8 ms·

Google ordered to remove links to stories about Google removing links to stories

187 points by PretzelFisch 11y ago

teamhappy 11y ago
Sounds like they google Google at Google. // You guys had a rough week, huh?
twothamendment 11y ago
An ACLU article from The Onion comes to mind. http://www.theonion.com/article/aclu-defends-nazis-right-to-burn-down-aclu-headqua-1648 http://www.theonion.com/article/aclu-defends-nazis-right-to-...
mallamanis 11y ago
Well, they should now ask for this link to also be removed...
_lce0 11y ago
so now they will need to ask Google to remove links to stories about /(Google being ordered to remove links about stories about)*/ Google removing links to stories. So nice to see the Kleene star in practice!
halosghost 11y ago
I know it's still quite a controversial topic, and I have not yet come down on whether or not I like the current implementations, but I am a fan of the notion of a Right to be Forgotten. At the very least, I like the notion that a person should be able to have some level of control over what companies are allowed to access about them; the control over what information may be in the public sphere is a little more difficult to talk about. E.g., I deeply dislike that most companies operate on an opt-out system for information collection; I would rather information collection (particularly anything dealing with personally-identifying information) to be universally opt-in with some reasonable attempt (not an EULA) made to offer the user an informed decision. Search-engines are tricky because they provide a public service for finding information but are, themselves, a company that often profits from the collection of information both in the usership of their service and in the data they crawl to aid their users in finding content. My current opinion (which is not yet fully formed) is that it is wrong to order Google to unlist results; but, on the other hand, it should be completely legal to order Google to remove what is essentially a dossier that they have on a particular user (at that user's request). I am still mulling this whole thing over; but, at the very least, it is obvious that the issue isn't a simple one.
- bko 11y ago
  I don't see how anything like right to be forgotten can be implemented without essentially internet censorship. Does a corrupt politician have a right to be forgotten forgotten? Former politician? Bank executive? Hedge fund manager? Barbara Streisand? How about those who donate to political causes? The trend seems to be going the other way on that one, at least in the US. What is the criteria and who decides? I can't imagine how such subjectivity would not be abused.
  - Zikes 11y ago
    I believe there should be a framework in place, but that it should be strict yet accessible. An easy example is someone that is arrested but not convicted of a crime. Arrests are public information, and very often people assume that only the guilty are arrested. Combine that with the regular practice of Googling new hires for every job and someone's life could easily be quite literally ruined.
    - runako 11y ago
      If a community cares about this, it seems more appropriate to address this at the community level by not publishing arrest records. Far fewer thorny issues are at stake with that decision that there are in censoring data that has been public at some point.
      - ghaff 11y ago
        Collectively, we've never really seriously dealt with information that was historically public but which historically also took considerable effort/interest to access--e.g. it was in a dusty file cabinet in the office of some town clerk who only worked for a few hours on Tuesday and Thursday. Furthermore, it took even more effort/interest/even money to link together such information with other information sources. While there are, in general, a lot of good reasons for transparency in society, there are probably good arguments for keeping certain types of information private now that they're so much easier to access.
    - 11y ago
robinson7d 11y ago
Regardless of beliefs on the Right to be Forgotten, this feels wrong. The way that I had previously interpreted it, a person or entity could ask to have all references to them removed. The request in this article isn't that, though - it's a request to cherry-pick, and have subsets removed. To me, this feels too exploitable. I'm not sure whether I could agree with a Right to be Forgotten in the first place, but if there were one it should be all-or-nothing. --- EDIT: It appears, per @alain94040's comment, that this is not entirely the case, and that the article was not accurate. The interpretation that @alain94040 explained, which is that Google would still show the articles in question, just not if the query includes the entity who requested they be forgotten's name (or is it just not weighted by the name? If a name's included, but the rest of the query is sufficiently strong, would it still find the article?) actually seems completely acceptable in the realm of a Right to be Forgotten.
- ergothus 11y ago
  I think this demonstrates the problems with restricting information (Note: Not making a moral judgement of any kind, just stating the problem set is HARD) Information has basically zero copy cost, and can't be removed once given. So to stop people from knowing, you have to stop them from originally learning. Except that the ability to learn is "cheap". The same problems result whether we're preventing the spread of how to build a bomb, breed a superbug, or remove naked photos. Somewhere in that continuum will be info that you agree is best not to be spread, but the steps required to enforce that can be a lot more expansive. It's hard.
