10 ms·

Insights on the First Three Years of the Right to Be Forgotten at Google

110 points by scrollaway 9y ago

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
I am a pretty big supporter of Right to Be Forgotten as a thing, and thought this was an excellent summary of how it's gone so far! When you add the 89% of the users being "private individuals", and that the next biggest category, 4.4%, is minors, it seems most of the requests definitely fall within the purpose intended. Without going into the details, 43% delisting rate seems likely quite fair, it doesn't seem like it's being over-implemented by any means, but a good number of requests are indeed being approved, this is a lot better than I expected, to be honest.
- userbinator 9y ago
  I'm the exact opposite: I believe that history should never be rewritten nor forgotten. The increasing "transientness" of information is, quite frankly, extremely scary --- when future historians looking back may see only a whitewashed representation of what things were really like. Besides, Google forgets enough even without being told to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840
  - dieterrams 9y ago
    I’m sure any future historians working on a scale where these delistings would be relevant would be working with tools that would be able to do the equivalent of a content-aware fill on the missing data.
    - arebop 9y ago
      I.e., the tools will make up a plausible story, such as the story that best fits the available evidence excluding the forgotten bits? That's not very reassuring for those who worry about the loss of history.
      - dieterrams 9y ago
        I’m being slightly tongue-in-cheek, but what history can be researched or delivered in human-digestible form where the histories of the delisted at the scale you’re concerned about wouldn’t be so lossily compressed as to amount to roughly the same thing? Not everyone will be delisted, the usual tools of extrapolation and demography are still available to the historian, and merely because information is not accessible via Google does not mean it is not available.
  - taneq 9y ago
    > The increasing "transientness" of information is, quite frankly, extremely scary Information has always been transient, except that which we put great effort into preserving, until very recently. The idea that every bit of data, every photograph, every snippet of text should be immortalized and exhaustively searchable is only a few decades old has in no way been proven to be 'better'.
    - cinquemb 9y ago
      >…few decades old has in no way been proven to be 'better'. As long as someone can leverage such information for any sort of 'gains', the incentives to store/collect information with these capabilities will persist and grow (esp as it becomes cheaper to do so). It will be interesting to see in the future what kind of databases pop up that with information on those who seek to scrub themselves from sites. I know the project I was working had companies wanting to pay us to remove information we mined/crowd-sourced about people (which we declined on principle that we found that it was increasingly valuable to people to be able to leverage this information on whatever contextual basis they chose to view it through). The Google's and Facebook's have had to comply since they ultimately take money from advertisers based in the EU (i.e. have assets with exposure to EU political risks that may entail when banking/employing workers in the EU when engaging with these sorts of actvities), future organizations/platforms (from relatively centralized to decentralized) that monetize their traffic/platforms by mining crypto on their users platform won't have to though.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    The highlight point is that Right To Be Forgotten is very specific on what types of information should be forgotten. (As shown, only 43% of requests for removal were approved.) If you consider the type of content that is required to be forgotten, this concern isn't really reasonable. Surely you would have objection to posting your social security number here, and entering it into a never forgotten, permanent pool of information for us to reference and use, right? RTBF specifically excludes any information that has historical significance or relevance to the public interest, so things like nude photos of you your ex posted is fair game, but the corruption scandal a politician is hoping to cover up is not. As another commenter pointed out, history of the mundane (such as things RTBF permits removal of) is so voluminous in nature, that removal of some private citizens' data will not meaningfully reduce the historical value of the Internet (or what remains of it) in the future. I'm far more concerned about valuable sites and content shut down due to lack of finance or interest, than the removal of personal information that's harmful to people alive today.
  - aaron695 9y ago
    > when future historians looking back may see only a whitewashed representation of what things were really like. Give the many orders of magnitude of info these days being recorded and stored historians will have way to much junk to deal with. Besides which, why should people live in pain today for someones hobby in the future? This law is specifically to help individuals. And it doesn't even delete data, it just makes it a little harder to find. If anything it makes future peoples hobbies more relevant.
