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Reflecting on the Right to be Forgotten

• lisper 10y ago
  Let us not lose sight of this: the enforcement of the "right to be forgotten" is a form of censorship. This is not about enforcement of copyright, or defamation, it's about an individual's ability to censor true information simply because that information happens to be about them. And it can only be effective if enforced globally. If the EU succeeds in enforcing the RTBF globally it would set a catastrophic precedent for freedom of speech.
  • mavdi 10y ago
    Practice your freedom of speech outside my personal life.
    • grzm 10y ago
      Can you expand on this? What I have in mind is where to draw the line between your personal life and your interactions with others. Posts on public forums (including HN)? Your Facebook page? Your github repos? Someone else writing a blog post about an experience they shared with you? I sympathize with some of the intent. It's increasingly difficult to have a private life. I just am wondering how practical it is. I know the Right to Be Forgotten doesn't necessarily include all of these, but I can imagine it be expanded in a way that's doesn't seem to be much of a "slippery slope".
      • wav-part 10y ago
        How about any personal information illegally obtained (the act already a crime most likely) be defined illegal unless already available legally. However there is still a question of, If a content be blocked globally if its illegal in some country. No IMHO.
        • grzm 10y ago
          any personal information illegally obtained You're right, that should be removed. As you say, it's already a crime, so that wouldn't need any additional support by the RTBF.
          • suby 10y ago
            I think I disagree. By that logic we would also be deleting information like that gained from the Snowden leaks
            • grzm 10y ago
              Damnit. Why can't this be simple? Is this type of thing really personal information, though? Would it be something covered by RTBF?
              • wav-part 10y ago
                > Is this type of thing really personal information, though? Its not. So the rule still works.
              • DiabloD3 10y ago
                It actually is simple. Covering up an illegal act using state-granted powers is illegal. Someone "breaking the law" to tell people you committed illegal acts is not illegal in any meaningful sense.
    • patcon 10y ago
      With all due respect, I think the position OP's advocating is that people need to start defending the right to have what you're calling a "personal life". Our lives are no longer personal, at least in the sense of information ownership, which is what we're talking about. The term's continued usage is a polite lie involving curtains and a cheerful aversion of thought. RTBF is reactive policy-making at it's worst. Resources are finite. Make those companies spend resources doing something useful for our rights.
  • dkarapetyan 10y ago
    Except it's not. The data is gone from the google index but you can still find it.
    • lisper 10y ago
      But the data in Google's index is still information, and forcibly suppressing it is still censorship.
      • edblarney 10y ago
        " and forcibly suppressing it is still censorship." No, not by any reasonable definition of the term. Whether it's 'censorship' or not, absolutely depends on what kind of information is in question.
      • biocomputation 10y ago
        Yes, forcible suppression by a state actor is definitely censorship, but not all censorship is bad. I am generally in two minds about this because there are convincing arguments for both sides. In the US, some people have a terrible time getting a job because of a criminal conviction. Yes, they did something wrong, maybe even terrible, but does society benefit from keeping these people from obtaining gainful employment? If society does benefit, for how many years should the individual wear the scarlet letter? At present a criminal conviction in the US is a life sentence for a lot of people. What if the government passed a law that expunged their criminal records after 7 years, but did so for the greater good of society? The French people think that the scarlet letter is bad for their society.
        • lisper 10y ago
          > not all censorship is bad I don't dispute that. I'm just saying that France should not be allowed to censor beyond their own borders.
    • andrewflnr 10y ago
      How long do you think it will take for RTBF advocates to figure this out and demand it be taken down at the source, too? Probably about as long as it takes for people to start working around search engines. At least then no one will be able to claim it's not censorship.
  • danieldk 10y ago
    Let us not lose sight of this: the enforcement of the "right to be forgotten" is a form of censorship. Censorship is not the suppression of any information, it's the suppression of some types of information by some types of actors [1]. If someone gets dox'ed and their private address gets exposed to the internet, asking for the information to be removed is not censorship, but protecting private information. Having revenge porn removed is also not a form of censorship, but protection of the individual. It is very important that privacy is protected, especially because spreading (mis)information can destroy someone's life. Of course, the right to be forgotten can be misused. That's why it should be carefully encoded in law under which circumstances the right can be applied. [1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/censorship https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/censorship
    • lisper 10y ago
      > it's the suppression of some types of information by some types of actors Yes, that's why I specifically cited copyright and defamation of examples of suppression of information that are not censorship. But forced redactions under TRTBF are clearly censorship.
