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Comment by Shinkei | Hacker News Reader

I really have to rant about the idiocy of this law. For full disclosure, I am American.

They call it a "right to be forgotten," but guess what, I have a right to information (speech, press, etc.) that I think supercedes this supposed right which I've never heard of before this law. People need to learn to live with their mistakes and be more careful about their actions. If a person (to cite the specific example commonly mentioned) went into bankruptcy due to economic issues, poor investment or even 'bad luck' then that is a matter of legal proceedings and should be public record.

I can certainly understand things like nude photos, sex tapes, etc. but we already have legal means of dealing with those examples. Can someone convince me why this law is necessary and in the public interest?

Edit: Took out statement about Chinese censorship because people were attacking that rather than the substance of THIS law.

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> I can certainly understand things like nude photos, sex tapes, etc. but we already have legal means of dealing with those examples. Can someone convince me why this law is necessary and in the public interest?

No, we don't.

Not only is it extremely expensive to go in court to have such a judgement for such affair, but it is also extremely complex as you are dealing with international laws and that most countries will not enforce a judgment made by another one for such "superficial" topics. And on top of that, you can add the Streisand effect.

Moreover, you still have the right to access the information, it will just not be shown by the popular search engines, as is the vast majority of the web.

This law is there to protect those that get a bad press on the web for things they already redeem themselves, have reach the prescription delay (e.g.: mistakes you did while you were minor) or that suffer from a side effect of some unrelated topic.

If you look at the questionnaire, it is long and complex enough to prevent most of abusive uses as it is the current case with the DCMA takedown idiocy. Plus the process is quite long (currently several weeks, or months) before a request is validated to prevent some scandale to be obfuscated that way.

>No, we don't.

You're right. I think the standard way of dealing of them here is to hire a lawyer to file a copyright on the images or video and DMCA the host, which only works if the person depicted is legally the owner of the material (like sexting selfies.) Otherwise, people file a case against the owner of the image for harassment or hacking (or something in that vein) and get a judge to issue a court order to take it down as part of a possible crime.

It's a pretty awful and expensive state of affairs (at least in the US.) The larger question is what this "right to be forgotten" attempts to answer in a more general sense, which is whether you should be able to force people to take these things down at all. I tend to say no. I don't think sexuality should differentiate your right to distribute content from any other reason, so, sadly, I think the current state of US law is mostly a good one.

I think that if you don't have a right to be forgotten, you also shouldn't have a right for your sex tape to be forgotten.

Look at it like this:

Suppose you made a comment on an internet forum that people got very upset about but it turns out there is no edit button so you can't change it. Would that piss you off? Would it make you feel like you are being misunderstood and therefore treated wrongly.

Someone notices that the thread has grown and decides to make a story out of it. They pick your statement because it triggered the most "feelings". You get the regular inflammatory headline and more people get upset. Sprinkle some twitter on it and some tv news might pick it up.

Now, suppose there was a vote on that forum to decide if there should be an edit button or not. Would you vote 'no' to preserve others right to information? Or would you click edit in an effort to keep people on subject?

You made the comment. People might disagree with your views - such is life.

If the comment is picked up by the news - again, you said it. Don't publish things to your name you aren't comfortable having everyone in the world know.

However, if what you wrote is being misquoted or taken out of context, it likely would be libel, which already is illegal.

Information flow is similar to an electric current. Current flowing through light bulbs and motors does useful things for us...but you want some resistance to that current. If you have no resistance, things break or burst into flames.

It's similar for information flow. Information flow does great things, but without resistance it can cause serious damage.

The internet greatly lowered the resistance. Search engines lowered it even more. I fear that if we do not find some way to increase the resistance, the problem will be addressed at the other end by changing the laws about what goes in the public record.

For instance, maybe arrests will no longer go into the public record--only convictions. That way, people who are arrested and later released due to lack of evidence don't have the arrest following them around. (Bad things make a bigger impression than good things...when someone finds out you were arrested, and then finds out you were let go, the latter usually won't negate the prejudice they have toward you from the former).

It is absolutely critical to a civil justice system in a democratic society that police department activities (including arrests) are a matter of public record. Operational details are not necessary, but at the very least the police have to be obligated to report that they have arrested someone and why. If not, you have a secret police department and secret arrests.

In my town, only convictions and lawsuits show up if you search someone by name in the court record system. However, you can go to the police department and ask for the daily activity log, which indicates who has been arrested, where, when, and on what charge. The newspaper does this every day, and publishes demographic information but not names.

Do you really want people disappearing with no one taking responsibility or giving an explanation? No, thanks. I don't need my local police department turning into the Stasi.

> Do you really want people disappearing with no one taking responsibility or giving an explanation?

Of course not. That's why I said that I fear the reduction of the public record.

However, consider that 30% of American males are arrested at least once by age 23 [1], or maybe that should be 40% [2]. It's a little confusing because both numbers come from studies that analyzed the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 and looked at arrests from 18-23, and both studies are by the same group of authors. WTF? Anyway, apparently a lot of American males have been arrested (and this is excluding arrests for minor traffic violations).

It only takes losing one job due to an arrest to turn someone into a "yes" voter for an initiative to remove arrest records from the public record, and with so many people having an arrest on their record, there could be a lot of those "yes" voters.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/us/nearly-a-third-of-ameri...

[2] http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-01/uosc-sho01031...

Chinese censorship exists to protect the state. EU right to be forgotten protects the individual.

That's a pretty huge difference.

I agree the parallel isn't exact, but it still represents the state limiting the dissemination of information. I would rather hear your opinion about the substance of the law rather than the weakest part of my statement.

So it's a good ol' ends justify the means argument. That certainly never turns out badly ...

I didn't make any argument

Uh?

This is surely an argument.

You are arguing that using the same means (censorship) to achieve two different end goals (protecting the individual, protecting the state), are very different situations. You imply that they should be looked at very differently.

If you don't want it to be an argument, simply state the facts, and remove, among other things the "that's a pretty huge difference" statement.

I find that downvote really funny.

> The parellels to Chinese censorship

We really need a new Godwin.

Comparing this law (remove a small number of very specific search results or face a fine) to Chinese censorship (great firewall; execution and torture and imprisonment for dissidents) is pretty offensive.

Good lord, would people please stop taking the weakest part of my statement? Let's discuss the substance of this law.

When I search for a particular person's name; on a European server; and that person has asked for information to be de-linked; and the search engine agrees that the information is no longer relevant and the person is not in the public eye and etc; then some URLs won't be returned for some particular search terms.

To compare that to Chinese oppression (you get shot in the head and your family gets a bill for the bullet) is perverse.

> the search engine agrees that the information is no longer relevant and the person is not in the public eye

Unless I am mistaken, there is no "agreement". This law functions like the DMCA: when Google gets a valid request, the must remove the specified results and fight the removal from this position, if they choose to.

> To compare that to Chinese oppression (you get shot in the head and your family gets a bill for the bullet) is perverse.

"Chinese oppression" is not an all-or-nothing thing. Comparing this to aspects of Chinese oppression may not be fair and may be calculated to provoke an emotional response, but it is not equivocating it to all the oppressive actions the Chinese regime is responsible for.

Where did you get the impression that this is like the DMCA and all requests must be acted on?

In all the commentary I've seen so far that's been one of the complaints: that companies have this duty to assess whether the information is no longer relevant or whether the person is in the public eye.

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