EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> Guardian articles have been hidden by Google
> Editorial decisions belong with them, not Google
> But such editorial calls surely belong with publishers, not Google.
Google has done absolutely nothing wrong here. It is making zero editorial calls. It's removing links that were flagged for removal by someone outside of the company, and it is compelled to do so by EU law.
In fact, if you ignore the finger-pointing at Google, you'll see that Google actually tries really really hard to get around this: It informs you when results were blocked, notifies when results are blocked, blocks only the narrowest possible search terms, and helpfully points you to google.com which doesn't filter.
> Publishers can and should do more to fight back. One route may be legal action.
No, legal action is the only route. This is a matter of law.
If the most concerning thing to you about this article is that it doesn't spend enough time exonerating Google for their role in this, then I don't know what to tell you.
And the article does imply the blame lies with Google way too many times.
No, it certainly does not: "As for Google itself, it's clearly a reluctant participant in what effectively amounts to censorship."
"Unwilling" or "legally obligated" might describe it better.
It's hard not to see this phrasing as an attempt to spread some culpability on to Google.
In some ways it's more appropriate than your options, because it implies that Google is fighting the implementation of the law as far as it can.
EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google
Publishers must fight back against this indirect challenge to press freedom, which allows articles to be 'disappeared'. Editorial decisions belong with them, not Google
When you Google someone from within the EU, you no longer see what the search giant thinks is the most important and relevant information about an individual. You see the most important information the target of your search is not trying to hide.
My Rewrite:
EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been required removed by law.
Publishers must fight back against this indirect challenge to press freedom, which allows articles to be 'disappeared'. Editorial decisions belong with them, not the government.
When you search someone from within the EU, you no longer see what might be the most important and relevant information about an individual. You see the most important information the target of your search is not trying to hide.
"EU's right to be forgotten", people with context understand this cause.
You are so good at political correctness... That does not matter if you use "search engine" to generalize google, Google is effectively the "search engine". You can say that Google has no fault in this incident, but you should not pretend that Google is not playing a crucial role in this incident...
Wording is just wording, truth is the truth...
Let's take high-profile person X who is found guilty of some serious crime, like sex offences. They have the money to hire a professional "reputation management" firm to find all stories in the press about them, and send takedown requests to Google, who is legally compelled to comply with those requests. The result is that information that is out there in the public domain, and that the public arguably has a right to know, is censored.
There's a balance here between an individual's right to be protected against defamation, and the public's right to know. I don't think this law strikes the right balance. Furthermore, it ignores the technical and social nature of how the Internet works - the so called "Streisand effect" that repeatedly gets invoked whenever someone tries to suppress information. And as technology evolves and there's even more ways for information to become replicated (think peer-to-peer search engines and the like), it's like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
If the guardian publishes something, it will have its day in the sun.
It just will eventually get removed, years afterwards. No press freedoms impinged, years after you've had your expressive speech.
Whatever freedom that is, freedom of historical reports?, it's nothing to do with speech or press. If you want to re-report the information, you could, but it then would likely no longer be for the public good or interest, it would merely be vindictive.
Unless, of course, you don't believe in redemption or rehabilitation.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past
Freedom of press is about creating a public record. When you remove that record from the public, when you censor the past of public discourse, you've infringed on free speech. Real discourse is full of [citation needed], and if you can preemptively remove those citations, there will be cheating.
They are if they operate in the EU.
But there's no universal place to submit takedown requests. People would also have to send them to Bing (according to this article DDG doesn't operate at all in the EU so is not subject to the ruling).
Neither of which have anything to do with a "true" reputation.
If we lose that one we are truly fucked.
I'm fairly sympathetic to the "right to be forgotten", but this Guardian article does raise some troubling questions about exactly how it is going to work. Two of the things it mentions being hidden from Google results are from 2011 and 2010. Is that "years afterwards"? Is three years so long ago that the information is genuinely irrelevant?
You might find this summary PDF informative:
http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets...
[Edit: In a discussion about whether this behaviour amounts to censorship, within 2 minutes of posting, someone has downvoted this comment even though all it does is point out what appears to be a widely held misconception about the subject matter and provide a credible source. If that's not irony...]