  • dmvaldman 10y ago
    How free would your speech be if it was recorded for posterity with no way of controlling it? Just something else to think about.
    • lisper 10y ago
      If I want to control the distribution of my own speech I can do that now by asserting copyright.
      • pessimizer 10y ago
        The enforcement of copyright is a form of censorship.
        • lisper 10y ago
          No, censorship is the suppression of information based on content, not ownership.
        • biocomputation 10y ago
          Many people believe that censorship applies only to speech limited by a state actor. Ex: the first amendment of the US Constitution means that the US government cannot repress your speech. It does not prevent others from doing so. Many other agents engage in repression of speech: we repress ourselves, so do parents, friends, communities, lawyers, contracts. We don't automatically regard repression of speech/expression as a bad thing, and in many cases we are glad for it.
      • edblarney 10y ago
        "If I want to control the distribution of my own speech I can do that now by asserting copyright." No, you can't. If you say something in public, and someone records with an iPhone and puts in on YouTube - you have no legal recourse on that matter.
        • codethief 10y ago
          Interestingly, in some (all?) European countries uploading the recording of your speech (or just you as a person) on YouTube would be a violation of your privacy rights, unless you're a person of public interest and gave that speech in public, i.e. in front of a crowd or something similar.
  • olalonde 10y ago
    I'm not convinced it's against the spirit of it though. Freedom of speech is about the right to express thoughts without fear of government retaliation or censorship. The "right to be forgotten" is essentially about censoring one's own speech, which is quite different.
  • biocomputation 10y ago
    Google defines itself as a global corporation and has stated many times that needs global access to talent, global access to markets, and global access to information. Yet a company that has benefited so much from globalization doesn't think that the French government should be able to enforce its laws globally. Stated simply, Google wants borders for everyone else and none for itself.
    • lisper 10y ago
      No, Google wants borders to mean something, and so do I. I don't think France should be able to impose its laws on me if I am neither a resident nor a citizen of France.
      • biocomputation 10y ago
        >> and so do I So you believe in the concept of sovereignty. France's laws end at France's borders? Border should be strong, right? >> No, Google wants borders to mean something, and so do I. No, Google wants borders to mean something when it benefits them, such as in this case. They want borders to be meaningless when it benefits them, such as the ability to operate in almost every country in the world. These sorts of skirmishes will only increase in the connected world being promoted by corporations. Some people, including myself, would rather that it wasn't done quite so hastily.
        • lisper 10y ago
          > They want borders to be meaningless when it benefits them, such as the ability to operate in almost every country in the world. Huh? That makes no sense at all. Of course they want to operate everywhere because that's how they make the most money. That doesn't mean that they don't respect national borders.
  • Silhouette 10y ago
    This is not about enforcement of copyright, or defamation, it's about an individual's ability to censor true information simply because that information happens to be about them. No, it isn't. In fact, the original CJEU ruling was quite clear that the right to be forgotten is not absolute and does have to be balanced against competing considerations like freedom of expression on a case by case basis. However, data protection laws in Europe are much stricter than in some places when it comes to things like incomplete or out of date information. A key detail in the right to be forgotten ruling is that it is not only the original source of such information that bears responsibility for it, but also search engines that make such information easier to find. The point is that while such technologies are useful for finding good information, they can also greatly magnify any damage caused by bad information. A search engine that links to a newspaper article describing how someone was accused of rape won't necessarily also link to the follow-up article describing how the key witness later admitted in court that they made the whole thing up and was found guilty of perjury themselves. And yet, a prospective employer or girlfriend or whoever else might have reason to look that person up by name won't know that and might reach entirely the wrong conclusion if they only saw the first article. More significantly in this hypothetical scenario, thanks to modern searching technologies, every prospective employer or girlfriend or whoever else might have reason to look that person up by name is likely to see the same article with the same missing follow-up, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the entirely innocent subject's life. That's an easy example that surely no-one is going to seriously argue against, because it's very clearly misrepresentative and the potential harm is obvious. Once you get into information that is factually correct but either no longer fairly represents an individual or is concealed for good reasons anyway, things tend to get more complicated. There are reasons that justice systems typically regard even most criminal convictions as spent after a certain period of time and no longer require disclosure beyond that point. There is a reason that courts sometimes order the identities of people involved in cases before them to be concealed. There are many other good reasons for confidentiality and privacy protections. In any of these situations, while whoever is disclosing the information in the first place may be the original cause of any resulting harm (and may be punished accordingly under the law), it remains the case that a search tool making the information much quicker and easier to find magnifies any resulting harm considerably.
