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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 res

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
  I'm saying the concept itself is absurd to begin with. Is all French data kept on French servers? Obviously not. Whatever infrastructure google uses to power their data layer is replicated across continents. So when a French citizen says "Remove me from all your indices because my government gives me that right" google is not allowed to insert some extra phrases in there like "only if the person requesting that data is also French or is asking for the data from servers located in France". Even if we assume that somehow all French data happened to be located on servers in France then complying with those requests would mean purging the data except it is obvious they are not doing that if a person from another country can access the data. So however you slice it google is either non-compliant or is purposefully misunderstanding what it means "to be forgotten" from their indices.
  - lern_too_spel 10y ago
    The newspaper who wrote an article about the Frenchman has a right to display that article to people outside of France and has a right to have search engines index the article to drive traffic to its website. The Internet user outside of France has a right to read something critical of the Frenchman to decide whether to do business with him on that basis and has a right to find that information using a search engine.
    - ptaipale 10y ago
      Right. And what happens when an Internet user in France opens a VPN connection that has an endpoint outside of France, and accesses information that the French government doesn't wish him to see? You can prosecute the Internet user, of course. That's what happens in China, for instance. You can try to detect VPNs and make it a crime to even try to create such a VPN. That's also what happens in authoritarian countries. But is that the right way for France or other EU countries to go? No.
  - slavik81 10y ago
    Is France the only country that gets this power? What happens when China demands the removal of Tiananmen Square wikipedia article in the name of unity? Or when the UK requests the removal of the Vietnamese napalm girl in the name of decency? Do we just keep taking down results until we're left only with things that no country objects to?
jayajay 10y ago
If you think bordered countries make sense, then bordered data should make sense, right? Can't we trace packets back to a physical emitter? I don't think this is a non-issue at all. If we replace "data" with "nukes", it's obvious that borders matter. Neither nukes nor data care about borders, but people do. I think the last sentence sums it up really well: "...should the balance between the right to free expression and the right to privacy be struck by each country—based on its culture, its traditions, its courts—or should one view apply for all?
- dkarapetyan 10y ago
  Google is mis-directing here. It is obvious what I mean when I say "Delete me from all your servers". I don't care what country those servers are in. This is not a freedom of expression vs privacy issue. This is people being in charge of their behavioral and historical data that google has locked up in their data silos. Framing it otherwise is disingenuous. I'm still free to express myself however I want on whatever forums I choose. Whether google gets to freely index and profit from it is the real question except their lawyers are trying to make it sound like they're champions of freedom of expression.
  - jodrellblank 10y ago
    It's obvious what you mean, but it's not obvious how or why an EU law means Google has to change data in their datacenters in the USA for someone searching from Brazil. What if Australia ruled that Google must keep all data on all people worldwide and forbid deletions. Should that override all other country laws? If not, why should the EU law affect other countries? > This is people being in charge of their behavioral and historical data that google has locked up in their data silos. It's not "their" data. People clicked "I agree", and it's someone else's data now. People aren't in charge of it, they never have been.
    - dkarapetyan 10y ago
      Great point about the other side of the coin about retention policies. The bottom line is that neither retention nor deletion is currently possible. Isn't that really the issue? If Australia wanted to retain whatever data google had then surely some kind of export functionality would be the answer for that use case. If google's retention policies were by some miracle something like 1 year instead of forever that is.

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
I'm saying the concept itself is absurd to begin with. Is all French data kept on French servers? Obviously not. Whatever infrastructure google uses to power their data layer is replicated across continents. So when a French citizen says "Remove me from all your indices because my government gives me that right" google is not allowed to insert some extra phrases in there like "only if the person requesting that data is also French or is asking for the data from servers located in France". Even if we assume that somehow all French data happened to be located on servers in France then complying with those requests would mean purging the data except it is obvious they are not doing that if a person from another country can access the data. So however you slice it google is either non-compliant or is purposefully misunderstanding what it means "to be forgotten" from their indices.
- lern_too_spel 10y ago
  The newspaper who wrote an article about the Frenchman has a right to display that article to people outside of France and has a right to have search engines index the article to drive traffic to its website. The Internet user outside of France has a right to read something critical of the Frenchman to decide whether to do business with him on that basis and has a right to find that information using a search engine.
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    Right. And what happens when an Internet user in France opens a VPN connection that has an endpoint outside of France, and accesses information that the French government doesn't wish him to see? You can prosecute the Internet user, of course. That's what happens in China, for instance. You can try to detect VPNs and make it a crime to even try to create such a VPN. That's also what happens in authoritarian countries. But is that the right way for France or other EU countries to go? No.
- slavik81 10y ago
  Is France the only country that gets this power? What happens when China demands the removal of Tiananmen Square wikipedia article in the name of unity? Or when the UK requests the removal of the Vietnamese napalm girl in the name of decency? Do we just keep taking down results until we're left only with things that no country objects to?

jayajay 10y ago

If you think bordered countries make sense, then bordered data should make sense, right? Can't we trace packets back to a physical emitter? I don't think this is a non-issue at all. If we replace "data" with "nukes", it's obvious that borders matter. Neither nukes nor data care about borders, but people do. I think the last sentence sums it up really well: "...should the balance between the right to free expression and the right to privacy be struck by each country—based on its culture, its traditions, its courts—or should one view apply for all?

dkarapetyan 10y ago
Google is mis-directing here. It is obvious what I mean when I say "Delete me from all your servers". I don't care what country those servers are in. This is not a freedom of expression vs privacy issue. This is people being in charge of their behavioral and historical data that google has locked up in their data silos. Framing it otherwise is disingenuous. I'm still free to express myself however I want on whatever forums I choose. Whether google gets to freely index and profit from it is the real question except their lawyers are trying to make it sound like they're champions of freedom of expression.
- jodrellblank 10y ago
  It's obvious what you mean, but it's not obvious how or why an EU law means Google has to change data in their datacenters in the USA for someone searching from Brazil. What if Australia ruled that Google must keep all data on all people worldwide and forbid deletions. Should that override all other country laws? If not, why should the EU law affect other countries? > This is people being in charge of their behavioral and historical data that google has locked up in their data silos. It's not "their" data. People clicked "I agree", and it's someone else's data now. People aren't in charge of it, they never have been.
  - dkarapetyan 10y ago
    Great point about the other side of the coin about retention policies. The bottom line is that neither retention nor deletion is currently possible. Isn't that really the issue? If Australia wanted to retain whatever data google had then surely some kind of export functionality would be the answer for that use case. If google's retention policies were by some miracle something like 1 year instead of forever that is.