d--b 11y ago
I have a feeling that someone is going to order this link removed.
lighthawk 11y ago
I'm all for privacy. It just isn't implementable.
alain94040 11y ago
The article is misleading and incorrect, possibly written to inflame smart geeks into noticing a crazy recursive loop. Those news articles about the right to be forgotten mention some private people by name, who have exercised their "right to be forgotten." The only request is that Google doesn't find a hit when someone searches for those people's names. If your search terms don't include those names, then it's ok to find those articles. Just not if you are specifically searching for info on those particular people by name. It's sad that a journalist would forget to mention the key point. Then people get justifiably upset, and no one wins.
- nicklaf 11y ago
  In my mind, this only makes the law itself all the more evidently absurd.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Well, the law has one thing in mind: You should be able to stumble upon knowledge, or if you know where to look, but a future employer, or a neighbor, etc should not be able to find out about crimes you did when you were a teen.
    - bmelton 11y ago
      Perhaps the real fix is in not publishing the details of teenagers who commit crimes?
      - plorkyeran 11y ago
        I think that's absolutely the correct solution, but it doesn't help all of the people who already had information about their actions as teenagers published.
        tracker1 11y ago
        If it were illegal, you could then file takedowns from the publishers, and it wouldn't show up in google anymore... Google should not be an enforcement arm for internet censorship... the end.
sloanesturz 11y ago
I understand why the DMCA exists -- so that people can't post your copyrighted data (that you necessarily own) without your consent. I understand slander laws -- so that people can't make up stories about you and present them as facts. I do not understand the Right to be Forgotten -- if something is true and public information, why should Google hide the data from its search results? An article being about you does not mean that the information inside of it "belongs" to you. >> "the links relating to a criminal offence that were removed by Google following a request from the individual concerned." You can't request the BBC or Telegraph to take down true and legitimate articles (nor should you), so on what basis does the EU think that they can order Google to alter their search results?
- alain94040 11y ago
  Your question is covered by the EU's fact sheet on the topic. I found it very readable and clear: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets/factsheet_data_protection_en.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets...
- mattmanser 11y ago
  Your daughter is caught on camera shitting on a beach drunk when she was celebrating her 18th birthday. Should the rest of her life now be ruined because it is 'is true and public information'. Can she never move on? Seriously, imagine it. Put yourself in that scenario. Google will forever more show 'Girl squatting on beach' whenever anyone searches your name. Before the age of computing she could simply move to another city and within a few years all would be forgotten. What is so damaging about Google's search is that unlike humans, it never, ever forgets and it will never forget that the story was wildly popular and very relevant to your name. And it's the same with crimes. When we punish someone for breaking the law, we send them to jail, punish them, and hopefully try and rehabilitate them. When they leave prision their punishment is spent, they have done their penance. But not in Google's eyes. It will highlight the crime as the most relevant bit of information about this person in perpetua. It's mob justice meted out by a computer. At some point people have to be allowed to move on with their lives, and Google is preventing that.
chintan 11y ago
Not done yet: https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+ordered+to+remove+links+to+stories+about+Google+removing+links+to+stories&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+ordered+to+remove+lin...
panzagl 11y ago
There's an author with the same name as me- if I exercise my right to be forgotten, does that mean he's forgotten too? I can imagine he might not like that.
- cbr 11y ago
  You can identify specific search results that are about you and ask for them to be removed. If anything I would expect the author to be in favor of this, because now more of the remaining results will be about them.
m3h 11y ago
"We need to go deeper."
dsfyu404ed 11y ago
