6 ms·

The Times should really stop referring to the "right to be forgotten" madness as a privacy restriction as it only touches on public info, it's a censorship law.

The Times should really stop referring to the "right to be forgotten" madness as a privacy restriction as it only touches on public info, it's a censorship law. They are being fined and ordered to censor public record items globally, say what you will about China but even they don't do that.

oh_sigh 11y ago
Right...and the insane part is they aren't even censoring the primary documents - just the index! It's like not allowing a library to have index card saying "Mein Kampf is located in section 23, row 8 under 'misguided ideologies'", but you do allow them to stock the book itself.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  Because this isn't about censorship! Google results are the default answer to 'what something is' online. It's improper for someone's first result online to be fraudulent or irrelevant. So Google is the problem. Not the actual article. Furthermore, actually removing content from original websites is incredibly hard, incredibly costly, and involves a lot of legal work. Tracing down web hosts all over the planet. Controlling this at the search engine level, on the other hand, only needs to talk to a handful of companies, and a simple, common framework can ensure individuals are able to expediently request redress for these wrongs against them.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - cromwellian 11y ago
    What if one day everyone runs their own indexer, or there's a distributed search engine where people index parts of the web and share it with others like FreeNet/Kazaa? What of sites like archive.org whose job it is to preserve the history of the web, in effect, a history of our culture? You're talking about in effect, erecting a Great Firewall around Europe so that EU citizens can't surface information that the rest of the world can. But anyone in Europe could use Tor, a foreign proxy, or a VPN to get around this. Ultimately, if government censorship extends too far, it may push decentralized information indexing and sharing to be more mainstream than the darknets it currently exists on.
    - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
      If you'd like to help replace Google with a decentralized, publicly-controlled alternative, I think that'd be a great thing! But that's a very large amount of mystical speculation, Ray. And by and large, if people had their own indexers, we wouldn't have a single search engine determining what people's public reputation is, so this problem would largely cease to exist. But the reality is, this has nothing to do with 'government censorship'. Google itself admits things like revenge porn should be blocked. (And in fact, it's Google itself that decides whether or not to censor RTBF sites!) Private citizens should have the right to remove personal information with no public bearing from the Internet. If you disagree, feel free to post your social security number and credit card information.
      - cromwellian 11y ago
        You can't remove anything from the internet, that's the point, and that's why you should be very careful about what information you put in the internet. At best you can temporarily hide it. Anyone who truly wants to dig up dirt on you, or wants to do a background check, won't rely only on Google. You say it's not about a company in particular, but the principle, but notice how you are totally ok with a non-Google index. The reality is, any distributed system would converge eventually, and end up with the same issues you have with Google today, only just like with controlling nukes in a multipolar, vs superpower world, governments would lose power to regulate speech and publishing. Thinks would get harder and more dangerous for those wishing to remove information about themselves from being found. Notice how quickly people are to go hyperbolic on the precedent of Apple unlocking a single cell phone, because hey, if the FBI can ask Apple to do it, then the Chinese government can too. But I don't see any similar concern about the possible bad precedents European censorship will set for China, Russia, et al. How can tech companies put up a fight against Chinese requests for censorship, when the European Union is given that option? Given your history Jake, of nearly daily anti-Google articles on your social feeds, should I not be skeptical that this has less to do with principle, and more to do with your desire to see Google lose a battle or two? And before you chalk this up to my employment at Google, maybe you should look at my history in trying to prevent censorship of this form, going all the way back to the 90s as one of the authors of the early anonymizing internet proxies in 1996 (https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/privacy-compcon97-www/privacy-html.html https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/privacy-compcon97-ww..., search for 'Decense', or https://web.archive.org/web/20011129060515/http://www.clark.net/pub/rjc/decense.html https://web.archive.org/web/20011129060515/http://www.clark....) I have always absolutely opposed censorship, of any kind, by any entity.
- gohrt 11y ago
  Search engine doesn't host the articles it links to, so the analogy doesn't quite match.
  - gefh 11y ago
    But the spanish newspaper hosting the article in the case that lead to this law _is_ under EU regulation, so I think in this case the library is 'all websites hosted in the EU' and google is just the card index.
- effie 11y ago
  The objected results are being removed from search results page only for specified queries (name of the individual...). The documents themselves stay in search index and can be found via other queries not specified in the removal request.
ocdtrekkie 11y ago
