How Google determined our right to be forgotten | Hacker News Reader

How Google determined our right to be forgotten

theguardian.com

41 pointsIBM51 comments

Publishers, too, have a case to answer. Was La Vanguardia entirely in the right to republish its entire archive, or was it careless?

It's interesting that is the only piece of discussion in that whole multipage article about how the information ended up in public in the first place.

I guess it's a better story to blame faceless machines and algorithms than for a newspaper to blame another lazy, thoughtless newspaper publisher?

I think there are issues around how Google deals with exposure of personal information (think deliberate trolling campaigns). But this is a weak story that provides no insight into what future issues of privacy will look like.

Are you really trying to attack a newspaper for digitizing its archives?

That isn't a "lazy, thoughtless" action.

Of course not.

I'm blaming both newspapers for not standing up and going "Google is making content we made available searchable. We can't just blame them for it".

Newspapers digitizing their archives is great; it's their rejection of the initial removal request that should have been challenged. Removing things from indexes makes much less sense than removing them at their source.

Disclaimer: I work for Google as an engineer on open source software.

"The first removal was made public not by Google, with a clear breakdown of what was being delisted and why, but by prominent journalists reacting to alarming emails sent to their webmasters headed “Notice of removal from Google search”."

I wonder if the author would really see it as benign if Google had published a complete breakdown of what was being delisted and why, instead of just emailing the content hosts. I think it would put Google at risk of being found in contempt of the court...

> I think it would put Google at risk of being found in contempt of the court...

I'm not a lawyer and don't speak for Google, but my understanding is that the regulation prevents you from telling anyone except the relevant parties when a link has been delisted. I think "relevant party" includes who the link is about and the webmaster that owns the link itself.

It would kind of defeat the "right to be forgotten" if Google were to loudly publish a report saying, "Hey, everybody! Forget that Fred Smith did XYZ on this date!"

The reason we know that some things were delisted was because the relevant parties were themselves journalists who then chose to publicize the fact.

So, yes, if Google publicized all delistings, they would violate the legislation. This is something the author of the article certainly knows, so decrying Google for not doing it is disingenuous at best.

Interesting, while reading the article (right from the title) I had an expectation of a strong argument against how Google handles things. No such a thing came, other than the lack of transparency. Is that a sign that whatever Google is doing is actually working, or just a writing failure?

Lack of transparency is itself a problem, because it means when things fuck up in the future there's less ability to recover.

True, but Google has a long tradition of not revealing its internal processes. That's because whenever people thought they understand how it works, they tried to game it. That's why there are hundreds of spam comments that get through recaptcha on my blog each month (and I'm nowhere near a popular blogger). I imagine they don't want people trying to game this system.

How could Google be transparent here?

The whole point of the legislation is to stop publicizing information. Google can't exactly publicly tell the world about everyone they've been told to stop publicly telling the world about, can they?

The idea of 'right to be forgotten' is... ignorant. It is simple to create a web spider (yes, yes, it gets more complicated quickly), and you can be operating your spider quite quietly and privately. The logical outcome is that there will be grey market databank sellers of 'unforgettable' indexes of information.

Everything exists on a continuum of accessibility. People hold conversations in public all the time, but they don't expect anyone to be recording and publishing that information. The issue of the right to privacy becomes a bit more sticky on the web where information is easy to transmit and store, but I wouldn't call it ignorant. It's people trying to apply an older philosophy on privacy to the Internet.

It's not about expunging information from the internet, it's simply to prevent something inappropriately or incorrectly defining a person.

    When the Spaniard googled himself in 2009, two 
    prominent results appeared: home-foreclosure notices 
    from 1998, when he was in temporary financial trouble.

That stuff will always be part of his/collective history and important for some purposes, but in the context of this man and the search results for his name it's almost never going to be important or relevant information.

Google and the other search engines offer a standard mechanism for websites to tag such content so it won't be indexed. That's a much better solution for the man in the article. As it is now he has to make a request to every search engine to remove these search results, including new future search engines that might arise. Such victims would be better served if they could go to the source website to have such content deindexed for all search engines at once.

How can this man, and everyone else, be guaranteed the ability to change somebody else's pages to ensure they're no longer indexed by search engines that explicitly dishonor the spirit and purpose of instructions not to crawl pages?

