Google rejects France's demands for a global right to be forgotten

That's the part I'm split on with regard to the right to be forgotten law. I support it in regards to allowing people who have served their time (post-probation) to be forgotten/forgiven in regards to their crimes. And the way we use the Internet today makes that nearly impossible. I'm not sure if it's Google's job to erase or censor data other users create as that would set the precedent that anyone can ask for anything to be removed from the index. This is both bad on the basis that Google's reliability depends on indexing all it can (but respecting the robots.txt no indexing rules) and to harm that reliability for reason, even good ones, could mean that what the general public knows is being actively censored. Governments would love to make Google into the memory hole in that respect. And corporations already have that sort of functionality via DMCA which isn't any better.

In a perfect world, Google wouldn't index criminal records because they wouldn't exist online (imo, unless it's a crime that is as serious as rape, murder, assault, or major larceny it shouldn't be in the public) and folks who have naughty pictures on their Facebook wouldn't be shamed by society (at worse they would just be embarrassed). But we don't live in that perfect world, so I hope we can come up with as close to perfect solutions to the problem. I think the first step is to make sure we have better privacy advocacy on government and corporate information. Google can help foster that front with their own lobby efforts if they have any. It wouldn't be against their best interests, imo, since Google has no real need to freely share user information other than metadata. But I'm sure they would oppose any strengthened privacy laws just to cover their bottom line.

The "right to be forgotten" is antithetical to free speech and free press. The news, even when it reflects on someone unfavorably, is a matter of public record. Just because it's about you does not make it "your" data or confer some sort of moral right to decide what happens to it. The public has a right not to have information disappear out from under it.

1984 opens on a guy who shoves inconvenient public records down the memory hole. What the EU is trying to do is no different. It can and should be resisted to the greatest extent possible at every turn.

They remove it from their search engine - not the web altogether.

I believe there are entire websites that list suspected removed "right to be forgotten" links. Streisand effect really bites these people in the ass when they ask for something to be removed.

Complying with laws is hardly "evil", it's part of living/doing business in places that have them. How you (or Google) feel about these laws is irrelevant.

The article describes exactly why Google chose not to apply a French law to the entire world - it's an application of the rule "laws in country X do not apply outside of X." Doesn't sound very evil to me.

> complete transparency or totalitarian control.

same thing.

> Why don't people just ask the maintainer of the website to remove content? Why Google?

Some "maintainers" don't even respond to such requests and are in business of harvesting data themselves.

Impossible, you don't get to choose them: http://www.le-message.org/?lang=en