I don't see what the disagreement is. Somebody (e.g. Billybob) does something stupid that winds up on the local news sites. 6yr later the court case is long since closed and he wants it behind him because it was a just a drunken mistake. EU says he has a right to be forgotten which he exercises. Google deference the news articles from Billybob's name. Billybob Google's himself and finds a blog about Google referencing search results that mentions him by name and the nature of the result. Since it mentions him by name it's a primary result (you Goggle Billybob and it comes up) and Google should have to remove it per the law. Obviously this sort of law creates an incentive for background check services to just crawl every news site imaginable which could create a whole set of different problems but that's beyond this scope... I think it'll just take time for society to understand that people do stupid shit and ignore it as long as it's irrelevant to the context and "forgetting" events is just a stopgap. Eventually people will realize that racists, political extremists and people with non-violent felonies can still function normally from 9 to 5 and this will be a non issue. This problem has a lot in common on the technical side with dragnet surveillance and law enforcement. Google needs to determine what is and isn't relevant when returning results for somebody. Some misdemeanor in highschool is of dubious relevance 10yr after the fact and if the person apparently has a lot of results that paint a picture of them having a successful career and generally having moved on. Google could put that on the 3rd or 4th page, after all the "people named $name in $state" public records databases, where it's practically forgotten. Meanwhile the NSA (or whoever) needs to figure out how to filter out and avoid flagging for followup that sound like flags but are actually sarcastic, based on inside jokes, or obvious false positives when considered in context (to avoid wasting their time,wasting our money and violating people's privacy).
- spinlock 11y ago
  > Obviously this sort of law creates an incentive for background check services Bingo
  - x0x0 11y ago
    Yet you'll note that things like credit services are, at least in the united states because that's what I'm familiar with, regulated. You have to be able to see the information and there is a process to contest inaccurate information, with government penalties if the companies don't comply. And there is enforced forgetfulness: negative credit information is removed from your report generally after 7 years. I rather doubt google wants to be so regulated; like many internet companies, they want to have their cake and eat it too.
hyperpape 11y ago
I'm surprised no one has discussed an aspect of this decision that I find particularly troubling: it means that if there is a serious abuse of the right to be forgotten law, the articles discussing that abuse may be delisted because they mention the individual involved. I'm against the law in general, but I have to admit there are cases that I find innocuous when considered by themselves. If Google has to delist an article about a private citizen's minor indiscretions, I disagree, but it's small potatoes. But any law is subject to potential overreach, and to combat it, we have to be able to discuss it. It seems that this decision works to censor criticism of the law as well. As someone will point out, you can criticize the law and be ok by omitting the relevant facts (is that just the name of the individual involved?) but I think it is bad to put this requirement on any critical discussion of the law.
- smt88 11y ago
  > If Google has to delist an article about a private citizen's minor indiscretions, I disagree, but it's small potatoes. There's a reason the "slippery slope" is such a popular phrase in legal discussions. What exactly is "minor"? Who is a "private citizen"? Where do you draw those lines? Everything is a spectrum. In order to arbitrate in situations where there are shades of gray, we need judges. But laws such as this are impossible to bring before a judge due to their quantity, and there isn't necessarily a single party "damaged" by the takedowns, which makes it even less plausible. There is a public interest in having this information, and it's hard to get individuals in a free society to spend a lot of time and money fighting for public interest. If you're against this law in some cases, you have to be against it in all cases.
  - hyperpape 11y ago
    > If you're against this law in some cases, you have to be against it in all cases. I don't know what this is supposed to mean. Of course, if I am against a law, I think it should not exist. And that covers all cases. But equally obviously, I can say that there are cases where applying the law has better or worse consequences.
    - 11y ago
methodover 11y ago
If anyone's interested in listening to a lengthy debate on the "Right to be Forgotten", check this out -- http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/1252-the-u-s-should-adopt-the-right-to-be-forgotten-online http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/1... It's a fascinating debate, and a really great listen. For me, I was on the fence at the beginning, but ended up firmly on the side of "No, the 'right to be forgotten' should not be adopted by the United States" by the end of it. Edit: Oh hey, I listened to the podcast, but turns out there's a video version too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDzW-2q1ZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDzW-2q1ZQ
tracker1 11y ago
I think in cases like this, especially if it's recursive, the search should redirect to `//censored.google.eu/?q=...` with a big notice at the top noting that the results excludes links that were specifically censored by EU law, with maybe a link to an article, or two about said law at the top of the page.
zubairsaif007 11y ago
http://googler700.blogspot.com/ http://googler700.blogspot.com/