IF that was ever viable the EU wouldn't have forced a solution.

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/robots-txt-remove-url/

> search engines that explicitly dishonor the spirit and purpose of instructions not to crawl pages

If you believe that to be true, then you should be arguing for a solution to that problem.

A robots noindex meta would work perfectly well to suppress an online bankruptcy notice about an individual.

In that video you'll see Matt Cutts from Google's Web Spam team explaining how they've declared indexing a url on google, and crawling a url's content, are apparently separate things so your express wishes can be overridden by any third party linking to your content, resulting in the URL being on google search and in results with inferred content instead of spidered content.

I think this is a problem, but this is not the entirety of the right to be forgotten problem, which just makes what you proposed more efficient because people only have to contact one company with an official procedure.

Crawling and indexing truly are fundamentally different things, and search engines have mechanisms to block both.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en

> You can prevent a page from appearing in Google Search by including a noindex meta tag in the page's HTML code. When Googlebot next crawls that page, Googlebot will see the noindex meta tag and will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it.

For all intents and purposes "indexing" and "crawling" is "appearing in search results", and they conflate these terms themselves in their robots.txt page:

> "You only need a robots.txt file if your site includes content that you don't want Google or other search engines to index."

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en

They do say noindex overrides 3rd party links so that's something, but it's a moot point either way because this was the approach for the last decade. Having to contact each individual person in charge of each individual URL isn't even effective when the MPAA throws money+DMCA at the task, individuals asking nicely never had a chance.

Yep. Bummer for him. Consider the fact that while Google makes this public, all this law is doing is ensuring that unseen data brokers sell the data privately, while you don't know what they know. :-)

I would suggest that you're ignorant of the issue.

It's not the information existing that's the problem.

It's that the most powerful search robot in the world, with little context, can tell other people severely out-dated information about you that people treat as canonical fact, long after the information was pertinent or relevant, and that can define an entire person's online identity. And it may never fade away, or drop down the rankings, because the computer is too stupid to realize that a house foreclosure notice for 10 years ago is not an appropriate thing to show.

> It's that the most powerful search robot in the world,

So, other search robots doesn't do that?

See my response below.

I thought this was harmless, when I found out that there are numerous 3rd party websites who scrape data in social networks, newsgroups, even app reviews. This shifts the control outside your hands. Remember when there's a story about how you can't remove data from a service provider ? It doesn't matter if Google/Twitter/Facebook/others support removing my data and public posts, it means that I have to hunt down other parties to do the same, as they don't update their data and no one knows that app review I wrote is 3 years old and the account doesn't even exist anymore.

That's also why I'm done with the Internet and real name policies.

I think this is a great article that covers quite a lot of topics. It reminded me that we're already aware in real life of the importance of being able to 'expunge' or seal certain forms of records (e.g in law or financial judgements, I believe), yet we've gotten away without such things for the data that ends up online about us. This will matter even more as devices etc become connected to the Internet and it's worth having such debates now.

It's also worth remembering that the entities that index, store, and present this data to us have their own motives for doing so. We should not be so quick to assign some kind of hallowed status upon them.

But what of the entities that publish this information online in the first place? Why are the newspapers not accountable?

Long time ago there was post on HN from guy who was harassed online. Someone pretended to be him and created fake blog, twitter account, social profiles etc.. It had serious impact on his life / job / family.

Every other company removed this fake profiles within days (twitter, facebook, yahooo...). Only Google did not bothered to answer for weeks. Last time I checked he was trying to shutdown blog on some copyright technicality.

Perhaps this law would not be necessary, if google would cooperate as other companies.

To me this is the other side of the double-edged sword that not many people take time to consider. It's easy to say that the "right to be forgotten" will be used, and abused, by people trying to bury their sordid past in the interests of trying to revise history. And that's absolutely true, it definitely will be. But there's also cases like this where you're trying to undo what someone else did with malicious intent. I don't have a good answer for how to balance those two things because even if you add some sort of "malicious intent" clause all that would do is cause people to start to cry "libel!" when they wanted stuff taken down.

Now when you say removed the profiles, do you mean removed links to it, or removed the actual profile.

