Google's "Right to be Forgotten" Disclaimer
googlesystem.blogspot.com
googlesystem.blogspot.com
The fact that global search engines often can have extremely negative implications vis-a-vis personal data retention, is one that more easily escapes those who were born naturally into the Internet age, as opposed to those who "merely adopted it". The "adopters" are usually more sensitive to the before-and-after effects, than the "naturals", usually because the naturals often lack the firsthand context with which to make informed comparisons of said effects.
A contributing, and perhaps aggravating, factor is the tendency of many (possibly younger) HNers to fall into knee-jerk behavioral patterns of vociferously defending all that is Google, from the somewhat irrational perspective of Google being All That Is Good And Holy, simply because of the corporation's trite slogan of "Do No Evil". At the very latest, the Snowden revelations and ensuing NSA scandals have shown us Google and co. are as far from sainthood as any other multibillion dollar multinational corporation.
In summary, the European little guy has scored an important victory that gives them the tools to improve their quality of life, or at the very least avoid a degradation thereof. How this is twisted into censorship of a search giant is fascinating and very revealing of other deeper and far more worrisome underlying tendencies within the very defenders of the "Mega Corp".
I see Google's censorship as an attack on "freedoms and rights".
> HNers to fall into knee-jerk behavioral patterns of vociferously defending all that is Google
I personally hate Google, and avoid their products whenever possible. I've used Bing for a number of years, and recently switched most of my searching to DuckDuckGo.
> European little guy has scored an important victory that gives them the tools to improve their quality of life
I don't think this is an "important victory", but rather an attack on the freedom of information.
P.S. I live in Australia and New Zealand.
You took my quote out of context and ran with that. I said many HNers. Not all HNers.
There is no censorship involved here. Read the EU ruling. The ruling does not prevent Google from indexing personal information. It prevents Google from permanently indexing personal information if it is irrelevant or no longer relevant. Even after said information has been removed from Google's database, it will still be available at the source that Google previously linked too. It's fallacious to pretend that information is being surpressed.
Wby Bing or Google can't index a La Vanguardia article? Why they are the ones censoring that name and not La Vanguardia?
Have I misunderstood something, but isn't this exactly about giving people a right to choose about the online visibility of their name?
If that is the case, isn't it a good thing that people get to have control over what is being shown and what is not? Or is full disclosure of personal details, the full personal transparency online the Right Thing to go with?
I thought a year ago during the NSA diclosures the consensus was that people should have the right to control the information collected, stored and shown about them. I see this paralleling that indirectly.
For what it's worth and to give someone something to grab onto, I am from Europe.
What do the Russians think? And the Chinese? And the Africans? No one knows? Assuming they even have an opinion about it?
If we don't like it we can always censor them?
hehehe
Including the message only on pages that have actually been censored would be much better because then you'd know when the government has required Google to lie to you.
Any explicit mention of "there is censored information" would mean Google are back in court.
I honestly doubt any big scandal can be hidden by removing it from Google. Scandals spread virally, ear to ear (i.e. social networks, digital or not). This is more useful so embarrassing or false information can't prevent normal folks from getting a job and so on.
A government's legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed, but its power comes from the threat of force. If that wasn't true, then there would be no need for government, since people could just ask nicely for what they want and receive it without any need to coerce others into doing it under threat of forced deprivation of assets or liberty.
What does private persons being able to censor searches of their own name have to do with the different censorship policies of European countries? These censorship policies, e.g. Piratebay blockades or secret child porn lists which when uncovered often also contain porn of young-looking adults, are also widely discussed in mainstream news of the countries in question, so saying that people are not informed about it is, well, misinformed.
Or are you referring to something else, some secret censorship, of which proof is difficult to obtain so it must be true?
I'm a European and I like this policy.
I like that individuals have the ability to have things that are no longer relevant forgotten about them so that their ability to have social mobility isn't compromised. I like that young people who make mistakes are now given the chance to move on, mature and change.
The opposite to this law is a view that a person can never change, and must always be held accountable for their past in their future.
No, I'm really happy this exists.
"To err is human", otherwise translated as "everyone make mistakes". Life and potential shouldn't halt when it happens.
The example I used in the other conversation about this when it first emerged is a real one, I know a girl who was the victim of an attack and chose to contact the police. The attacker was young and the court scrubbed his name from public record, but the local newspaper reported the victim's name and profession. Now you have a victim with a permanent smear against her created by an easily accessible record of fact (the newspaper, not the court record). The problem with the patriarchy and an unequal society being that woman who are victims of attacks are frequently met with doubt and victim blaming, "Was it something she wore?", "Did she act in any way as to provoke it?"... and so a victim is punished by the availability of information. Her peers have remarked how they've seen it on Google, because in her profession researching your peers is what you do.
