Google under fire from regulators on EU privacy ruling
reuters.com
reuters.com
Information doesn't want anything. There may be a statistical tendency of information to propagate, but it seems to me that the only people who want information to want to be free are those advancing an agenda with a catchy slogan.
Further, the only viable endpoint is not totalitarianism-- one can argue about where on the spectrum we stand today, or might be in the future, but in the US we try to strike a balance. Unless you support being able to use whichever country's version of Google that permits things like searching for identity theft, illicit pornography, etc., it seems like we're OK with at least some restrictions on speech.
Assuming we accept the EU has the authority to pass such a law, then so long as Google wishes to operate within their jurisdiction, it seems fair that it abides by the law, vis., "deleting data as requested", not "make data inaccessible to those who cannot execute a second Google search on how to subvert the restrictions".
If EU courts and regulators want to give citizens the right to be forgotten, they should be doing away with restrictions on name changing.
Way before ordering a corporation to burn books.
There are very few restrictions on changing your name in England. Is that not the case for the rest of Europe?
It may be a bad title, probably for the purpose of link baiting, but the article itself isn't completely wrong assuming the EU desire is ultimately to gain control over what information is retained for EU citizens. It's possible this is merely speculation.
Personally, if the EU wishes to extend this limit themselves, then they should block access to US search engines from within EU member states. That's entirely within their right to do and it's a whole lot easier than upsetting everyone else who doesn't want to play by the same rules (and negates the need for extending treaties and the likes).
At its most extreme, I'm humored a bit by the prospect of what this sort of precedent would set for future demands made by North Korea.
Google pulled its Chinese version a few years ago, redirecting users to the Hong Kong version instead. But Google only had a small stake in the Chinese market when it did that. It can't pull the same trick with the EU. It needs to sell ads in the EU, and you can't sell ads in a country while openly violating its laws.
Why doesn't the EU take issue with the fact that, for example, the Internet Archive probably has copies of every page that EU citizens want censored? Well, to begin with, few people even know about the Internet Archive. But even more importantly, the Internet Archive has no presence whatsoever in the EU. It's a US charity with US servers. So although it will never be able to get away with hosting content that violates American law, it doesn't need to give a flying fuck about EU law, Thai law, Russian law, or whatever. Oh, the Saudis want to censor images of women driving cars? Feel free to arrest our Chairman if he ever visits Saudi Arabia.
I think this is exactly why keeping the flow of information distributed is so important to keeping it open. Different countries want to censor different kinds of information, so the union of censored information is huge, but the intersection is very small. If we become dependent on a few multinational corporations to access information, we'll end up suffering the union of every censorship regime in the world (or at least the union of regimes where those corporations do business in). But if we keep the flow of information distributed, only the intersection need be censored.
I'm actually quite impressed that they're not falling for the non-existent technological obstacles that have been put in place here to side-step the law, for a change the EU court actually seems to be on the ball.
Free speech American Style is American, the EU is different, whether better or worse is not for me to decide but it is the law of the land and as such it should be respected by corporations operating there.
The EU is concerned with privacy here, you are concerned with censorship, those are not the same concepts and they are not addressed by the same mechanisms.
The fact that in some EU countries (ex) politicians hold large stakes in media conglomerates and can manipulate public opinion is a much bigger source for worry than that some politician embroiled in a juicy scandal would be able to wipe his trail completely. Especially newspapers will take a serious stance against that and it will simply not work.
Or they won't, as you noticed they are owned by ex-politicians. Or they would, but the law gets passed anyway and what they do? They don't have 1st amendment to appeal to, so they get nothing.
>>> Free speech American Style is American, the EU is different, whether better or worse is not for me to decide
Why not for you? Nobody can prohibit you to think for yourself and decide if having freedom of speech is better or worse than not having it. Not even EU can, at least for now until they didn't invent "right not to be thought of".
So how can such a double standard possibly be justified? How can google be forced to delete things from the servers, but newspaper archives can't be forced to burn their material?
What I find interesting is how everybody is focusing on Google here, when the real focus should be not on how this system could be abused but why it exists and who it could benefit. And that gives a completely different picture. But it's late here (3 am) and I'm off to bed.
They're not taking down "automated collections of data", they are taking down links to newspaper articles. The exact same articles that are in the archives.
The focus SHOULD be on how the system IS abused because the costs of the abuse vastly outsize any potential benefits.
Funny thing is that the case that brought this ruling is about forcing Google to delete any mention to a newspaper article and nothing about the article in itself
These new demands are not from a court.
