submit complaints on behalf of their employees? Hell, why wouldn't the government just have employees have to sign a form allowing for the government to send out blanket complaints to Google every month to remove information related to them or their work?

It's different in principle. I'm not saying that this will be easy to manage in practice, that's not the point I was trying to make. There seems to be some clear cut cases however, like bullying and character assassinations where perhaps law enforcement is involved. I think the question it self is important, and it will be interesting to see how this works out in practice.

Censorship is censorship, whether initiated by bureaucrats or citizens.

In this case it's removal of your own data, so it's self-censorship if anything.

What does it mean when Eric Schmidt says someone "should" have a right to do something, when his company works against it every day?

You forgot to include North-Korea in your list of scary sounding countries.

Google are already the deciders of what information should be easily accessible.

They like to pretend that those decisions are somehow unimpeachable because they're made by an algorithm instead of directly by a human, but the algorithm is still written and adjusted by humans.

Yeah, right.

The law defines the right, it doesn't force Google to do anything. Google can take every request to court.

The qualification "horribly rash, poorly thought" out applies to the services Google creates ("huh, privacy, what privacy?"), and the way it responds to request to comply with basic privacy ("fuck you, fuck you and fuck you, oh, oops, we lost in court, let's hack something together to prevent losing $$$").

Besides, Google already decides. There's nothing even remotely objective about Google's search results, and Google is eager to pro-actively censor it's services for anything ranging from the copyright mafia to American puritanism.

The EU lawmakers didn't force Google to be a bunch of assholes. They just defined basic civil rights.

I'd love to see an example of Google censoring for "American puritanism."

YouTube.

> Advocates of freedom of speech have said that the ruling paved the way for rich or powerful individuals and criminals to remove information about them, a claim that is dismissed by privacy activists since the ECJ allowed Google to apply a public interest test in deciding whether to remove the links.

Oh yeah, no big deal. What would normally be carefully weighed by a judge can just be decided in 30 seconds by a dude with 400 more requests to get through today. I'm sure that's going to go brilliantly.

I'm wondering if a precise definition of "valid removal request" really exist. For example, if some guy named John Smith was accused and further released after years and submitted a removal request, what should Google do? Even human cannot distinguish this Smith from that Smith.

EU court just fear the information world?

It'll be a lot of fun if Google publishes the requests as they take things down, in keeping with the spirit of transparency reports.

The point of putting it down the memory hole is so no one can see it. Google would likely be libel if they published that data but only EU citizens searches need to be censored so a VPN will get you actual search results.

I don't think it's libel to state facts such as "M. Vanger, of Hedestad, Sweden, requested that 37 pages regarding events in 2006, 2007, and 2009 be removed."

I think happyscrappy maybe meant "liable"

That's kinda useless, isn't it. First, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of "M. Vanger" in any bigger city.

Second, M. Vanger has the right to request that information above hidden as well, so in the end the information would look like:

"M. Vanger, of Hedestad, Sweden, requested that 1 page containing a note of his page removal requests be removed."

Conclusion does not follow from evidence.

Maybe but that would draw more attention to these items as they could just be diffed against the actual search results and posted by people not affected by EU foolishness.

Edit: People in the EU will be "protected" from seeing certain information that the rest of the world will have no problem seeing. And even people in the EU will be able to see it if the have a VPN. Google will do their best to stay in Europe but they have had to give up before.

*Protected, not affected. The EU at least is trying to address the issue, something Google never cared to do themselves which paved the way for mountains of extortion and spam/scraper sites amplifying the effect of anything a person did.

I suspect that if I ise google.com/ncr (no country redirect) that I'll get the unfiltered results, and if I use google.com which redirects to google.co.uk I'll get the filtered results.

I would like to create a site where users can submit search terms that have been censored, and it will compare Google EU and non-EU results to show what's been removed.

The "Search removal request under European Data Protection law" webform, https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_eudpa?product=we...

What the article does not says it's that Google has already stated that information will be "removed" only within UE. So, outside UE, the information will be available. That is they are not going to remove it but just hide it.

Granted, the topic is not easy, especially for criminals, but to me it's a clear sign that Google don't really want to comply with actual privacy laws. And I am sorry but that completely taint whatever they can say about privacy.

90% of the demands would probably be reasonable but that means staffing ... customer support. Something we all know, Google want to avoid at all costs.

It seems counterproductive to ask every possible data aggregator (of which Google is just one) to allow data to be taken out and hidden from view.

If John Doe has something so embarrassing in their past that would warrant this, it can be accomplished by him changing his name.

I mean purely speaking as engineer, I'd make the central reference (the name) invalid, and not go check every possible reference user.

You do realize that you can't just change your name, right?

If the legislators want to give people the right to be forgotten, restrictions on name changing should be the first thing to fix, way before forcing a corporation to burn books.

I don't know where you live, but actually yes, you can just change your name.

I've changed my name in Canada. Here, name changes are made public in a government newspaper. It may be the case in other countries, too.

To be more general, a name change doesn't mean anything when the change itself is recorded.

Only matters if some Nameoogle comes along and publicizes websites with name traslations joined in.

What is this thing you call "newspaper"?

I live in Germany and changing your name here is only possible for a small number of reasons. If you have a normal name aren't marrying someone or are transgender and transitioning, changing your name is effectively impossible.

What next? Will they force google to pay taxes?

What's the problem with this comment? Don't you think the EU would be more accommodating if google wouldn't evade taxes? After all Capitalism is the de facto world government.

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