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Comment by Twisell | Hacker News Reader

Only thing that bother me is that this article revolve solely around google point of view. The main spirit of the french RTBF law is to protect citizen privacy when published media can have negative effect on their life.

As for an example revenge porn, false public accusation or protection of witness are more in the spectrum of RTBF law than chinese-like censorship mentionned by Google. And correct me if I'm wrong but french RTBF apply only to individuals, so how could they even compare this with state censorsphip?

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"The main spirit of the french RTBF law is to protect citizen privacy when published media can have negative effect on their life."

Yet the main method is to try to control secondary indexing instead of primary distribution?

If the published media has a negative effect on their life, why aren't they making the published media go away?

I'm ignorant of the actual law, so this is just a guess. Targeting the companies indexing the information is probably a more tractable problem then tracking down and eliminating all the sources. There's only a handful of really influential companies indexing this data compared to the numbers that produce and distribute it. If you remove the indexes and render the information difficult to find, its not that much different from removing the information altogether.

And my guess is: the local newspapers are a worse political target than evil large western company they can blame all their ills on :)

"Targeting the companies indexing the information is probably a more tractable problem then tracking down and eliminating all the sources."

I don't buy this. All of these sources need a way to print retractions/etc in these countries due to the way libel/etc laws work. So they already must have mechanisms to achieve this.

This is like targeting library card catalogs for indexing microfiche.

> And my guess is: the local newspapers are a worse political target than evil large western company they can blame all their ills on :)

I don't think that's the reason:

> In 1995 the European Union adopted the European Data Protection Directive (Directive 95/46EC) to regulate the processing of personal data.[9] This is now considered a component of human rights law.[10] The new European Proposal for General Data Protection Regulation provides protection and exemption for companies listed as “media” companies, like newspapers and other journalistic work. However, Google purposely opted out of being classified as a “media” company and so is not protected. Judges in the European Union ruled that because the international corporation, Google, is a collector and processor of data it should be classified as a “data controller” under the meaning of the EU data protection directive. These “data controllers” are required under EU law to remove data that is “inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant, ” - making this directive of global importance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

That's how the law is written. A newspaper can publish archives, but not do anything it likes with the influence of the front page.

But then again, why should they have a right to ask google not to show a newspaper article that is legal for the newspaper to keep online?

It sounds like a end run around press freedom to me.

I totally understand your point and of course it had to be both in and ideal world. But if the web server is hosted offshore...

But again its strange because Google dont say they won't apply RTBF, they just say they will apply it on a per country basis... But from a technical standpoint this is even more complicated... So they basically say "we Google define the law" for everything that is "out" of your country.

Yet good luck to them defining what "out your country mean" in a global network.

Well, Google does have programs to take revenge porn out of many search results, and does (unsurprisingly) have programs to rate truth above falsehood: that's part of the search quality about which they're so passionate.

The bit where the state says they'll punish you if you don't comply---if you don't stop talking about the things they want kept quiet? That's state censorship. What else could it be?

Because the precedent is dangerous and is a very slippery slope. RTBF will easily start applying to politicians, from there we'll let's also remove XYZ and soon we're in China.

> And correct me if I'm wrong but french RTBF apply only to individuals, so how could they even compare this with state censorsphip?

Yes, it is just for "citizens".

http://www.cnil.fr/linstitution/missions/proteger/

And you're right, it's not related to censorsphip at all.

It is probably a strategy from Google's lawyers to turn that in something against the "liberty". A sophism.

> it's not related to censorsphip at all.

Censorship: the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts.

Isn't the suppression of "unacceptable" information the stated goal of the right to be forgotten?

It's like something you would read out of Catch-22.

News organizations can still publish articles about someone who invoked the RTBF, but nobody will read it because it's impossible to find.

In the bureaucratically definitive sense it's technically not censorship, it's just using a characteristic of the internet to make it censorship. At least, that's the writing on the wall.

In fact it seems like most requests are just individuals looking to protect their privacy, as these accidental release of stats to The Guardian show.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/14/google-acc...

if you told me that the majority of DMCA takedowns are due to copyright infringement, would that make you feel better about the DMCA process?

Exactly, I find myself feeling uneasy while reading the article.

I thought 'Right to be forgotten' was something organisation like EFF stand for.

The right to be forgotten is the right to erase history. EFF is not a fan of right to erase history when they see other mechanisms for solving the same problem.

(IE either we should give up an curtail press freedoms, or we should accept that society needs to be more accepting of reality. This intermediate state where we curtail the freedom of certain actors, but have decided another set get a pass, is what the EFF is complaining about)

Yet the mechanism to "erase history" (in terms of referencing) is in place and Google controls it.

As a citizen I would fell better knowing that a Law define what can and cannot be erase instead of bargaining on the promise of a Big Company : "Don't be evil"

An ideal solution would be that an international treaty globaly redefine for the best all the laws about copyright which are all utterly outdated and inappropriate for digital media.

(RTBF is as far I know is in France either a part or an extension of copyrights laws)

"Yet the mechanism to "erase history" (in terms of referencing) is in place and Google controls it. "

Because the EU and france forced google to control it. They didn't want to control it at all. They tried desperately not to. They wanted the source of these stories to be responsible for what they publish, and be forced to update or remove the stories.

Which seems much saner to me.

This make sense. Now I get why EFF support this. The FUD and comparaison with China still bother me, but in the end they are right cause yeah indexing engine should be agnostic...

But excuse me if I prefer DuckDuckGo over Google on that matter :P

You're saying here that absent external requirements from governments, Google would never make any policy decisions about what was and wasn't revealed in its SERPs? I find that hard to believe. You're making a lot of sense in general and I don't think RTBF is good policy, but you might be overstating your case.

When it comes to mass data collection, the EFF is definitely a fan of erasing history. So it's not that simple.

It's a problem of balancing privacy rights and press rights.

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