187 points by PretzelFisch 11y ago

Sounds like they google Google at Google. // You guys had a rough week, huh?

An ACLU article from The Onion comes to mind. http://www.theonion.com/article/aclu-defends-nazis-right-to-burn-down-aclu-headqua-1648 http://www.theonion.com/article/aclu-defends-nazis-right-to-...

mallamanis 11y ago

Well, they should now ask for this link to also be removed...

_lce0 11y ago

so now they will need to ask Google to remove links to stories about /(Google being ordered to remove links about stories about)*/ Google removing links to stories. So nice to see the Kleene star in practice!

halosghost 11y ago

I know it's still quite a controversial topic, and I have not yet come down on whether or not I like the current implementations, but I am a fan of the notion of a Right to be Forgotten. At the very least, I like the notion that a person should be able to have some level of control over what companies are allowed to access about them; the control over what information may be in the public sphere is a little more difficult to talk about. E.g., I deeply dislike that most companies operate on an opt-out system for information collection; I would rather information collection (particularly anything dealing with personally-identifying information) to be universally opt-in with some reasonable attempt (not an EULA) made to offer the user an informed decision. Search-engines are tricky because they provide a public service for finding information but are, themselves, a company that often profits from the collection of information both in the usership of their service and in the data they crawl to aid their users in finding content. My current opinion (which is not yet fully formed) is that it is wrong to order Google to unlist results; but, on the other hand, it should be completely legal to order Google to remove what is essentially a dossier that they have on a particular user (at that user's request). I am still mulling this whole thing over; but, at the very least, it is obvious that the issue isn't a simple one.

bko 11y ago
I don't see how anything like right to be forgotten can be implemented without essentially internet censorship. Does a corrupt politician have a right to be forgotten forgotten? Former politician? Bank executive? Hedge fund manager? Barbara Streisand? How about those who donate to political causes? The trend seems to be going the other way on that one, at least in the US. What is the criteria and who decides? I can't imagine how such subjectivity would not be abused.
- Zikes 11y ago
  I believe there should be a framework in place, but that it should be strict yet accessible. An easy example is someone that is arrested but not convicted of a crime. Arrests are public information, and very often people assume that only the guilty are arrested. Combine that with the regular practice of Googling new hires for every job and someone's life could easily be quite literally ruined.
  - runako 11y ago
    If a community cares about this, it seems more appropriate to address this at the community level by not publishing arrest records. Far fewer thorny issues are at stake with that decision that there are in censoring data that has been public at some point.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      Collectively, we've never really seriously dealt with information that was historically public but which historically also took considerable effort/interest to access--e.g. it was in a dusty file cabinet in the office of some town clerk who only worked for a few hours on Tuesday and Thursday. Furthermore, it took even more effort/interest/even money to link together such information with other information sources. While there are, in general, a lot of good reasons for transparency in society, there are probably good arguments for keeping certain types of information private now that they're so much easier to access.
  - 11y ago

robinson7d 11y ago

Regardless of beliefs on the Right to be Forgotten, this feels wrong. The way that I had previously interpreted it, a person or entity could ask to have all references to them removed. The request in this article isn't that, though - it's a request to cherry-pick, and have subsets removed. To me, this feels too exploitable. I'm not sure whether I could agree with a Right to be Forgotten in the first place, but if there were one it should be all-or-nothing. --- EDIT: It appears, per @alain94040's comment, that this is not entirely the case, and that the article was not accurate. The interpretation that @alain94040 explained, which is that Google would still show the articles in question, just not if the query includes the entity who requested they be forgotten's name (or is it just not weighted by the name? If a name's included, but the rest of the query is sufficiently strong, would it still find the article?) actually seems completely acceptable in the realm of a Right to be Forgotten.

ergothus 11y ago
I think this demonstrates the problems with restricting information (Note: Not making a moral judgement of any kind, just stating the problem set is HARD) Information has basically zero copy cost, and can't be removed once given. So to stop people from knowing, you have to stop them from originally learning. Except that the ability to learn is "cheap". The same problems result whether we're preventing the spread of how to build a bomb, breed a superbug, or remove naked photos. Somewhere in that continuum will be info that you agree is best not to be spread, but the steps required to enforce that can be a lot more expansive. It's hard.