    • 10y ago
  • edblarney 10y ago
    "The enforcement of the "right to be forgotten" is a form of censorship" This is a false representation of the issue. Your 'address' may very well be 'true' information - but people don't have the right to publish it. Your 'private notes stored at Google Docs' are 'true information' - does Google or anyone else have the right to make it public? No - we live in a new world, we need new rules, new laws - 'the right to be forgotten' in 99% of cases is completely benign and reasonable. 99% of the time entities may not want to 'forget' it's simply for economic reasons: they want the data to mine - that's it. This is 99% a 'consumer vs. massive company' issue - and far less an issue of 'right to access information'.
    • wav-part 10y ago
      I think main concern against RTBF that its not well defined. It cannot cover every info associated with a person. Right to Privacy is more applicable and solves everything you want.
      • pyrale 10y ago
        Just like any fresh law. Let the judge/regulation bodies polish it.
    • lisper 10y ago
      > Your 'address' may very well be 'true' information - but people don't have the right to publish it. Of course they do. For anyone who has ever made a political contribution in the U.S., their address is public record. I have to pay the phone company extra to not publish my address and phone number. > Your 'private notes stored at Google Docs' are 'true information' - does Google or anyone else have the right to make it public? No, because I hold the copyright on my private notes. > 'the right to be forgotten' in 99% of cases is completely benign and reasonable. I'm actually not disputing that. What I am disputing is a country's right to enforce its laws outside its own borders.
      • edblarney 10y ago
        "Of course they do. For anyone who has ever made a political contribution in the U.S., their address is public record." No, they don't. That is a specific case, wherein someone could arguably publish data, because it's public. It would be trivial to change that law - i.e. you cannot know the 'home address' of the contributor, or, you cannot publish it. In which case we're back to the normal scenario of 'your private info is not public info'. "No, because I hold the copyright on my private notes." FYI - you do not hold the 'copyright' on your Google notes - you have a 'user agreement' with Google, which is probably complex, and beyond the understanding of anyone who is not a lawyer, and may allow them to do all sorts of things. Bug you validate my case: as with 'google notes' - there's not reason that standard information could not be controlled in a similar manner. If you want to 'delete' your Google notes forever, you probably could, and Google would probably not keep a copy. They can do the same for other things.
• dlandis 10y ago
  > Aside from anything else, it’s plain common sense that one country should not have the right to impose its rules on the citizens of another, especially not when it comes to lawful content. That's just not true. A country has the right to impose it's rules on you if you want to do business in that jurisdiction. Of course no one is forcing them to do business there, which they did not mention in the post.
• dkarapetyan 10y ago
  Really weird dichotomies they're drawing. Clearly the intent behind the right to be forgotten is to be removed from whatever indexing Google does to display results regardless of where the query comes from. Trying to map national boundaries over data is why this person is having such a hard time trying to make a convincing case. Data does not care about countries and national boundaries since clearly the google servers doing the indexing could be in space. In which case would they be allowed to not comply with any requests by people to be removed from their indices? Or would they be compliant depending on which continent the servers happened to be over at the time? Bordered data is an absurd concept and this person is being very disingenuous by framing the argument in those terms.
  • zzleeper 10y ago
    It's not about the servers, it's about the users location. If a judge in France can succesfully that no one in the US can no longer find results for XYZ on Google, I find this troubling.
    • visarga 10y ago
      They don't need to restrict access by Google search domain. They can do it by search IP geolocation. Thus, if you're in France, you won't see the result from any Google site, but if you're in Germany, you will see it on all Google search sites. I agree with them that worldwide banning is troubling, especially if there is open door for any country to ban anything from any other country. Let's not forget that deleting something from Google doesn't delete it from human memory, the source website or mirrors it might have, and from other search engines. What gets on the internet tends to be resilient to deletion. Google can only do so much and they didn't write the content in the first place. They are just infrastructure.
      • zigzigzag 10y ago
        They already do that. France wants them to go further.
    • dkarapetyan 10y ago
• aftbit 10y ago
  I'm really not a fan of the new brand gTLDs. It's very pro-centralization. :(
• wyager 10y ago
  I think "The Right To Be Forgotten" is misleading in its use of the passive voice. A more accurate description would be "The Right To Force Other People To Forget".
