BBC to publish 'right to be forgotten' removals list
bbc.com
bbc.com
Yes, because in Europe free speech isn't an absolute right; sometimes the right of privacy trumps free speech.
How long before this moves into "right to not be offended trumps free speech" territory?
You can comment all you want about it, but it doesn't compel them to change how they are at all.
Interestingly though, your comment is a nice example of being irrationally fearful of free political speech.
You're talking out of both sides of your mouth here. First it's okay to comment on other culture's behaviors and now it's "cultural imperialism".
How about everyone is okay to comment on whatever they wish without the meta value judgements? I think that system works pretty well.
Sometimes those people will mix up "first ammendment" rights with what a website owner is allowed to do; or they appear to be unaware of the very many cases of people in America who lose their jobs or are arrested because they wear the wrong t-shirt or have an innocent poster on their door.
We often hear these people when there's coverage of twitter trolls going to court. They'll say that it's ridiculous to prosecute people for being mean on twitter. This is intensely frustrating because -and this should be fucking obvious- no-one is arrested for being a bit mean on social media. People are arrested for making credible repeated threats of violence. But that happens in the US.
Arrested and convicted of a crime are two different things. Do you have any evidence of that happening? I know of a Virginia teenager who was arrested last year because he wouldn't take off an NRA shirt, but first, he wasn't arrested for the shirt, he was arrested for obstruction, and second, charges were dropped.
As for European attitudes toward free speech, I don't say they're wrong for Europeans, I just think some of them are daft, like locking people up for racist remarks or offensive speech. That just turns harmless idiots into martyrs.
http://deadspin.com/5896709/racist-tweets-about-fabrice-muam...
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/21/man-racial...
Here's 11 people who got locked up last year:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2330809/Lee-Rigby-de... (daily fail, but their info appears sound)
And that was just on the first page of google. Note that in all of these cases, the comments were just ugly and racist, but not threatening.
Portions of the U.S. used to have a strong cultural affinity for human slavery, yet many within that same U.S. argued that slavery was wrong from day 1 of the current republic. Europe used to have a cultural affinity for anti-Semitism (and it hasn't completely gone away). If you believe in any sort of objective truth whatsoever, then it's possible for a 'cultural value' to still be wrong.
"A unanimous Supreme Court, in a famous opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concluded that defendants who distributed leaflets to draft-age men, urging resistance to induction, could be convicted of an attempt to obstruct the draft, a criminal offense." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
From it's very inception, that phrase has been used to justify the restriction of political speech. Nothing has changed since 1917, people still use it to argue against political speech to this day.
>The fact that nobody was actually hurt in these two incidents doesn't alter the deontological basis for a rule against such behavior.
Then what possibly could? Hegel's ghost?
Then what possibly could? Hegel's ghost?
The improbability of anyone being hurt. If you stand in the middle of a public park and yell 'the sky is falling!!' nobody will take you very seriously, but even if they did and decided that it was necessary to run indoors the probability of a stampede occurring is vanishingly low. But maliciously causing panic in an enclosed space significantly elevates the risk of injury to others, because the more panicked people are, the more irrationally and dangerously they may act, a phenomenon for which we have abundant evidence.
What it says is that some line has to be set, and this concrete situation described is something that obviously should fall on the other side of the line. (Therefore, people should be imprisoned for speaking out against the war Q.E.D.)
Another example would be shouting "She's got a gun, arhhhh!" in a crowded plazza while setting off some firecrackers.
This isn't 1900. There are accessible, well-lit exit routes in every theater I've been in. Not to mention fire suppression systems, alarms, and the fact that you'd most likely see a fire before it was time to panic.
edit: You're overestimating the wisdom of crowds and the care of theater owners. Spraying mace in a crowded club led to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_E2_nightclub_stampede
Fear that the Who would start playing early caused https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Who_concert_disaster
We should probably add 'doing a sound check' to 'shouting fire in a crowded theater.'
This is already the case in Europe.
Is there even a right to keep private something everybody knows? A right to have milk on the floor be in the glass it spilled out of?
Free speech wasn't an absolute right in Soviet Russia either. And, yes, they too had ways of avoiding naming what they were actually doing.
The answer to your question is that the EU law is written horribly, by people who have no real idea how the internet works.
I have no idea how the EU justice system works
Then why not inform yourself before making grand pronouncements on what counts as error? There are other legal philosophies besides the one you adhere to, you know.
Sure you will, as long as you don't use Europe's neutered version of reality.
You are still allowed to find and read the original article under this EU law. You are just not entitled to have it pre-emptively collected and indexed for you if the subject of the article has a colorable wish to preserve their privacy.
I don't see that that's morally different from e.g. "you have to pay a $20 fine if you do this."
What if I have a hand-crafted artisanal search engine, like Yahoo Directory. Are those exempt from this law?
Is that your intent?
Search engines are an equalizer, they allow people to search through massive amounts of data blazingly fast. This closes the gap between the research a professional reporter is capable of, and the research that the general public is capable of.