He did say "send takedown request to Google".. and that's exactly the situation that is described in your PDF when discussing the case. The article says the court decided that the newspaper archive would be kept intact, and Google would need to delete the links -- and this was the correct balance of the public's right to know.
In fact, from my reading of the article, I'm having a hard time thinking of a case where Google could refuse to delete a link -- since Google only links to other people's content, and that content will be available even if Google's links to it are deleted.
Edit: the quote:
The case itself provides an example of this balancing exercise. While the Court ordered Google to delete access to the information deemed irrelevant by the Spanish citizen, it also emphasised that the content of the underlying newspaper archive should not be changed in the name of data protection (paragraph 88 of the Court’s ruling). The Spanish citizens’ data is still accessible but is no longer ubiquitous. This is enough for the citizen’s privacy to be respected.
How about the case discussed right here? The summary linked above says:
The request may for example be turned down where the search engine operator concludes that for particular reasons, such as for example the public role played by John Smith, the interest of the general public to have access to the information in question justifies showing the links in Google search results.
That seems like it could be pretty easily satisfied in this case: Stanley O'Neal is a major business figure with a clear public role, serving on the board that controls gigantic multinational corporation Alcoa. Given that powerful role, it's in the interest of the general public to be able to search for and find information about his recent past in positions of power at other gigantic multinational corporations, such as major events during his CEOship at Merrill Lynch.
The main practical problem, imo, is that Google is unlikely to want to put in the resources that would be necessary to make case-by-case determinations, and would therefore probably just err on the side of deleting anything requested. But taken in isolation, this particular case really seems like one of the easier cases in which to reject the request, which they would probably win if litigated. Perhaps not quite as easy as if it were Silvio Berlusconi asking for articles about his political career to be delinked (that request would be really clearly rejectable), but O'Neal is still clearly a public figure, and the article in question was also about his public role as CEO (while the Mario Costeja González case was about the personal bankruptcy filing of a pretty obscure individual).
Which is exactly the problem with this law -- if Google wants to reject a request, the burden of proof is on Google to prove that the information should NOT be deleted. While you may believe Google could win this case, you're suggesting Google spend legal resources (and money) fighting over a few links... and that they should do that every time they get a bogus request. AND if they repeatedly do this and lose their case, Google may be subject to fines of 2% of worldwide annual revenue (over $1B/year).
Why would Google ever decline a request when the penalty is $1B/year?
I think the bigger issue for Google isn't their fear of fines and/or losing lawsuits if they really did make case-by-case determinations, but rather than difficulty & expense of putting together any kind of system for case-by-case determinations in the first place. They tend not to want to put together such systems, as can also be seen in the "delete first, ask questions later" approach to letting music labels delete videos on YouTube after algorithmically scanning, not even requiring the labels to put together a proper under-penalty-of-perjury DMCA request. I'm sympathetic to that position from a practical perspective, but I think it's a somewhat different problem. The problem here is that even if it is perfectly possible to make case-by-case decisions in a reliably compliant way, Google just doesn't do case-by-case decisions in that manner, for business reasons: their entire business model is automated decisions at scale, not manual curation of content.
I think it highly unlikely that the court would want this article suppressed. I think Google may be taking things down over enthusiastically to bring the law and the ruling into disrepute. They are betting that the law rather than their particular takedown process will be blamed.
The DMCA notice/counternotice arrangement has a similar but more subtle effect, because while it is superficially symmetric, the situation of the parties with respect to it is asymmetric in a way which results in the one side systematically being privileged.
I'm quite sympathetic to the idea that the rules may be wrong or could be made better but I think that there being some control in this area is a good idea on balance.
The FAQ someone linked to refers to balance of freedom of speech and data protection so there is the possibilities of complaints from both sides.
Given this my comment is probably too harsh, there is no evidence that Google isn't properly assessing requests that I am aware of.
Most people from the next generation use Facebook. They're not ignorant of how they use it--they use their privacy settings to hide posts from the public.
