I wonder how EU regulators are going to react when, for example, Russian regulators demand that Google remove all links to "inaccurate" (i.e. not Russian propaganda) stories about MH17, worldwide.
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.
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.
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.
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> It is EXACTLY the same thing.
Of course it isn't. Let me spell it out:
Censorship: A nation-state determining what its own populace can read about general world affairs and affairs concerning that governments own actions, inspection and possible redaction of communications between citizens and their access to media (such as books).
Privacy: The right of an individual to govern the whereabouts of the data concerning that particular individual.
You can't possibly confuse the two.
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...