Google is side-stepping the reach of the EU by keeping the data on servers outside of the EU but this goes against the spirit of those laws, it is about the citizens not about where the data resides.
This is not at all about "where the data resides", as you claim, because the EU is not attacking the data where it resides -- it leaves that alone, on their original servers -- but instead where the data is indexed.
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/government...
Or maybe you think it should only honor requests from these countries, where it has an office?
Just because the EU's legal restrictions are grounded in privacy doesn't mean another jurisdiction's won't be grounded in censorship. Which is one thing if those restrictions apply to search results intended for that jurisdiction and quite another if those restrictions are applied worldwide.
Whether that is functionally identical with censorship or not is another debate.
We can have that debate, but it will end in some gray area where a convicted criminal that has served his sentence should probably be able to clear his name in the search engines and where a politician that was caught in some scandal will not be able to do the same (because he was a public figure at the time).
Censorship requests can simply be stonewalled until the company is sued and then the judges can side with Google or the claimant on a case-by-case basis.
There's no sensible reason for EU regulations to have anything to do with the search results that I (as a non-EU citizen, searching from outside the EU, most likely using entirely non-EU servers, network connections and so on) see. I agree that the EU has the economic and political power to impose these regulations (on Google, Bing, Yahoo, ...). I just think that, even though they can, they shouldn't.
This is exactly the same sort of extraterritorial bullshit that drives the EU (and EU citizens) nuts when the US does it. See, for example, the US government demanding, from Microsoft, the emails of EU citizens stored on EU servers in response to a US search warrant. Or the volumes of requirements (tax monitoring, sanctions compliance and so on) the US imposes on non-US banks even when their only US connection is they sometimes transfer dollars between non-US customers.
EU citizens and EU regulators might care deeply about the "right to be forgotten", but if they think that endorsing and emulating the US's extraterritorial grandstanding in its name is going to be anything but a gigantic net loss for European privacy, they're kidding themselves, at best. Google's response to the "right to be forgotten" has been disappointing and frustrating (though I doubt we'd agree on why). What similarly powerful governments (e.g. US, China, ...) end up doing with the new tools the EU is forging to enforce that right will be terrifying.
Arguing that freedom of speech trumps your privacy rights is a rather twisted interpretation of the UDHR, by that interpretation we have no privacy at all, because after all, anything, once uttered by another person immediately becomes 'free speech'.
Your life belongs to you, and so does the data about you, unless you choose to become a public figure (for instance by seeking public office), or you become one through circumstance (for instance because you crash a cruise ship into a rock and capsize it).
In those cases your right to be forgotten is going to be trumped by the rights of the public to be informed.
Free speech is guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
But that way lies madness. Once Google is done censoring every search result that any government objects to (including results governments let their citizens object to), what will be left?
It's like the copyright battles in reverse, only this time the rights holders are citizens, and it is google playing shell games rather than say allofmp3.
(Referring to the song: "He's making a list, Checking it twice; Gonna find out who's naughty or nice.")
According to the regulation the range of a telephone tower should end exactly at the border of the county (taluka) !
In 1978, the french government proposed to cross-reference (through digitalization) many of its databases (birth registry, healthcare, retirement fund, driver's license…). It encountered a very strong resistance from the public, mostly because of an news article in one the biggest newspaper (Le Monde) titled "SAFARI [the name of the project]: the hunt for french citizens" (la chasse aux français). Needless to say that such a system would have been a blessing for the German administration during WW2. It was 1978 and WW2 didn't seem that far away, either your generation or the one of your parents lived during the war. That's how France ended up with a law (Loi Informatique & Libertés) that regulates what one can do with databases storing personal information.
How's that related to the right to be forgotten? Bear with me.
This law (and up to minor differences, the EU directive on the matter), makes explicit what I consider to be a very smart and important idea: "purpose of data" (finalité des données). Basically, before you're authorized to store personal data (like email adresses, names, phone numbers, IP addresses[1]), you have to state what the purpose of this data is (to who and how is another matter, but that's not too difficult). Also, data should only be stored for a specific amount of time. This duration is determined by the purpose of the data. For example, if you have a database of all the people that used to be registered to your {nodejs,rails,lisp} newsletter but aren't anymore, you cannot keep that data for, say, 10 years. 10 years doesn't make sense given the purpose of your data. Note that if you anonymize the data, you're good to go. On the other hand, if you have medical data on cutting edge treatment of cancer, you may want to keep the data for 30 years if you need to contact a former patient when you discover longterm side-effect of your drug. And in this case, it's fine.