Meanwhile, you're completely ignoring the actual problem, which is that now anyone can do a bang-up research job on private rather than public individuals, without being held to any ethical standards for journalistic accreditation or publication. Somewhere upthread I pointed out the example of mugshot aggregation sites, which operate a thinly-veiled extortion racket under the rubric of 'free speech'.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7951269/Young-w...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Court_of_Human_Rights#...
Non-judges are a rather common thing among high European courts. And what would be wrong about putting someone whose publications have laid the groundwork for other judges' descisions in the past in such a position? It's not like the academic track is any less qualified.
It seems strange that people can become judges without actually practising the law or working as a judge in a lower court first. If I was being operated on, I'd want a surgeon that has operated before, not an academic expert on surgery.
Now that's a good example of a feature fighting the product. Disable article commenting: you might miss out on engagement and subsequent pageviews. Enable commenting: you might get the article de-listed from Google. Allow anonymous commenting: you invite trolls (such as jezabel/violent GIF swarm). Require (partially) verified identities: you risk takedown requests.
The blog remains in google under all obvious keywords. Google only removes it for the requested keyword (probably the commenters name).
It's not a true delisting, but the option to have your name disassociated from content.
https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_eudpa?product=we...
> "When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information — for example, we may decline to remove certain information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials."
There is a legitimate problem with Google's search results listing harassing links to persons. Revenge porn would be a terrific example.
If there is something on the internet about you that you don't want there. It isn't possible to remove it, that would be absurd but your public facing name on the internet shouldn't be clouded by unwarranted defamation material.
They do at least promise not to remove professional malpractices and the like. I doubt for instance they would not return reviews about your business on yelp or similar.
A much larger issue that needs to be tackled is DMCA, which is being abused today. We have tried DMCA and it needs some reform. We haven't really tried right to be forgotten yet, and I just don't see that the downsides outweigh the potential benefits.
BBC publishing links that have been deemed by persons who are the subject of the links to be bad; paints a giant bullseye on those links.
Google has also taken down a link to an online dating profile for user Thom109 on Telegraph Dating.
Google is constantly looking to create controversy and undermine any kind of privacy rights enforcement rather than being constructive in finding solutions.
Google has every right to ignore all but the most obviously justified removal requests and only remove results after a court order. They are deliberately taking an axe to the search results in an attempt to make EU privacy protection look like censorship.
Besides, at the volume at which the requests have poured in, even Google has limited time and resources to fight each request in court. It's unrealistic to expect them to actually fight any takedown individually when the entire idea is absurd.
Yes, I added my opinion at the end there.
I think the difference is that newspapers probably never would have printed half the stuff people want removed in the first place. You would also be able to sue a newspaper and have corrections printed. Probably not as easy with online content if posted anonymously.
I think a big part of the problem is the different attitudes to free speech around the world. In the US it is top priority. In the UK people are legally punished for posting harassing or threatening messages on social media. In France/Germany there are laws are speech on the holocaust and anti-Semitism. I think free speech is important but I also think we can regulate it to a point and that's not an attitude that would fly in some countries, particularly the US (my opinion is changing slightly as it become more and more obvious we can't trust our governments). The internet being a global thing we are going to face these problems more and more.
It's not a hypothetical issue - the "anonymous online speech" is a red herring as the very first censored link was removing a link to a truthful newspaper article, and the BBC removed links are again censoring undisputed respectable news article history.
Except that before the Internet was a thing, in general, if you did something that got you in the newspaper five years ago, nobody would remember it when you're applying for a job or networking or somehow get in the news again, doubly so if you moved town.
These days, it's likely that if you were in the news once, that baggage is likely to be attached to you forever; it can quite literally ruin your life.
That's quite a massive difference if you ask me.
FWIW, I see this as blatant censorship.
I do not want to live in a world where everything I've done, and every mistake I've made, is indexed and shared across the world. Not everything about the Internet revolution has made the world a better place.
I'm a little perplexed at how people who find NSA surveillance utterly unacceptable and wish to be able to shield private information from even lawful (warranted) scrutiny nonetheless seem fine with surveillance and publication by private sector, whether that's more-or-less universal publication via search engines or fee-based as in the case of data brokers like Acxiom.
First, I asked what the endgame is, not what it is right now.
First, that everyone has a similar level of things to be embarrassed about.
And yet here we're discussing a law that leaves the amount of damage to be done to freedom of information up to the whims of each individual person who thinks they should be able to censor some piece of data, rather than any kind of objective test. Including the "rich and powerful".
Second, that wealthy and powerful people won't simply sue or bribe publishers to withhold or delete the embarrassing material.
That does not work in the real world. The rich and powerful have been trying to restrict information getting out for years. Snowden and Streisand are living proof of this. The continued explosions in the faces of people who try to do this are further proof.
That old saying about the internet interpreting censorship (and we can quibble about the wheretos and the whyfores all day long, but at the end of the day, this definitely fits the definition of censorship) as damage? That doesn't stop applying just because legislators want it to.