d--b 11y ago

I have a feeling that someone is going to order this link removed.

lighthawk 11y ago

I'm all for privacy. It just isn't implementable.

alain94040 11y ago

The article is misleading and incorrect, possibly written to inflame smart geeks into noticing a crazy recursive loop. Those news articles about the right to be forgotten mention some private people by name, who have exercised their "right to be forgotten." The only request is that Google doesn't find a hit when someone searches for those people's names. If your search terms don't include those names, then it's ok to find those articles. Just not if you are specifically searching for info on those particular people by name. It's sad that a journalist would forget to mention the key point. Then people get justifiably upset, and no one wins.

nicklaf 11y ago
In my mind, this only makes the law itself all the more evidently absurd.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Well, the law has one thing in mind: You should be able to stumble upon knowledge, or if you know where to look, but a future employer, or a neighbor, etc should not be able to find out about crimes you did when you were a teen.
  - bmelton 11y ago
    Perhaps the real fix is in not publishing the details of teenagers who commit crimes?
    - plorkyeran 11y ago
      I think that's absolutely the correct solution, but it doesn't help all of the people who already had information about their actions as teenagers published.
      - tracker1 11y ago
        If it were illegal, you could then file takedowns from the publishers, and it wouldn't show up in google anymore... Google should not be an enforcement arm for internet censorship... the end.

sloanesturz 11y ago

I understand why the DMCA exists -- so that people can't post your copyrighted data (that you necessarily own) without your consent. I understand slander laws -- so that people can't make up stories about you and present them as facts. I do not understand the Right to be Forgotten -- if something is true and public information, why should Google hide the data from its search results? An article being about you does not mean that the information inside of it "belongs" to you. >> "the links relating to a criminal offence that were removed by Google following a request from the individual concerned." You can't request the BBC or Telegraph to take down true and legitimate articles (nor should you), so on what basis does the EU think that they can order Google to alter their search results?

alain94040 11y ago
Your question is covered by the EU's fact sheet on the topic. I found it very readable and clear: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets/factsheet_data_protection_en.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets...
mattmanser 11y ago
Your daughter is caught on camera shitting on a beach drunk when she was celebrating her 18th birthday. Should the rest of her life now be ruined because it is 'is true and public information'. Can she never move on? Seriously, imagine it. Put yourself in that scenario. Google will forever more show 'Girl squatting on beach' whenever anyone searches your name. Before the age of computing she could simply move to another city and within a few years all would be forgotten. What is so damaging about Google's search is that unlike humans, it never, ever forgets and it will never forget that the story was wildly popular and very relevant to your name. And it's the same with crimes. When we punish someone for breaking the law, we send them to jail, punish them, and hopefully try and rehabilitate them. When they leave prision their punishment is spent, they have done their penance. But not in Google's eyes. It will highlight the crime as the most relevant bit of information about this person in perpetua. It's mob justice meted out by a computer. At some point people have to be allowed to move on with their lives, and Google is preventing that.

chintan 11y ago

Not done yet: https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+ordered+to+remove+links+to+stories+about+Google+removing+links+to+stories&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+ordered+to+remove+lin...

panzagl 11y ago

There's an author with the same name as me- if I exercise my right to be forgotten, does that mean he's forgotten too? I can imagine he might not like that.

cbr 11y ago
You can identify specific search results that are about you and ask for them to be removed. If anything I would expect the author to be in favor of this, because now more of the remaining results will be about them.

m3h 11y ago

"We need to go deeper."