  - Xylakant 9y ago
    Why should history not be forgotten? It used it be that way all the time before we managed to build information storage large enough to capture this huge amount of data. And at what cost does it come that we never forget? Not all too long ago (1993-1997), there was a large trial against 25 people for alleged child abuse in germany. (1) All were eventually cleared, one person died while in prison before the trial ended. It was one of the largest case of false accusations for child abuse. The names were all over the press. Should those people not have the right to have that memory fade? To have history be forgotten at some point? > Besides, Google forgets enough even without being told to: That was not the case when the laws were drafted and enacted. (Wormser Prozesse, sorry, german only https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormser_Prozesse https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormser_Prozesse)
    - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
      Should those people have the 'right' to be remembered, falsely, as child abusers? Should anything and everything every written about the case be expunged? Should individuals be responsible for purging their diaries of such information too? Why not? Someone might upload it to the Internet in the future and, because everyone else officially 'forgot', who will remain to remember that this is officially prohibited information?
  - keiferski 9y ago
    Sorry but I really fundamentally disagree with this line of thought. My existence and my rights, right now, are vastly more important than some theoretical future information-hungry archeologist.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  As a supporter of RTBF, what do you think about its impact on startup search engines? I'm advising a startup in Europe -- 3 people, self-funded -- and am not looking forward to them launching and hitting a buzz-saw of RTBF requests.
  - matt4077 9y ago
    That seems like a problem such a startup would love to have. In any case, one cost-saving advice would be to piggy-back on Google's process: simply check if they delisted the search result and follow. I can't think of a specific law this would actually infringe.
    - yorwba 9y ago
      Does Google have a public API to check for URL delisting, or are you thinking about bending the search API for that?
      - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
        If I were to try to implement this, I'd safely assume any link I'm asked to delist, Google was also asked to delist. Therefore, if I can't find it in Google Search with a query where the page in question should be the top or only result, it means Google delisted it. That being said, I don't feel anyone should assume Google's decisions are inherently right, and do something just because Google did it.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      Google takes active counter-measures against the sort of automated queries that this would involve. It's also against their TOS, and might be considered criminal in some places.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    I am not sure how much they need to worry. Bear in mind, they only need to act if they get a request. Consider how successful your startup's search engine would have to be before individuals and companies would start submitting RTBF requests to them! People are worried about how they appear on Google because Google is people's default. (In Europe, Google's somewhere in the 90% of search range, I think, you'd know better than I.) People don't want the first impression people get of them in the world's index to be unfair. That's why RTBF doesn't really even bother removing the original content from the web, they just want Google's index cleaned out. I think if the startup you're advising ever has to seriously worry about RTBF, that startup has already succeeded. (And, as an aside, pass on my best wishes to them. We need more choices in the search space!)
- woolvalley 9y ago
  RTBF is a nice sounding thing, but feels like it's too easy to abuse to create a censorship regime. Generally with law, if an abuse is possible, power users will eventually exploit that abuse potential to the fullest extent possible.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >RTBF is a nice sounding thing, but feels like it's too easy to abuse to create a censorship regime. Privacy is not that alike censorship for the individual. That's not a regime, it's a right. For public affairs we have all kinds of records from the media anyway. And people should have the right for their past crimes to be forgotten, even murder or whatever. What you did in your 20s is not necessarily who you are in your 50s. And since public bias, society gossip/meanness nature will be with us for the foreseeable future, we can at least kill the technology and "permanent records" that feed it.
    - cortesoft 9y ago
      Ok, but do people have a right to remember, too? If you murdered my daughter 30 years ago, I have a right to keep telling people about what happened, including about the person who did it. I shouldn't be censored from talking about what happened to me, just because the person who killed my child wants to forget about it.
      - FooBarWidget 9y ago
        But that already does not happen under the GDPR right? Criminal record keeping still works the way it used to. And what about the person who was wrongly accused/convicted of murder? He deserves to have his incorrect history forgotten, does he not?
      - coldtea 9y ago
        >Ok, but do people have a right to remember, too? If you murdered my daughter 30 years ago, I have a right to keep telling people about what happened, including about the person who did it. 30 years on? Why? What good can come out of it? Assuming that the person has served its time (or did it by accident or something)?