  • msane 10y ago
    Force would be misleading, it's more like "enable"
    • wyager 10y ago
      Google already has the capability to remove results, so they do not need to be "enabled" by EU law. I'm not really sure how you imagine this works, but the "right to be forgotten" refers to various legal frameworks in the EU for forcing companies to delete data that pertains to an individual.
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • dzhiurgis 10y ago
        Google seems to be happily applying DMCA to the whole world.
        • wyager 10y ago
          I don't think they're happy about it. They've funded a lot of anti-DMCA stuff under "chilling effect" branding. The DMCA is a horrible law, so I don't think we should use it to justify similar takedown behavior under other laws.
      • zigzigzag 10y ago
        It doesn't actually. There are no laws that create or define the right to be forgotten. It was a "right" created out of nothing by a new court interpretation of a very vaguely worded part of the ECHR. Before the court invented this right nobody was even talking about it.
• danaliv 10y ago
  I'm guessing very few, if any, people here have ever felt a need to be forgotten. There was a time only a couple short decades ago when a person who made mistakes could do the work to make things right, make themselves a better person, and move on with their life. Now that's extremely difficult if not impossible. Mistakes are newsworthy and get indexed; redemption isn't and doesn't. That's not to say that everyone who makes mistakes redeems themselves. But those who do, nowadays, still have to enter every new job, every new relationship, with the dark past just a few keystrokes away. I would like to stress that this is a very new development. As such, I think it merits discussion beyond a simple black-and-white free speech analysis. I would urge you all to look beyond abstract principles and consider also the human impact that these policies have on actual people's lives. Try to imagine, if you can, what it's like for a person who has done the hard work to right their wrongs after landing in the news. Don't they deserve to be allowed to shut the door on their past when it's no longer who they are? I also think it's important to note that we (in the U.S.) do already recognize such a right when it comes to criminal records, through expungement proceedings. We routinely remove convictions from people's criminal records. I don't think any disagreement with this "right to be forgotten" is complete if it can't be reconciled with that.
  • peteretep 10y ago
    I don't think your "a couple of short decades ago" holds; Merle Haggard was singing about it in the 60s: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/merlehaggard/brandedman.html http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/merlehaggard/brandedman.html
  • wav-part 10y ago
    But what about my Right to Remember ? This is the world we now live in. We have to get used to it. Its a disadvantage but a disadvantage faced by everyone.
    • Silhouette 10y ago
      This is the world we now live in. We have to get used to it. Why? The problem here is a little bit someone's right to remember (which is in no way undermined by the CJEU ruling) and a lot the tools that artificially help everyone to find information they never knew in the first place. Its a disadvantage but a disadvantage faced by everyone. We're all subject to police powers and the criminal justice system, too, but statistically speaking it seems some of us are more subject to them than others. The press are equally free to report on all of us and under the same professional obligations to print retractions if they make mistakes, but it turns out that the retractions tend to be more prominent when it's a celebrity with the resources to bring a multi-million defamation lawsuit than when it was the local school teacher whose name was coincidentally the same as a convicted paedophile in last week's front page report where they included the teacher's photo by mistake.
• Silhouette 10y ago
  I'm a strong believer in personal privacy, and I also think that there are reasonable arguments for "forgetting" (in the sense we're using it here) information about individuals under some circumstances, sometimes even if that information is correct. However, this article makes a valid point. When operating in Europe, of course you have to comply with the European legal framework, and the meaning of "operating in Europe" is reasonably clear and has absolutely nothing to do with accessing data via a European national TLD. However, absent relevant laws or other agreements, I see no reason at all that what information people in one nation provide to people in another nation should be constrained by the wishes of people in a third nation. That sort of extra-territorial influence would set a very unhealthy precedent, for exactly the kinds of reasons the author set out here.
• aphextron 10y ago
  >"That’s why, for much of the last year, we’ve been defending the idea that each country should be able to balance freedom of expression and privacy in the way that it chooses" It's clear now that Google's motto of "do no evil" was a cynical joke. They left out the preceding lines: "see no evil, hear no evil".
• id122015 10y ago
  What is annoying about Companies House in the UK, is that when you open a company, and even after you close it, they make your Name, your Address and your Date of Birth public on the internet, inviting thus Identity thieves to fraud you. It wouldnt be enough to publish just the name of the company name and your name. Moreover they pass these details to third parties for over a decade. Search engines should ban these websites: beta.companieshouse.gov.uk duedil.com companycheck.co.uk companyformationuk.co companieslondon.com
  • cJ0th 10y ago
    Similarly, when you publish a website in Germany you have to disclose your name and address on your website. The idea is that everyone is responsible for what they are publishing. Sadly, the danger of fraudsters wasn't taken into account when this law was made.
