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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 deg

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
Regarding censorship rape threats, defamation, bomb threats and other obvious and clear exceptions to free speech. Those are pretty well understood and covered by existing law. We are talking about suppressing true statements 1984 style and making the truth disappear ex post facto from the internet. This isn't the same as shouting fire in a crowded theater and you know it. You still haven't addressed how easy it would be to create a public search engine of illegal truths nor the fact that there is so much info out there that anyone of importance will likely have access to all the info about people that they might want to hide. You wont be able to get a job at McDonald's without dealing with someone who pays a monthy fee for the truth about you.
- Silhouette 10y ago
  We are talking about suppressing true statements 1984 style and making the truth disappear ex post facto from the internet. This isn't the same as shouting fire in a crowded theater and you know it. No, it's the more like a court-ordered anonymity ruling protecting a vulnerable witness, or medical confidentiality, or a government removing old convictions for minor offences from someone's official background checks. All of these are well established principles in other parts of our legal and government systems, and the ethical arguments for them are well understood. You still haven't addressed how easy it would be to create a public search engine of illegal truths If you want to do that somewhere outside the jurisdiction of the EU, well, good luck with that. It's going to cost you a fortune for very little benefit, but if you believe so strongly in the ethics of this and your own legal system protects your freedom of speech above any other relevant rights, go ahead. But if you do that in the EU, you're going to jail. And you should probably expect that if you did openly challenge the legal principles of the EU in such a way, the EU actually would respond by censoring your site within its own territory, just as it ruled that Google (who know a thing or two about building a search engine, in case you didn't know) are required to comply with the same data protection rules as everyone else in the RTBF case. nor the fact that there is so much info out there that anyone of importance will likely have access to all the info about people that they might want to hide You keep saying this, but the whole point is that if you have a facility like a search engine making it easy to find that information then any damage caused by propagating or perpetuating the information will be greatly magnified. The reality is that even in very important situations like a trial in court, a jury will not be told information that the law deems irrelevant or inadmissible in the case. And as I've been explaining in various other comments in this discussion, these legal principles have been developed over a very long period of time and apply far more widely than just Google and RTBF. If you want to challenge them, again go ahead, but you're not just taking on some online free speech issue, you're taking on generations of legal and ethical argument that have brought us to where we are today. You wont be able to get a job at McDonald's without dealing with someone who pays a monthy fee for the truth about you. That kind of argument is exactly why these legal protections are necessary. Again, it's hardly news that allowing employers to discriminate on undesirable grounds is not healthy for society. We have literally passed laws to protect various categories of vulnerable people against other potential abuses in the employment system. This is no different, except that it's not even close to the same scale and didn't even need laws of its own, just the same basic legal data protection principles that already applied. If you want to provide that monthly database of "truth" about someone to potential employers of that person, and your database in fact presents a misleading picture of that person because while true the information is also incomplete or out of context or otherwise not telling the whole story, you should expect to be taken to court and you should expect the court to award damages to the person harmed by your misrepresentation of them. Ultimately it's the same principle that leads oaths in court to say not just "tell the truth" but something like "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth". The problem here isn't someone telling inconvenient truths about someone else, it's misrepresentation that causes harm. Sometimes you can do that even by telling the truth, if you're only telling a partial truth, and our legal system recognises that.

michaelmrose 10y ago

Regarding censorship rape threats, defamation, bomb threats and other obvious and clear exceptions to free speech. Those are pretty well understood and covered by existing law. We are talking about suppressing true statements 1984 style and making the truth disappear ex post facto from the internet. This isn't the same as shouting fire in a crowded theater and you know it. You still haven't addressed how easy it would be to create a public search engine of illegal truths nor the fact that there is so much info out there that anyone of importance will likely have access to all the info about people that they might want to hide. You wont be able to get a job at McDonald's without dealing with someone who pays a monthy fee for the truth about you.

Silhouette 10y ago
We are talking about suppressing true statements 1984 style and making the truth disappear ex post facto from the internet. This isn't the same as shouting fire in a crowded theater and you know it. No, it's the more like a court-ordered anonymity ruling protecting a vulnerable witness, or medical confidentiality, or a government removing old convictions for minor offences from someone's official background checks. All of these are well established principles in other parts of our legal and government systems, and the ethical arguments for them are well understood. You still haven't addressed how easy it would be to create a public search engine of illegal truths If you want to do that somewhere outside the jurisdiction of the EU, well, good luck with that. It's going to cost you a fortune for very little benefit, but if you believe so strongly in the ethics of this and your own legal system protects your freedom of speech above any other relevant rights, go ahead. But if you do that in the EU, you're going to jail. And you should probably expect that if you did openly challenge the legal principles of the EU in such a way, the EU actually would respond by censoring your site within its own territory, just as it ruled that Google (who know a thing or two about building a search engine, in case you didn't know) are required to comply with the same data protection rules as everyone else in the RTBF case. nor the fact that there is so much info out there that anyone of importance will likely have access to all the info about people that they might want to hide You keep saying this, but the whole point is that if you have a facility like a search engine making it easy to find that information then any damage caused by propagating or perpetuating the information will be greatly magnified. The reality is that even in very important situations like a trial in court, a jury will not be told information that the law deems irrelevant or inadmissible in the case. And as I've been explaining in various other comments in this discussion, these legal principles have been developed over a very long period of time and apply far more widely than just Google and RTBF. If you want to challenge them, again go ahead, but you're not just taking on some online free speech issue, you're taking on generations of legal and ethical argument that have brought us to where we are today. You wont be able to get a job at McDonald's without dealing with someone who pays a monthy fee for the truth about you. That kind of argument is exactly why these legal protections are necessary. Again, it's hardly news that allowing employers to discriminate on undesirable grounds is not healthy for society. We have literally passed laws to protect various categories of vulnerable people against other potential abuses in the employment system. This is no different, except that it's not even close to the same scale and didn't even need laws of its own, just the same basic legal data protection principles that already applied. If you want to provide that monthly database of "truth" about someone to potential employers of that person, and your database in fact presents a misleading picture of that person because while true the information is also incomplete or out of context or otherwise not telling the whole story, you should expect to be taken to court and you should expect the court to award damages to the person harmed by your misrepresentation of them. Ultimately it's the same principle that leads oaths in court to say not just "tell the truth" but something like "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth". The problem here isn't someone telling inconvenient truths about someone else, it's misrepresentation that causes harm. Sometimes you can do that even by telling the truth, if you're only telling a partial truth, and our legal system recognises that.