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If I'm going to be hiring you, dating you, or having you around my family the public information regarding your history of immorality and criminality suddenly b

If I'm going to be hiring you, dating you, or having you around my family the public information regarding your history of immorality and criminality suddenly becomes relevant. Does it? Does getting busted for smoking a joint at university really make any difference to whether someone is a good employee a decade later? Should this matter? Does being merely accused of something once upon a time really make any difference to whether someone is a good employee? Even if they didn't actually do it, and were cleared at trial or never even got that far because the charges were later dropped? Should this matter? Sometimes people tend to think the worst of other people, or simply let their personal prejudices get in the way. That's why employers already aren't legally allowed to discriminate on some grounds when making hiring and firing decisions, and why sometimes information is legally protected by the courts. So maybe providing tools with the scale and influence of a search engine like Google to feed the prejudices and paranoia of hiring managers without regard to correctness, completeness or context isn't the best idea. It's a conversation between all of us and we individually ought to determine what is relevant to all of us not censors. Be careful what you wish for. In this case, one person's censorship is another person's respect for privacy. In a world where no-one gets second chances, how do people ever escape a criminal path and get back on the straight and narrow? If you even try we will make a search engine exclusively for illegal truths and the things that you want to hide will only become more visible. Ultimately the Internet belongs to all of us and we won't let you stifle it. Oh, you're going to invent and fill an entire Internet on your own, free from the laws and ethics and practicalities that apply to everyone else? Well, OK, good luck with that.

michaelmrose 10y ago
- Getting busted smoking a joint where its still illegal is a matter of public record regardless of whether it shows up on google - If you are wrongly accused refute the accusation. Its an unfortunate matter that got cleared up. You might get passed over for a job, try again put in another app. The extra struggle unfortunate as it is is a lesser evil then giving anyone with money to hire lawyers the ability to silence critics. - Respecting your privacy means not reading your diary or publishing your emails for planet earth to read. Unless the data was obtained unethically or you had a legal or moral expectation that it wouldn't be shared then there is nothing legally or morally wrong with sharing it. This isn't gray its black and white. - Censorship is when the government acting on its own behalf or on behalf of others via legal apparatus silences the citizenry or suppresses their speech. Once again this is super black and white. Censorship is a terrible idea that is somehow gaining credence among otherwise educated people. In the first place it is a gross violation of the right of the citizenry and a terrible precedent, in the second while it might silence the little guy in a lot of common cases the people you ought to be concerned about the movers and shakers who are likely to make decisions that effect peoples lives can probably afford a source of information that is less likely to be effected. So you are looking at creating a world where you don't know bob whose dating your daughter was accused on 3 separate occasions of rape but john the hiring manager still knows you were caught with some weed at 19 even if the charges were dropped. If you win you will have accomplished nothing of note other than making the world a crummier place.
- Silhouette 10y ago
  Getting busted smoking a joint where its still illegal is a matter of public record regardless of whether it shows up on google But in a lot of places, the degree to which public authorities will report it in official background checks will fade over time, as will any legal obligation for the individual to disclose the information when, say, applying for a job. There are well established arguments for governments acting this way in their treatment of past offenders, and whether or not search engines highlight past indiscretions that are otherwise considered in the past by the legal system, thus undermining the normal legal position, can have a large practical impact on the individual's future. If you are wrongly accused refute the accusation. Its an unfortunate matter that got cleared up. You might get passed over for a job, try again put in another app. The extra struggle unfortunate as it is is a lesser evil then giving anyone with money to hire lawyers the ability to silence critics. I'm sure that will be a great comfort to the paediatrician who was mistaken for a paedophile by someone too stupid to know the difference, as they go into hiding on police advice while the death threats are dealt with. Unless the data was obtained unethically or you had a legal or moral expectation that it wouldn't be shared then there is nothing legally or morally wrong with sharing it. This isn't gray its black and white. Very little in either ethics or law is black and white. In fact, there is an entire section of EU law about processing personal data that shows how far from black and white the legal rules are, and the RTBF ruling from the CJEU was just a particularly high-profile application of those general legal principles. Censorship is when the government acting on its own behalf or on behalf of others via legal apparatus silences the citizenry or suppresses their speech. Once again this is super black and white. So you don't agree with any form of defamation laws? You don't have a problem with someone inciting someone else to commit a serious crime so they can avoid getting their own hands dirty? You think someone who phones in a hoax threat before a major sporting event, causing huge amounts of disruption, financial loss and potentially physical harm to many thousands of people, is just exercising their right to free speech and shouldn't suffer any negative consequences? So you are looking at creating a world where you don't know bob whose dating your daughter was accused on 3 separate occasions of rape That depends entirely on the situation. Were those three separate accusations all made by close friends of Bob's psycho ex, and did any of them actually lead to any sort of trial? Because if not, protecting Bob from unproven accusations that could seriously damage his reputation is exactly why it's important to have strong privacy laws and to make sure that any personal data that is being shared is not misleading. Now, if Bob was prosecuted for rape, took a plea bargain accepting some lesser sexual assault charge, and is on some official sexual offenders register, then that's a different story entirely. But in that case, it's unlikely that the RTBF would mean Bob was entitled to suppress search engine results reporting that situation either. Again, the world is not a black and white place, and neither are the EU legal provisions on which the RTBF result was based.