• heisenbit 10y ago
  This really is about Google putting a foot down on territorial limits of enforcement. Without those we will be living in a lowest common denominator world. The stance they are taking is important beyond this specific issue e.g. warrants wrt. data stored in foreign data centers and law enforcement hacking foreign computers.
  • wheelerwj 10y ago
    No it's not. This is about google wanting to maintain control over someones data just because they are in a different jurisdiction. If google succeeds, the only thing that will happen is more walled off sections of the internet as countries move to control the flow of data.
    • eh78ssxv2f 10y ago
      Can you please explain what you mean by "google wanting to maintain control over someones data"? I thought if the original publisher removed an article, it will be removed from the Google's index too. So, I thought Google was not controlling data, they were merely indexing it.
• bambax 10y ago
  Although French, I tend to agree with Google. Bu what does this mean: > Aside from anything else, it’s plain common sense that one country should not have the right to impose its rules on the citizens of another, especially not when it comes to lawful content. Lawful content? According to whom? By saying that, Google seems to agree that there is such a thing as a universal lawfulness, which is the point the CNIL is trying to make. If there was a country that considered child porn to be completely ok (and there may be), would Google let American citizen visiting that country search and find child porn on the local Google?
  • zigzigzag 10y ago
    The "right to be forgotten" does not apply to illegal content. If it was illegal it could just be removed from the origin servers (if in the EU) and the publishers punished. The right to be forgotten applies to legal, true content which nobody will be punished for, but which the person it's about would prefer to go away.
• oliv__ 10y ago
  .google??? Really?
• intralizee 10y ago
  I find it funny when people can easily take the side, news or records should stay permanent online forever. Many lives are ruined daily by the law and the ruined lives can be innocent of the crime accused of committing. These people have to wait years to expunge in some cases and are not living the easy life with a job that makes anything close to what software engineers make. The US does not care if you were not found guilty of the crime or what you were accused of was dismissed. People will just see whatever in a background search and close all doors without asking the other party. A very horrible world for some people.
  • philipov 10y ago
    Only people earning less than X have a right to be forgotten.
    • usrusr 10y ago
      Which would be exactly the opposite of even the most optimistic "right to be forgotten" scenario, because enforcing that right would certainly be a rather expensive luxury.
  • pitaj 10y ago
    Then the solution is not a right to be forgotten, but fixing the specific issues you addressed. It's like applying a bandage without removing the shrapnel.
• Annatar 10y ago
  To be clear: we are not disputing that Google should comply with the right to be forgotten in Europe. We have worked diligently to give effect to the rights confirmed by the European Court of Justice. We have delisted approximately 780,000 URLs to date and have granted fast and effective responses to individuals who assert their rights. But you haven't done that for the United States, which makes it clear Google wants to play Big Brother, where legally not disallowed to do so. Else, Google would have proactively implemented this for everyone across the board, and where that is not legally possible, Google would have diligently lobbied the authorities like it does when it is in Google's interest. The whole thing is a farce; if Google weren't legally pressured, they would never do this because it cuts into their business model of living off of people's privacy. Clever opinion manipulation attempt with "every country should be able to choose", but not clever enough; there should be no attempt at manipulation to begin with, Mr. Global Privacy Counsel. As a privacy counsel, You shouldn't even be making these arguments, Mr. Global Privacy Counsel!
  • pitaj 10y ago
    The RTBF is not a valid right, is censorship, and is at its core contrary to free speech and the freedom of the internet.
    • Annatar 10y ago
      So you are saying that if Google finds, indexes and caches my private information without my explicit permission or knowledge, it is okay for that data to be available to everyone indefinitely? Well I disagree vehemently, especially in cases where a third party, such as a for-profit corporation violates a fiduciary relationship without my knowledge, sells that data, and Google mines and makes that data available. That's just wrong!
• tent 10y ago
  Police Google as much as you like. They can remove their results worldwide, but not the data itself. I'm confident that there will always be a search engine available that gets around this law. Perhaps we will even see some specialized tools to show only results hidden by Google.
  • amelius 10y ago
    I think this argument is flawed. Analogy: there will always be people who steal stuff; this doesn't mean we should accept the practice, and discard any preventive measures.