You may start to see where I'm going. We have basically the same idea in the right to be forgotten. Yes, it impedes freedom of speech as american people think of it. Sure. But, you know, in Europe, we have a different freedom of speech, which also traces back to WW2. I can't go around saying that I hate black people and that I'm a nazi. I'm gonna be fined/thrown in jail for doing that. And a vast majority of Europeans do agree with that. Basically restrictions are nothing that promotes hate/racism and libel (you can't say that somebody's a serial killer before he's convicted for example.)
And you may think I'm backwards, turning away from the blinding beauty of technology (right to be forgotten? that's not how the internet works!). Thinking that Freedom of speech as the US knows it is the way to go everywhere is universalism, pure and simple. So, please remember that countries and people have a history.
Yep, the internet doesn't work that way. And I am aware the I can host my server in some random third world country and get away with mostly whatever I host. Or I can use a tor hidden service. But that's not the point. 99% of these cases will be about data hosted by legitimate businesses, which have a name and address and that will be compelled to remove the data. In my opinion, the slope isn't that slippery. After all, you'd be hard pressed to consider EU countries as being way too censorshipy (?) — in general, not just when talking about Internet.
And yes, law will always be stupid when you pit it against technology. But unless you advocate total deregulation, it's a matter of how much idiocy you can accept.
Finally, a thought on jurisdiction: european judges consider that they have authority if the intended public is european. So yes, google.es, google.co.uk and such are subject to european law. Wether or not google.com is subject to EU law has not been tested in court (it probably has, but I can't remember any specific case), but even in this case, it would be perfectly acceptable (from the court standpoint) to alter google.com for EU IP addresses and leave it untouched for other addresses. So, no, nobody's gonna tread your freedom.
Ironically, I don't really have an opinion on Freedom of speech (US vs EU). But I find that the EU has struck a nice balance when it comes to that. Knowing that companies must destroy data that has my name attached to it when it's not relevant anymore is very appealing.
In the end, the US and the EU, in this case, disagree on principle, which are like axioms. You can't prove me that one is better (in the general framework of modern civilization, ie, let's say The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to keep it simple.)
[1] this one is tricky, but this comment is already long enough
But, you know, in Europe, we have a different freedom of speech
In general I feel like in Europe there is not this holy grail of abolute freedom like in the US. It's often limited by personal rights, privacy etc. Americans don't seem to understand that this isn't just the EU on some kind of acid trip, but that Europeans simly have different values.
Freedom is an absolute in theory only, just about every country in the world loses out on one or more dimensions of it but somehow the US has the general idea that it and it alone is somehow the bastion of freedom.
But this has nothing to do with free speech in general. The two issues are orthogonal to each other. They're not "basically the same idea". It's entirely possible for a country to regulate the direct collection, use, and distribution of personal information in one way, while regulating free speech in general in another way.
My phone company's collection of my personal information has little to do with free speech, it's a contractual obligation that they incur in exchange for getting my information. It's just like when Hertz rents me a car and tells me "you can only use this car for 7 days, you can't use it to drive for Uber, and you can't sublet it to other people." Hertz can charge me a hefty fee if I use the car in a way that they disallow. Similarly, I can sue my phone company for damanges (or have the government fine them) if they use my personal information in a way that I disallow. And if the law provides standard rules on what is allowed and what is not, well, that could be convenient for all of us.
On the other hand, if someone publishes embarrassing facts about me on their website without my permission, now that's a matter of free speech, and whether or not I can tell them to delete those posts should depend on how much actual impact those pieces of information are expected to have on my life and the lives of people around me, as well as the potential impact that a system of censorship might have on the general quality of public life in the country. It's probably a good idea to let citizens hide the list of sex toys they bought. It's probably not a good idea to let the President hide the list of bribes he took.
Since these judgments are cultural, reasonable people can disagree about them. In America, flying a Nazi flag doesn't count as a harmful thing, only a disgusting thing. In Germany, due to its unique history, it's considered a very harmful thing. But I don't think this shows any disagreement "on principle". Both agree that harmful speech is not protected; even in America, you can be punished for shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Different cultures simply have different ideas about what is harmful.
Again, this has nothing to do with the usual collection and use of personal information that your excellent "purpose of data" law is concerned with.
I agree that these things should be decoupled, though.
As for limits to the right to be forgotten I can't find sources right now, but I'm pretty sure that you can only invoke this right on things related to "private life" (ie not public figures).