I think twitter should have a requirement to remove a false account impersonating me, but i think Google (or any other search engine) shouldn't be required to remove references to that profile.

Requiring search engines to remove references to "offending" material seems like forcing libraries to hide certain books because they are illegal.

I meant to remove offending profile, not just links. Impersonation with malicious intent is probably crime in most countries.

Wording like "taken every opportunity to passively promote its role as a “truth” engine" makes me suspicious. How do you promote something "passively"?

If the EU wants to delist results worldwide they have to reach for a worldwide law. Work together with other bodies of law, the UN or whoever. But why'd EU law rule worldwide? Oh, right, we're rich.

The article's comparison to copyright takedowns was a very good point.

It is a superficially appealing point, but I think the analogy falls apart on closer inspection.

Unlike the "right to be forgotten", a lot of effort has been put into harmonizing copyright law worldwide. While the mechanics of the takedown process may vary from country to country, if the content at the end of a link is infringing in country A, it is probably infringing in country B (with some limited exceptions like historical differences in went into the public domain). Given that, there's a serious rationale for applying copyright takedowns worldwide that isn't Google uncritically applying US law worldwide.

I always find it amusing when the Streisand Effect kicks in. Before his case, I suspect that a vanishingly small number of people were aware of González's foreclosure. These days it makes its way to news articles across the world and a Wikipedia article.

The result may not be good for him, since it inverts the original goal. However many other people will benefit from this judgement, and be able to excercise the right to be forgotten.

yes, some people take one for the group. Not everybody act only by personal interest.

This goes back to the "careless newspapers" comment someone else made: why do articles feel the need to keep naming the plaintiff? How does knowing the name of the guy and his past financial troubles improve my understanding of the situation over, say, referring to him as "a Spanish citizen..."?

It's kind of a dick move. It's not necessary to publish his name and you have reason to believe he doesn't want his name publicized like this so the only reason I can see for publishing his name constantly is a weird sort of professional-caste vendetta against him by newspapers, since his beef was also with them.

This guy single-handedly created a brand new and widely abused way for governments to censor the internet. And your reaction is to feel sorry for him? Anyone with the slightest respect for free speech and freedom of expression should have a vendetta against him.

Fuck him.

The online community's infatuation with the 'Streisand Effect' is somewhat thoughtless. The mechanism annihilates the power of the law, by making any attempt to get justice subject to the approval of the online mob.

Sure, it's a feel-good story when some celebrity suffering from affluentia is the subject. But why shouldn't Mr. Gonzalez have the right to try to clear his name? Is trust in the court system so low that we're happy when they are replaced by collective judgement by people who decide based on whatever small slice of the truth they saw on Twitter?

When you say "clear his name", that suggests the story about him wasn't true. In which case, the site should be asked to remove the article as it would be libellous.

My understanding of it though is that it's entirely true. It just happened a reasonably long time ago. I'm not sure why it's Google's job to censor queries about true stories on the grounds that they happened a few years ago.

This reminds me of a recent survey where more people claimed to use facebook than the internet.

It also makes me think of an alternate reality where Hitler burned the card catalog and left the books alone.

Sometimes, it's easier to just change your name.

"This is an excellent article." - the comment section on this (Guardian) website is hilarious.

Sorry, but who can take The Guardian, and by extension the NYT seriously while they are sitting on a bunch of the Snowden material? Whining about Google when you are withholding the stuff on privacy that really matters due to a lack of moral courage is weak-sauce...

Perhaps it is better to judge an article by its contents only.

I hear Mein Kampf is a really good read. Edit: Wow. Downvote flurry. What I mean is that to take an article without the context of author is ridiculous. Perhaps I was a little bit too snide.

Reductio ad Hitlerum is rarely a constructive addition to a debate.

Privacy is a much larger topic than Google. The point I am making is that it's a bit past disingenuous to hold forth on a topic when you are not an honest broker in the overall topic itself..

Find the down votes interesting though...heh...

A hypocrite can still be right.

I couldn't disagree more. All news sources editorialize. Knowing their slant and accounting for it is the only way to find truth in their writing.

And of course the right to be forgotten doesn't apply to the press - The guardian is a bad as the murdoc press in some ways.

They would always drag out Max Mosley's private life when writing about Formula One is one example.

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