It has nothing to do with censorship. In fact, the requirements of the Right To Be Forgotten are pretty clearly stated to ensure that anything that the public deserves to know or should know does not qualify for RTBF protection. Unfortunately, Google's PR machine was in full force against this law, and a lot of people are completely unaware of it's very reasonable limitations. The funny part is, people's upset with it, were actually because Google overextended improperly in applying the law to invalid submissions (which strangely, worked WELL for their PR). "Google indeed acknowledged that some of its search result removals, affecting articles that were of public interest, were incorrect, and reinstated the links a week later."
- marcoperaza 11y ago
  >It has nothing to do with censorship. In fact, the requirements of the Right To Be Forgotten are pretty clearly stated to ensure that anything that the public deserves to know or should know does not qualify for RTBF protection. So ultimately, some body has to decide what does and doesn't qualify. We call that body a "censor" and their work, "censorship".
  - NovaS1X 11y ago
    This is not some body arbitrarily requesting removal of information. This is a body judging the legitimacy of requests on the behalf of a private individual. That is not censorship and I believe it's an attack on a fundamental human right to say that Google has the power to do whatever they wish with your private information that is outside of the public interest. Google is not a journalist or a news source.
    - curt15 11y ago
      Google is not digging up any information that hasn't already been made public. Any news stories it surfaces about an individual are part of the public historical record.
      - hk__2 11y ago
_rpd 11y ago
> "We disagree with the CNIL’s assertion that it has the authority to control the content that people can access outside France” Absolutely, and kudos to Google for fighting this ruling. This is an important dispute over jurisdiction, and it needs to be resolved sanely.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - jrock08 11y ago
    I'll copy-paste my reply to every comment you make, since you seem to really like making this non argument. Gawker could chose to relocate it's business outside the US, but as long as they are a US corporation, they are bound by US laws and rulings handed down by US courts. Furthermore, defamation laws for publishing content are very different than the right to be forgotten laws which apply to indexing content. No one is arguing that the content is defamation, since it is true and reasonable, the argument is that the content is no longer relevant to a person's character (eg shoplifting arrest as a teenager that made local news).
quotemstr 11y ago
Oh, China is getting worse too: https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/04/china-is-exporting-its-tiananmen-censorship-and-we-are-all-victims/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/04/china-is-exporting-its-...
NovaS1X 11y ago
No, this is not a censorship law. This is about private individuals requesting potentially harmful or embarrassing information from being propagated and easily searchable. This is putting power into the private citizens hand. This is not a removal of critical speech or journalism. Calling this censorship is the equivalent of calling blinds on your living room window censorship. Privacy is not censorship.
- georganos 11y ago
  Not sure I follow the analogy. The blinds protect a private space (your home), as opposed to some publicly accessible internet website.
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    Much of what is covered by RTBF is stuff that should be covered by blinds in your home, but may have been illegally brought to the Internet. Such as revenge porn.
  - NovaS1X 11y ago
    I'll try and explain it in my point of view from an event that happened to me. I was doing a job interview when I was younger and it was going well. I got scheduled in for a second interview. Right before my second interview I got a call from the manager saying that they didn't want to hire me. I asked why and he said this "I was taking a look at your Twitter profile and saw that you were holding a gun". What actually was going on here was my profile picture was me holding a paintball gun with my friends from a weekend event a month before. I was told that they don't want people with my image as a part of the company. (this is a whole conversation in itself but I'll leave it here). So after this I went and removed my picture. Done deal; problem solved. Now, what If I didn't have the option of removing that picture? This was my personal profile. This was MY information. Would it hurt future job prospects? What if someone posted revenge porn or myself (no this doesn't exists online or anywhere else). What if I went through a goth phase in high-school and a potential employer or volunteer organization didn't like it. There are many, many scenarios like this. Some of which end very very badly for people, and others just very annoying. The point here is that there is permanence on the internet but individuals change. And as an individual I should have the right to remove that information. In the modern world it's not realistic to ask "just keep everything offline". I fear for my eventual children who will do what kids do and will have that stuck with them for their entire lives. I'm very happy that nobody can Google what I did when I was 12. The blinds analogy highlights the idea that behind those blinds we have(had) photo albums, journals, arguments, phases of life, conversations, and skeletons in our closet that we had control over. Today we no longer have control over that information (and stay culturally relevant in any context) and top it off with the horrendous privacy records of companies like Google and Facebook that drive our lives I think we have the right to have laws like this.