Third, that living in a panopticon is a good thing. I'm a little perplexed at how people who find NSA surveillance utterly unacceptable and wish to be able to shield private information..
In every case we're talking about here, it's not "private" information. It's information that's always been there, for free, to anyone who cares to look. Arrests are not private information, neither are blog comments, neither is anything else you do in the public eye. I find it repugnant to suggest that removing that information from one or two places makes it as if those things never happened.
There is a difference between public and private information, and you don't seem to know what that is.
We're discussing censorship of public information.
Why did you choose to invoke the NSA bogeyman in a discussion about already-public information?
Why do you think the "wealthy and powerful" will be able to censor information when the wealthy and powerful are massive failures at it already?
Remember, the private sector can't enforce their laws and taxes by force like the state can. After all, it's not like Mafia rackets were able to enforce their "protection" rules on small businesses, or drug cartels were able to assassinate the families of informers. The state is the one and only risk to the private citizen, and by definition must be opposed at every step.
I just don't see the positive in a world where actions don't have consequences since the collective unconscious can be selectively edited by legislative meddling.
The idea of a "right to be forgotten" is so fundamentally alien to me, as someone who fundamentally believes in the rights of freedom of speech and free access to infofrmation, as if the subject of a given piece of information somehow has ownership of it, rather than the person who created it.
Now suppose you are arrested but never charged due to lack of evidence, or released because your arrest was a case of mistaken identity. Is it OK for mugshot republication firms to make lots of money out of you, or at the very least put you to the trouble of having your mugshot removed from police department websites by legal means? If you're poor and don't have the resources or the knowledge to address this situation immediately, is it OK for search engines to cache that information forever?
There's a reason for the legal concept of a 'statute of limitations'; for most criminal actions other than very serious offenses, we have agreed as a society that criminal liability must expire at some point that's more or less proportional to the sentence one might have incurred if caught and convicted. This benefits a few very astute criminals, which is a downside, but an acceptable price to pay for limiting the prosecutorial reach of the state. Why then should we give private actors free rein to commercially exploit the history of people's interactions with law enforcement, to those people's detriment?
And yet the law in some places has this idea already - if somebody takes a picture of a person in some countries and in 27 US states, that person has some rights over the use of that photograph under the concept of "publicity rights" or "personality rights". There's stronger concepts of this across some of the EU. This is why model releases exist.
So the concept of the subject of a piece of information having some ownership of it is not that foreign, although rights to the extent required for the right to be forgotten is something relatively new as far as I can tell.
Yes, there are disadvantages to easy access to information like this. There are advantages as well, though.
Google are deliberately stonewalling on this and issues around copyright, basically with a "If it's good for us then it must be right" attitude, which is actually in danger of creating widespread economic problems much worse than Microsoft ever achieved.
It's interesting to compare the response here with the vitriol Uber receive. Google's PR machine is very good.
Sure, there is a vague awareness that Google is invading your privacy and harvesting your data, but it does so for "free" and generally makes it look like a good deal. It's also a lot more subtle about it than Facebook.
Google isn't morally superior. It's just less obviously evil. And let's be honest: to the average bloke (even on HN), the problems with Uber or Airbnb are a lot easier to relate to than the much fuzzier problems with Google (privacy, media licensing, etc).
It's a magical "censor whatever I say" button. What kind of constructive solution do you imagine?
This is not a straw man. Either the laws aren't as specific as you expect, or they aren't applied as specifically as you expect - censoring an article if there is absolutely nothing wrong within the actual article is certainly not specific enough.
All that has been eradicated is the searchable connection between the commenter's name and that article.
But it's also a far cry from "banker censors report about his malpractice": The banker most definitely would not be allowed to do that under the law in question.
So far, I've yet to see anything to convince me that there are any valid uses of this law. Just censorship.
Hence why it's called "right to forget". People didn't have easy access to such data ten years ago, either, and the world provably didn't collapse. What this is battling is a new thing: The eternal online pillory, knowing neither restraint, remorse, nor forgiveness... nor research costs.
What this is battling is people who can't cope with the world changing. Too bad for them. No sympathy here.
Just because one person cannot cope with changing technology does not mean that the rest of us should be crippled to their level. To do this through censorship is double odious.
It's power without responsibility, accountability, or sane restraints.
no, they tried this, they ended up in front of the European Court of Justice and lost.
If that's not censorship I don't know what is.
If it wants to sink massive amounts of money, time, risk for other operations, and goodwill from powerful people in order to avoid doing something that won't affect its bottom line in the slightest way to just do.
>They are deliberately taking an axe to the search results in an attempt to make EU privacy protection look like censorship.
No, they're accepting censorship because there's no money in being freedom fighters.
The law that possibly profits governing bodies the most is a bad law.
Why we cannot know if our new neighbour have paedophile past, corruption or rape incidents? Such mistakes should stay public for ever. But now very specific groups of people are trying to whiten themselves up. Its somehow scary...
Or stuff that has been taken down for copyright infringement?