dsfyu404ed 11y ago

I don't see what the disagreement is. Somebody (e.g. Billybob) does something stupid that winds up on the local news sites. 6yr later the court case is long since closed and he wants it behind him because it was a just a drunken mistake. EU says he has a right to be forgotten which he exercises. Google deference the news articles from Billybob's name. Billybob Google's himself and finds a blog about Google referencing search results that mentions him by name and the nature of the result. Since it mentions him by name it's a primary result (you Goggle Billybob and it comes up) and Google should have to remove it per the law. Obviously this sort of law creates an incentive for background check services to just crawl every news site imaginable which could create a whole set of different problems but that's beyond this scope... I think it'll just take time for society to understand that people do stupid shit and ignore it as long as it's irrelevant to the context and "forgetting" events is just a stopgap. Eventually people will realize that racists, political extremists and people with non-violent felonies can still function normally from 9 to 5 and this will be a non issue. This problem has a lot in common on the technical side with dragnet surveillance and law enforcement. Google needs to determine what is and isn't relevant when returning results for somebody. Some misdemeanor in highschool is of dubious relevance 10yr after the fact and if the person apparently has a lot of results that paint a picture of them having a successful career and generally having moved on. Google could put that on the 3rd or 4th page, after all the "people named $name in $state" public records databases, where it's practically forgotten. Meanwhile the NSA (or whoever) needs to figure out how to filter out and avoid flagging for followup that sound like flags but are actually sarcastic, based on inside jokes, or obvious false positives when considered in context (to avoid wasting their time,wasting our money and violating people's privacy).

spinlock 11y ago
> Obviously this sort of law creates an incentive for background check services Bingo
- x0x0 11y ago
  Yet you'll note that things like credit services are, at least in the united states because that's what I'm familiar with, regulated. You have to be able to see the information and there is a process to contest inaccurate information, with government penalties if the companies don't comply. And there is enforced forgetfulness: negative credit information is removed from your report generally after 7 years. I rather doubt google wants to be so regulated; like many internet companies, they want to have their cake and eat it too.

hyperpape 11y ago

I'm surprised no one has discussed an aspect of this decision that I find particularly troubling: it means that if there is a serious abuse of the right to be forgotten law, the articles discussing that abuse may be delisted because they mention the individual involved. I'm against the law in general, but I have to admit there are cases that I find innocuous when considered by themselves. If Google has to delist an article about a private citizen's minor indiscretions, I disagree, but it's small potatoes. But any law is subject to potential overreach, and to combat it, we have to be able to discuss it. It seems that this decision works to censor criticism of the law as well. As someone will point out, you can criticize the law and be ok by omitting the relevant facts (is that just the name of the individual involved?) but I think it is bad to put this requirement on any critical discussion of the law.

smt88 11y ago
> If Google has to delist an article about a private citizen's minor indiscretions, I disagree, but it's small potatoes. There's a reason the "slippery slope" is such a popular phrase in legal discussions. What exactly is "minor"? Who is a "private citizen"? Where do you draw those lines? Everything is a spectrum. In order to arbitrate in situations where there are shades of gray, we need judges. But laws such as this are impossible to bring before a judge due to their quantity, and there isn't necessarily a single party "damaged" by the takedowns, which makes it even less plausible. There is a public interest in having this information, and it's hard to get individuals in a free society to spend a lot of time and money fighting for public interest. If you're against this law in some cases, you have to be against it in all cases.
- hyperpape 11y ago
  > If you're against this law in some cases, you have to be against it in all cases. I don't know what this is supposed to mean. Of course, if I am against a law, I think it should not exist. And that covers all cases. But equally obviously, I can say that there are cases where applying the law has better or worse consequences.
  - 11y ago

methodover 11y ago

If anyone's interested in listening to a lengthy debate on the "Right to be Forgotten", check this out -- http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/1252-the-u-s-should-adopt-the-right-to-be-forgotten-online http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/1... It's a fascinating debate, and a really great listen. For me, I was on the fence at the beginning, but ended up firmly on the side of "No, the 'right to be forgotten' should not be adopted by the United States" by the end of it. Edit: Oh hey, I listened to the podcast, but turns out there's a video version too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDzW-2q1ZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDzW-2q1ZQ

tracker1 11y ago

I think in cases like this, especially if it's recursive, the search should redirect to `//censored.google.eu/?q=...` with a big notice at the top noting that the results excludes links that were specifically censored by EU law, with maybe a link to an article, or two about said law at the top of the page.

zubairsaif007 11y ago

http://googler700.blogspot.com/ http://googler700.blogspot.com/