oh_sigh 11y ago

Right...and the insane part is they aren't even censoring the primary documents - just the index! It's like not allowing a library to have index card saying "Mein Kampf is located in section 23, row 8 under 'misguided ideologies'", but you do allow them to stock the book itself.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
Because this isn't about censorship! Google results are the default answer to 'what something is' online. It's improper for someone's first result online to be fraudulent or irrelevant. So Google is the problem. Not the actual article. Furthermore, actually removing content from original websites is incredibly hard, incredibly costly, and involves a lot of legal work. Tracing down web hosts all over the planet. Controlling this at the search engine level, on the other hand, only needs to talk to a handful of companies, and a simple, common framework can ensure individuals are able to expediently request redress for these wrongs against them.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- cromwellian 11y ago
  What if one day everyone runs their own indexer, or there's a distributed search engine where people index parts of the web and share it with others like FreeNet/Kazaa? What of sites like archive.org whose job it is to preserve the history of the web, in effect, a history of our culture? You're talking about in effect, erecting a Great Firewall around Europe so that EU citizens can't surface information that the rest of the world can. But anyone in Europe could use Tor, a foreign proxy, or a VPN to get around this. Ultimately, if government censorship extends too far, it may push decentralized information indexing and sharing to be more mainstream than the darknets it currently exists on.
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    If you'd like to help replace Google with a decentralized, publicly-controlled alternative, I think that'd be a great thing! But that's a very large amount of mystical speculation, Ray. And by and large, if people had their own indexers, we wouldn't have a single search engine determining what people's public reputation is, so this problem would largely cease to exist. But the reality is, this has nothing to do with 'government censorship'. Google itself admits things like revenge porn should be blocked. (And in fact, it's Google itself that decides whether or not to censor RTBF sites!) Private citizens should have the right to remove personal information with no public bearing from the Internet. If you disagree, feel free to post your social security number and credit card information.
    - cromwellian 11y ago
      You can't remove anything from the internet, that's the point, and that's why you should be very careful about what information you put in the internet. At best you can temporarily hide it. Anyone who truly wants to dig up dirt on you, or wants to do a background check, won't rely only on Google. You say it's not about a company in particular, but the principle, but notice how you are totally ok with a non-Google index. The reality is, any distributed system would converge eventually, and end up with the same issues you have with Google today, only just like with controlling nukes in a multipolar, vs superpower world, governments would lose power to regulate speech and publishing. Thinks would get harder and more dangerous for those wishing to remove information about themselves from being found. Notice how quickly people are to go hyperbolic on the precedent of Apple unlocking a single cell phone, because hey, if the FBI can ask Apple to do it, then the Chinese government can too. But I don't see any similar concern about the possible bad precedents European censorship will set for China, Russia, et al. How can tech companies put up a fight against Chinese requests for censorship, when the European Union is given that option? Given your history Jake, of nearly daily anti-Google articles on your social feeds, should I not be skeptical that this has less to do with principle, and more to do with your desire to see Google lose a battle or two? And before you chalk this up to my employment at Google, maybe you should look at my history in trying to prevent censorship of this form, going all the way back to the 90s as one of the authors of the early anonymizing internet proxies in 1996 (https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/privacy-compcon97-www/privacy-html.html https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/privacy-compcon97-ww..., search for 'Decense', or https://web.archive.org/web/20011129060515/http://www.clark.net/pub/rjc/decense.html https://web.archive.org/web/20011129060515/http://www.clark....) I have always absolutely opposed censorship, of any kind, by any entity.
gohrt 11y ago
Search engine doesn't host the articles it links to, so the analogy doesn't quite match.
- gefh 11y ago
  But the spanish newspaper hosting the article in the case that lead to this law _is_ under EU regulation, so I think in this case the library is 'all websites hosted in the EU' and google is just the card index.
effie 11y ago
The objected results are being removed from search results page only for specified queries (name of the individual...). The documents themselves stay in search index and can be found via other queries not specified in the removal request.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago

It has nothing to do with censorship. In fact, the requirements of the Right To Be Forgotten are pretty clearly stated to ensure that anything that the public deserves to know or should know does not qualify for RTBF protection. Unfortunately, Google's PR machine was in full force against this law, and a lot of people are completely unaware of it's very reasonable limitations. The funny part is, people's upset with it, were actually because Google overextended improperly in applying the law to invalid submissions (which strangely, worked WELL for their PR). "Google indeed acknowledged that some of its search result removals, affecting articles that were of public interest, were incorrect, and reinstated the links a week later."

marcoperaza 11y ago
>It has nothing to do with censorship. In fact, the requirements of the Right To Be Forgotten are pretty clearly stated to ensure that anything that the public deserves to know or should know does not qualify for RTBF protection. So ultimately, some body has to decide what does and doesn't qualify. We call that body a "censor" and their work, "censorship".
- NovaS1X 11y ago
  This is not some body arbitrarily requesting removal of information. This is a body judging the legitimacy of requests on the behalf of a private individual. That is not censorship and I believe it's an attack on a fundamental human right to say that Google has the power to do whatever they wish with your private information that is outside of the public interest. Google is not a journalist or a news source.
  - curt15 11y ago
    Google is not digging up any information that hasn't already been made public. Any news stories it surfaces about an individual are part of the public historical record.
    - hk__2 11y ago

_rpd 11y ago

> "We disagree with the CNIL’s assertion that it has the authority to control the content that people can access outside France” Absolutely, and kudos to Google for fighting this ruling. This is an important dispute over jurisdiction, and it needs to be resolved sanely.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- jrock08 11y ago
  I'll copy-paste my reply to every comment you make, since you seem to really like making this non argument. Gawker could chose to relocate it's business outside the US, but as long as they are a US corporation, they are bound by US laws and rulings handed down by US courts. Furthermore, defamation laws for publishing content are very different than the right to be forgotten laws which apply to indexing content. No one is arguing that the content is defamation, since it is true and reasonable, the argument is that the content is no longer relevant to a person's character (eg shoplifting arrest as a teenager that made local news).

quotemstr 11y ago

Oh, China is getting worse too: https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/04/china-is-exporting-its-tiananmen-censorship-and-we-are-all-victims/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/04/china-is-exporting-its-...

NovaS1X 11y ago

No, this is not a censorship law. This is about private individuals requesting potentially harmful or embarrassing information from being propagated and easily searchable. This is putting power into the private citizens hand. This is not a removal of critical speech or journalism. Calling this censorship is the equivalent of calling blinds on your living room window censorship. Privacy is not censorship.

georganos 11y ago
Not sure I follow the analogy. The blinds protect a private space (your home), as opposed to some publicly accessible internet website.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  Much of what is covered by RTBF is stuff that should be covered by blinds in your home, but may have been illegally brought to the Internet. Such as revenge porn.
- NovaS1X 11y ago
  I'll try and explain it in my point of view from an event that happened to me. I was doing a job interview when I was younger and it was going well. I got scheduled in for a second interview. Right before my second interview I got a call from the manager saying that they didn't want to hire me. I asked why and he said this "I was taking a look at your Twitter profile and saw that you were holding a gun". What actually was going on here was my profile picture was me holding a paintball gun with my friends from a weekend event a month before. I was told that they don't want people with my image as a part of the company. (this is a whole conversation in itself but I'll leave it here). So after this I went and removed my picture. Done deal; problem solved. Now, what If I didn't have the option of removing that picture? This was my personal profile. This was MY information. Would it hurt future job prospects? What if someone posted revenge porn or myself (no this doesn't exists online or anywhere else). What if I went through a goth phase in high-school and a potential employer or volunteer organization didn't like it. There are many, many scenarios like this. Some of which end very very badly for people, and others just very annoying. The point here is that there is permanence on the internet but individuals change. And as an individual I should have the right to remove that information. In the modern world it's not realistic to ask "just keep everything offline". I fear for my eventual children who will do what kids do and will have that stuck with them for their entire lives. I'm very happy that nobody can Google what I did when I was 12. The blinds analogy highlights the idea that behind those blinds we have(had) photo albums, journals, arguments, phases of life, conversations, and skeletons in our closet that we had control over. Today we no longer have control over that information (and stay culturally relevant in any context) and top it off with the horrendous privacy records of companies like Google and Facebook that drive our lives I think we have the right to have laws like this.