The courts aren't wrong to record things.
The newspapers aren't wrong to report things.
But neither action was intended to be a permanent cross for the person to carry.
The girl in question? Her view is that if she knew it would end up on the front page of Google for her name, she would never have gone to the police.
Now ask yourself, is that the world you want to live in? I'm very glad the EU legal system agrees that it isn't, and that the EU politicians enshrined that it isn't. It makes me glad to be European.
I didn't realise just how extreme the opinion on this is. Shame HN doesn't show this in how the votes are displayed... I get that they're not displayed... but black text vs shaded implies only positive or negative, and hovering around 1 vote with lots of up and down votes is interesting in itself.
Is there such an EU country, where newspaper is permitted to disclose identity protected victims by officials?
> Now ask yourself, is that the world you want to live in?
I want to live in a world, where search engines do what they are supposed to do - search the internet. For the hamrful information available, authors shall be accounted responsible.
Shall we pass any law by giving colourful examples? Yes, censorship can be positive, if it protects the girl you knew, I agree, but it does not stop being censorship.
It is not illegal for newspapers to report past, spent convictions if you should make your way back into the public eye. There has never been a right to 'privacy' in this way. There still isn't, except for Google's search index.
In general, privacy laws of this kind - which we know all too much about in this country - help the powerful. (I don't notice any blacklisted trade unionists taking out superinjunctions - just Trafigura[0] covering up an ecological atrocity and rich men concealing their infidelity[1][2].)
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafigura#Super-injunction
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1389841/Ryan-Giggs-n...
You mustn't judge a law only by its best results, but by all of them, and particularly by its unintended consequences.
If you are a European citizen then you have whatever are the rights granted you by your country and wider EU law to request information about other citizens at the moment in time that you make the enquiry.
It might be that this grants you access to past acts, and it might be that this does not grant you access to past acts. And in the vast majority of cases the person you are requesting info about doesn't determine what you can access, the law does.
The law already does dictate whether past acts are relevant to you or not.
It's the timeliness that is important here, not who says what. Time allows people to move on with their lives and put some aspects of their past behind them (where it's the right thing to do for the rest of society).
Google failed here, because they accessed information at the time they were able to do so, but then permanently stored it and made it available. The judgement tells Google not to do this (the make available step), so that the enquirer needs to go to the source of the data and ask "at that moment in time", and thus whatever laws apply to deny or grant you this access is applied. That is all... your rights are unaffected and all the person being enquired about did is say "you should go back to the source to ask this".
The information is accessible right now and if you search that diary you will find that information without stating any point in time
No, but I get to decide what my government allows a foreign company to do with data about me.
In this case, I'm glad the law gives me more protection from a US company than the US law gives its own citizens.
And you will never know whom you face, because apparantly that he has a right to prohibit others learning about his wrong-doings.
So the real question is, do we want our private lives permanently documented for all to see; or do we deserve some level of privacy knowing there's a legitimate risk that a very small number of people will abuse those rights?
Personally I have the opinion that bad people will always find ways to do bad things; so I'd rather not punish the majority of good people out there just on the off chance that we can catch a couple of extra bad people.
It sometimes sounds like in pre-Google time we were living in a dark age of lawlessness where we were not able to scrutinized everyone thanks to the magic panopticon.
Actually thinking about it, little has changed....
That's not what the ruling was about. If we are to discuss this ruling it would help if people tried to understand it a little better, rather than claiming 'censorship' at every turn.
How is the current notice not telling the truth about what the EU is doing? You mean you think they should make a value judgment, which is a different thing.
Personally, I don't mind calling it censorship - I'm wary about this law too - but it would be hypocrisy after allowing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pages to be censored by just sending a DMCA takedown, without calling it the same.
Google already decides what to show you and we have little visibility as to how that decision is made (there's even an entire industry that tries to game it). To imply that that those search results are somehow 'pure' or better represent 'the truth', is completely ridiculous.
Deciding what Google, Microsoft or any other search engine can index or not is censoring.
And please, stop saying that people that it is against has not read the ruling because you're wrong.
Your failure to recognize the simple fact does indicate two things: you either didn't read the EU ruling or you read and fail to grasp its meaning.
And I see including the message only on affected pages as a kind of circumvention of the court ruling, because then the privacy of the individual is not really protected. Seeing such a warning only on an affected individual's search page would prompt searchers who are not already aware of any issue to look deeper, and probably find the information. (Which is why you want this I guess, since you seem to dislike the court ruling, and this would effectively circumvent it.)