However Facebook's ToS says [0] Facebook may use any information you share with them "to protect Facebook's or others' rights or property". So hypothetically, if Facebook felt some policy of a presidential candidate threatened "Facebook's rights", they would be in the clear, legally speaking, to publish those photos of you smoking a joint at 18.
So what is the difference exactly between Facebook publishing a photo of a joint and an old Guardian article? They are both expressions of speech. They are both things that the public arguably has a right to know. They are both cases where there is no legal impediment to the speech--other than, in your words, the "right to censor criticism or true facts about yourself." On what basis can we say one is allowed and not the other? I cannot generate a reason for analyzing these situations differently, although I very much want to. I suggest we have to either allow both, or forbid both.
This analysis would suggest that free speech and privacy have a very fundamental conflict--that the gain of one comes at the expense of the other. Increasingly, the right to privacy is really the right to prevent others from publishing information about you that they lawfully and ordinarily collect. I grow increasingly doubtful that we can achieve both outcomes--I think at some point we will have to choose sides.
[0] https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/your-info#howweuse
So what? We know three of the last US presidents used drugs when they were young. For none of them it was a major problem. If they had seriously bad things done in the past - that would be a problem, but the we want to know about it. Knowing that the presidential candidate smoked weed in college doesn't hurt him anymore - we already know pretty much everybody did it anyway.
>>> This analysis would suggest that free speech and privacy have a very fundamental conflict
Only if you define privacy as "ability to go back in time and undo public things that I did". In my book, privacy doesn't mean that. 1984's memory holes are not privacy, they are an instrument of oppression and mind control. I don't see why somebody would be allowed to control my mind and make me forget things about them that they no longer consider beneficial to them. So I know which side I would choose - the opposite of where 1984 is and where EU is heading now.
Once swathes of valid journalism disappears down the toilet, the shit is slowly going to hit the pan.
You could use this for some nefarious purposes I'm sure.
I have a client that wants a page removed because of a court case that painted them in a bad light. This ruling just made their year.
I can't tell whether that's less appealing than the usual idiom.
Google tells the media which articles are being expunged, the media writes about the articles Google expunged and then Google indexes these pages in their search results. Interesting process.
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/scot_prem/9143508.s... [2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1333950/Re... [3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/celtic/80980... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Anyway, at the time google had an automated (or semi-automated) service where you could ask them to hide news group postings. You had to declare you were the author and give a reason and so forth. I went through the process, and actually lied because the post that caused me problems wasn't posted by me but it was just a stupid one liner by some idiot which just had my username buried in the header somewhere, asked for it to be deleted because it was causing me problems getting a job, and thankfully they did it.
It pretty much saved my career, at least for now because I do live in fear somehow it will resurface.
By way of example, I knew nothing of the Dougie McDonald scandal until this article, which not only brought the scandal to my attention, but also suggests someone (presumably McDonald himself) doesn't want people to find out about the scandal.
This execution, however, is absolutely awful.
I don't think Google should escape criticism here. Yes they have to follow the law, but they should be aggressively pressing to the minimum boundary of what they have been asked to do. They should be declining cases like this and wearing the law suits that result until the real line and intent is hammered out. It sounds like they are taking a DMCA-like approach and taking things down by default, and that is very very worrying.
I am especially distressed that people can remove all the wrong they do from sight. What is next? Deny the holocaust? (yes hyperbole)
Methinks the law would be quickly changed. Especially with an election coming up next year.
Of course I am in no way encouraging anyone to do this, or condoning such behaviour.
Yes.
> The law that requires Google to comply?
Yes.
> Google for complying?
No! How can you blame a company for doing something they are legally compelled to do?
> Or no one—is the right thing being done, the "pen" of the Internet being dulled back into a pencil?
The Internet has always been written in pencil. Pages stop being served all the time. The only difference is that now the index of the Internet is written in pencil, and every EU citizen has been given an eraser.
They're not legally compelled to take action on every request they get. It's just that it's too expensive to look at each request individually.
They have three choices. One leads to censorship, the other two lead to bankruptcy. Choose.
Plus, most results about those individuals are now the articles about the censorship itself. Which is funny. Will the mentioned folks block those articles too?
Oh, wait...