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Comment by freshflowers | Hacker News Reader

Please note that this is not so much about the basic principle of the 'right to be forgotten', but the way in which Google is deliberately turning it into a bloodbath.

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.

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Because it is censorship, to the definition. It's no different than requiring the removal of newspaper archives from public libraries to articles from the past.

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.

>> "It's no different than requiring the removal of newspaper archives from public libraries to articles from the past"

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.

Actually, the whole legal issue started with a case of mr. Mario Costeja González wanting to remove a google search that returned news that was printed in a newspaper, and after suing the newspaper no corrections were printed and the article wasn't recalled as it was truthful, non-anonymous, etc. The newspaper article is still available in the archives, but Google has been given an order to hide it from people.

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.

> It's no different than requiring the removal of newspaper archives from public libraries to articles from the past.

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.

So what's the end game where everyone has that level of "dirt" on them? Doesn't it become a lot less extraordinary (and therefore, a lot less "life ruining") if everyone's publicly-documented bad behavior is accessible?

FWIW, I see this as blatant censorship.

I get what you're saying, but privacy is a huge issue, and figuring out how to protect peoples' historical expectation of privacy and a 'clean slate' by most standards is something the EU is grappling with. It isn't evil, though its implementation may be misguided.

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.

Your comment assumes several things. First, that everyone has a similar level of things to be embarrassed about. Second, that wealthy and powerful people won't simply sue or bribe publishers to withhold or delete the embarrassing material. 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 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.

None of those assumptions are made, at all.

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.

Your post is so self-contradictory and illogical that I see little point in discussing this further with you.

Let me make this simple then, your veiled insults aside:

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?

> seem fine with surveillance and publication by private sector

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.

Except that that isn't the case. Not nearly everyone ends up getting written about in a blog or a newspaper, as much as that might be the case in your social circle. However, some not-insignificant amount of people do.

The amount of writing and access to that writing has only gone up over time, and that's almost universally seen as a net positive.

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.

OK, consider this: in the US, police departments routinely publish 'mugshots' of arrestees. If you surf the web without an ad blocker you've surely seen ads along the lines of 'who's been arrested in (your area of residence)? find out NOW' with photographs of people wearing hangdog expressions. These ads are from companies whose business model is charging people hundreds of dollars to have their mugshot removed from their database. Of course there are multiple firms engaged in this activity so that can turn into an ongoing expense, more so for people who happen to be particularly photogenic or distinctive-looking.

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?

> as if the subject of a given piece of information somehow has ownership of it

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.

Which enabled many a serial con man to milk people indefinitely.

Yes, there are disadvantages to easy access to information like this. There are advantages as well, though.

It's very different. Searching an archive takes time and effort. Using a search engine takes virtually none.

There is more than an element of truth to this, uncomfortable as it is for many.

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.

I think one factor is that Google is very nebulous. Facebook's and Uber's ambitions are pretty obvious and easy to understand. Google is a search company and an advertising company, but it is also a social network and a cloud storage provider and a thousand other things. And some of its products aren't even gratuitously Google-branded (e.g. YouTube -- even if it's more integrated into Google+ now).

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).

>Google is constantly looking to create controversy and undermine any kind of privacy rights enforcement rather than being constructive in finding solutions.

It's a magical "censor whatever I say" button. What kind of constructive solution do you imagine?

This is a straw man, the laws are much more specific in what they would forget.

The original article contains an actual example from BBC of how "specific" they are - a valid news article was censored because of a complaint about a comment to that article. It's not a misinformed hypothesis of what might somehow happen, it's something that has already happened.

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.

The article wasn't censored, it just doesn't show up any more when you search for the name of the commenter. It still shows up when you search for the name of the banker that was the subject of the article, the name of the bank, or any other keywords you can find it with:

All that has been eradicated is the searchable connection between the commenter's name and that article.

We didn't destroy the book! We just ruled you can't keep it on a shelf where it's topical and someone might find it.

We didn't destroy the book! We just ruled you can't keep it on a shelf under the name of one of the reviewers - but everywhere else you want to keep it is fine.

As I said - a place where it's topical and someone might find it.

Yes, it might be topical, and I have a strong inkling that says that it's a case google shouldn't have accepted. They seem to be taking more down than is required of them.

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.

We're talking about a law that has had misuse baked into it from its very inception.

So far, I've yet to see anything to convince me that there are any valid uses of this law. Just censorship.

The original case was a 16-year old newspaper article about a bankruptcy (but no fraud or such) that showed up as first result on a google search for a Spaniard's name, which impacted his employment prospects and such.

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.

Ah, "right to forget". How lovely and Orwellian. Instead of "right to censor", which is what it is.

What this is battling is people who can't cope with the world changing. Too bad for them. No sympathy here.

Oh, I'm sure the guy could cope with the world changing. But can his future boss? You're acting as if that were in his control.

Just because one person can't handle shoes does not mean that they should be given a magical de-shoeing ray gun.

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 removes entire articles from the public consciousness. There's no "remove this section". There's not even the accountability to tell the publications what's being removed and who wants it gone.

It's power without responsibility, accountability, or sane restraints.

>Google has every right to ignore

no, they tried this, they ended up in front of the European Court of Justice and lost.

Why is this downvoted? I think Google has to delete you from the index if you wish, without any special justification or court order.

Google only accept about a third of the requests to delist.

Based on what's been published, Google's response seems pretty rational. They are denying some reasonable percentage of requests while complying with others. I don't like the EU policy here and I'd fight it vigorously if the topic come up in the US, but Google seems to be neither simply complying with everything nor taking everything to court. It seems a rational response by a corporation whatever its execs may think of the governing law.

Some of the very first usages of the "right to be forgotten" was by politicians hiding their past criminal activity.

If that's not censorship I don't know what is.

The problem is that Google has no incentive to be careful in choosing which links it removes. There is no penalty for removing links unnecessarily but there is the potential for EU member states to levy fines for not removing them.

>Google has every right to ignore all but the most obviously justified removal requests and only remove results after a court order.

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.

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