michaelmrose 10y ago

- Getting busted smoking a joint where its still illegal is a matter of public record regardless of whether it shows up on google - If you are wrongly accused refute the accusation. Its an unfortunate matter that got cleared up. You might get passed over for a job, try again put in another app. The extra struggle unfortunate as it is is a lesser evil then giving anyone with money to hire lawyers the ability to silence critics. - Respecting your privacy means not reading your diary or publishing your emails for planet earth to read. Unless the data was obtained unethically or you had a legal or moral expectation that it wouldn't be shared then there is nothing legally or morally wrong with sharing it. This isn't gray its black and white. - Censorship is when the government acting on its own behalf or on behalf of others via legal apparatus silences the citizenry or suppresses their speech. Once again this is super black and white. Censorship is a terrible idea that is somehow gaining credence among otherwise educated people. In the first place it is a gross violation of the right of the citizenry and a terrible precedent, in the second while it might silence the little guy in a lot of common cases the people you ought to be concerned about the movers and shakers who are likely to make decisions that effect peoples lives can probably afford a source of information that is less likely to be effected. So you are looking at creating a world where you don't know bob whose dating your daughter was accused on 3 separate occasions of rape but john the hiring manager still knows you were caught with some weed at 19 even if the charges were dropped. If you win you will have accomplished nothing of note other than making the world a crummier place.

Silhouette 10y ago
Getting busted smoking a joint where its still illegal is a matter of public record regardless of whether it shows up on google But in a lot of places, the degree to which public authorities will report it in official background checks will fade over time, as will any legal obligation for the individual to disclose the information when, say, applying for a job. There are well established arguments for governments acting this way in their treatment of past offenders, and whether or not search engines highlight past indiscretions that are otherwise considered in the past by the legal system, thus undermining the normal legal position, can have a large practical impact on the individual's future. If you are wrongly accused refute the accusation. Its an unfortunate matter that got cleared up. You might get passed over for a job, try again put in another app. The extra struggle unfortunate as it is is a lesser evil then giving anyone with money to hire lawyers the ability to silence critics. I'm sure that will be a great comfort to the paediatrician who was mistaken for a paedophile by someone too stupid to know the difference, as they go into hiding on police advice while the death threats are dealt with. Unless the data was obtained unethically or you had a legal or moral expectation that it wouldn't be shared then there is nothing legally or morally wrong with sharing it. This isn't gray its black and white. Very little in either ethics or law is black and white. In fact, there is an entire section of EU law about processing personal data that shows how far from black and white the legal rules are, and the RTBF ruling from the CJEU was just a particularly high-profile application of those general legal principles. Censorship is when the government acting on its own behalf or on behalf of others via legal apparatus silences the citizenry or suppresses their speech. Once again this is super black and white. So you don't agree with any form of defamation laws? You don't have a problem with someone inciting someone else to commit a serious crime so they can avoid getting their own hands dirty? You think someone who phones in a hoax threat before a major sporting event, causing huge amounts of disruption, financial loss and potentially physical harm to many thousands of people, is just exercising their right to free speech and shouldn't suffer any negative consequences? So you are looking at creating a world where you don't know bob whose dating your daughter was accused on 3 separate occasions of rape That depends entirely on the situation. Were those three separate accusations all made by close friends of Bob's psycho ex, and did any of them actually lead to any sort of trial? Because if not, protecting Bob from unproven accusations that could seriously damage his reputation is exactly why it's important to have strong privacy laws and to make sure that any personal data that is being shared is not misleading. Now, if Bob was prosecuted for rape, took a plea bargain accepting some lesser sexual assault charge, and is on some official sexual offenders register, then that's a different story entirely. But in that case, it's unlikely that the RTBF would mean Bob was entitled to suppress search engine results reporting that situation either. Again, the world is not a black and white place, and neither are the EU legal provisions on which the RTBF result was based.