    • jamescostian 10y ago
      I believe your analogy might be flawed. When theft is prevented, the downside is that "thieves" don't end up with more things. But when you have the right to be forgotten, you may also remove other things. For example, in an election, a candidate's running mate could easily decide "I hate this person, I want all of my work with them to be forgotten", which would severly hurt that candidate's media coverage (sure, you can still find articles about that candidate on some archives, but many voters do not work that hard to educate themselves) But that isn't even what your parent comment was talking about. They were talking about how the whackamole game of censorship. If you put a law in place to prevent theft, it's not like thieves start coming up with places for all other thieves to come steal. On the other hand, if you censor Google Search results, there's a good chance you'll see, e.g. employers, moving to another search engine specifically for finding results people have requested to be forgotten
      • amelius 10y ago
        Well, granted, my analogy might be flawed, but to second order approximation. The original argument, however, is flawed in the first order.
• quickben 10y ago
  Another take on this is that Google, an advertising company, is regretting removing about 780k links of potentially very interesting content. This is a very slippery slope for them, because it threatens their core business.
• zmmmmm 10y ago
  I'm ambivalent about RTBF when it's confined to a particular country - I can see arguments in favor and against. But I think having one country's laws on free speech extend out of that country is a massive bridge too far. Anybody advocating for this needs to consider reciprocity - will they accept other countries laws regulating what they can see, publish, read and hear? But even with that aside, I don't think having the laws spread out of an individual country reflects the spirit and intent of RTBF laws. The essential problem is that people's privacy is violated because it suddenly becomes trivial to find out negative, inaccurate and out of context information incidentally. That is, you find out by accident, through casual browsing and not because you specifically desired to research negative information about that person. It has always been possible to find out about people's past if you put in specific effort. Doing that is an essential activity for all kinds of reasons. Going out of your way to use a VPN or a dedicated other-country search site demonstrates an explicit attempt to research a person beyond mere casual informational purposes. So I think extending these laws out of their country of origin not only is a terrible idea for free speech, but it doesn't even reflect the spirit of the laws themselves.
  • smoyer 10y ago
    I agree with your opinion that it's ludicrous to extend RTBF beyond a country's borders but I feel that even RTBF within a country or collection of countries could be detrimental. If you do something newsworthy enough to make it into a newspaper, I can go find out what you did (unless RTBF also requires printed papers to go redact your information from each copy). Isn't this collective knowledge part of what keeps society running? And doesn't this provide incentives to behave (to those who are thinking about misbehaving)?
    • Silhouette 10y ago
      If you're thinking along those lines, you might consider that reputable newspapers (and TV news shows) do issue retractions when earlier reports have been incorrect or misleading. There is also some debate about how certain -- perhaps less reputable -- newspapers will print a big front page article that is wrong, and then issue a tiny retraction on page 17 a few weeks later. The concern is very similar to the arguments for RTBF online: disproportionate coverage can leave the wrong impression with readers. Also similar to RTBF, there is talk of stronger regulation, such as requiring retractions to be printed or announced as prominently as the original story.
• greglindahl 10y ago
  The Right to be Forgotten is a huge barrier to entry for new search engines.
• aub3bhat 10y ago
  Google is right on this one, what French are effectively doing is European Imperialism 2.0. This is far far worse than whatever Russia or Chinese great firewall does. Worse if Google does implements this worldwide then its game over for internet as we know it. The next hot business would then be building platforms to allow governments to interfere with tech companies under false pretense of "privacy protection".
  • wav-part 10y ago
    You absolutely hit on all points. Great Firewall of China sound sane in comparision.
• wheelerwj 10y ago
  Dear google, maybe if your data collecting hadn't gotten so incredibly out of hand, this wouldn't be an issue. But people are starting to see how little control they have over their information, and they are beginning to freak. the-fuck. out. Now, you have to reign it in. Before, being a giant global company meant only mean more customers and more places to hide your profits. But now, there are global consequences too. So don't try to make us feel bad about your regulatory issues. We have our shit to worry about.
• chrisdone 10y ago
  > Google believes it should not. It's always funny to see someone write that a company "believes" anything. It's a party line. With a company as big as Google of 10,000 it's downright strange.
• sjg007 10y ago
  It is absolutely a fundamental right to be able to be forgotten. By court order especially.
• Tharkun 10y ago
  Google should be entirely irrelevant when it comes to the right to be forgotten. That right should be used to allow users to delete content from websites. Who or what points to those websites is irrelevant. This is a broken piece of legislation based on a broken understanding of how the internet works. There are alreadt laws about defamation etc which could be used to censor/remove defamatory articles aimed at your person or business. So RTBF shouldn't apply to content about you, only to content by you.