Comment by josephlord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephlord | Hacker News Reader

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I think there are games being played here. The European Court ruled that some things should be made harder to find (revenge porn, obvious slander, spent convictions etc.).

Google don't want to do this and are trying to make a mockery of the ruling removing from the results anything that they are asked to as long as it is about a person with the very aim of stirring a backlash against the ruling. Requests to take down important stories from major news organisations are the perfect way to do this provided that they keep the blame on the EU not on their implementation.

I haven't read the ruling but I'm pretty sure that there is some leeway for judgement and for Google to have a process to decide on these cases rather than having to comply with every single request.

I would need to understand the ruling better to come down with a full view about whether it is right or not. On the one hand Google's results can cause a lot of damage and they should carry some responsibility for them on the other legitimate stories of real public interest and information about serious wrongdoing shouldn't be censored.

> On the one hand Google's results can cause a lot of damage

Public, factual information causes damage and Google is responsible because somebody else reported on it and they indexed it? And so Google should stop linking to the article which will still exist and can be found on other search engines in other jurisdictions without any effort? And we can pretend online censorship works all of a sudden now that the EU found a "good" excuse for it?

> The European Court ruled that some things should be made harder to find (revenge porn, obvious slander, spent convictions etc.).

So what does freedom of expression mean to you, then? A regulated, controlled public discourse with arbitrary rules about what the government thinks is relevant or important for people to know or read about? And it looks like you slipped "spent convictions" in there, which throws off the argument.

I think you already made your mind up.

I wouldn't classify automatically generated results as expression.

So it's not a harm to freedom of expression if we allow your blog to exist, but we censor links to it because they're "automated"? It doesn't matter if it's automated or highly moderated. It's an expression and censoring anything like it influences the public discourse in some way.

The original person who started his was a Spanish business who wanted court records removed over his debts and their was a dr who had been in trouble or struck off from practicing by his country's medical certifying body.

Yes, it's evil google's fault. Maybe you can be a peach and come up with a better implementation than doesn't require all google employees to work on this full time.

Google representative on the radio today indicated that the search result suppressed is the name of one of the thread's commenters and not for the bank executive's name which will still return the correct link.

Given this my comment is probably too harsh, there is no evidence that Google isn't properly assessing requests that I am aware of.

I think if a conviction was reported in a newspaper when it happened, I don't think that should be removed from Google, even if the conviction is subsequently "spent". Do people go through newspaper archives deleting them from the (what used to be) microfiche copies?

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