- rovek 9y ago
  > When you add the 89% of the users being "private individuals", and that the next biggest category, 4.4%, is minors, it seems most of the requests definitely fall within the purpose intended Not necessarily, from the article: > The top 1,000 requesters, 0.25% of individuals filing RTBF requests, were responsible for 15% of the requests. Many of these frequent requesters are in fact not individuals themselves, but law firms and reputation management services representing individuals.
sjroot 9y ago
I have been following Elie and his team's work for a while now, and enjoyed this read, but I am curious as to why it was posted on his personal website as opposed to Google's Research Blog (https://research.googleblog.com https://research.googleblog.com). He is one of four authors and this was clearly not a personal effort of his. Not to mention, it would reach a larger audience if shared by Google directly.
- ebursztein 9y ago
  Hey :) We did have an official post today: https://www.blog.google/topics/google-europe/updating-our-right-be-forgotten-transparency-report/ https://www.blog.google/topics/google-europe/updating-our-ri... that is focused on the improved transparency report rather than the research paper and I am sure it will reach a larger audience. You will recognize the infographic that I borrowed from it :) When we make a paper public I have the habit to share a short summary (sometime with a delay thus) of what the paper is about on my personal blog. Kurt, Luca and Yuan helped with the summary on a personal capacity which is why they are co-author of the blog post. Bottom line this is not the official post, we do have one, it is just a summary a few authors of the paper wrote in personal capacity to share some of the finding we found the most interesting.
  - sjroot 9y ago
    I didn't see the Google Blog post - thank you for pointing me in the right direction! And great work.
TangoTrotFox 9y ago
The article omits what I think is probably the most important datum: '0.2% of requesters accounted for 20.8% of all accepted delistings. Many of these frequent requesters were individuals using law firms and reputation management services.' That's a total of about 214,000 URLS deleted on account of 1000 individuals. The most prolific requester requested 5,768 URLs relating them be removed. It's unstated how many of these were approved. The sort of individuals using law firms and reputation management services to try to erase information about themselves from public access, are generally going to be the individuals whose information has the most probable public utility. But they're also the individuals who can most threaten Google with lawsuits and other difficulties should they not comply. The internet is something that will live on long after we're all dead, and it is creating a living chronicle of the times. The more this chronicle is interfered with, the less valuable this information will be. Einstein's 'marital demands' [1] (not what you might think) of his wife would almost certainly fall within this 'right to be forgotten' yet they now provide a all too rare glimpse at the less 'sculptured' life of one of the most important figures in history. This yin and yang, good and bad, nature of people helps provide a more balanced, and less idealistic view of actors in the past - and present. Perhaps the thing becoming ever more clear is that search is something that needs to be decentralized. It's all too easy for the player in control to exploit the data for their own personal benefit, and they also end up working as a single point of failure for access to said information. [1] - http://www.openculture.com/2013/12/albert-einstein-imposes-on-his-first-wife-a-cruel-list-of-marital-demands.html http://www.openculture.com/2013/12/albert-einstein-imposes-o...
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  Einstein was a highly public figure, its unlikely that such things would be removed from public view, or a lawsuit to such effect would be winnable. Information parties like Google has goes far beyond what you see publicly, and its not being retained for your benefit, its being retained for Google's, and Google's and your goals are not in alignment.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  The internet is something that will live on long after we're all dead Yup, but how much of what’s online today will? Bitrot kills, and it seems like a lot of today’s content will be gone long before we are. By conflating the net with the content you’ve avoided that key issue.
forapurpose 9y ago
I've been wondering: How will Right To Be Forgotten be implemented in blockchain products, where forgetting is supposed to be impossible? Am I misunderstanding something fundamental about blockchains?
- mikekchar 9y ago
  Indeed, this is an excellent thing to consider when you are using immutable databases. GDPR is another such requirement that people are now having to struggle with. Essentially, you need to be able to rewrite the DB with the new information. For merkle chains that are in the public record (like Google's scheme to to publish certificate requests so that CA shenanigans are obvious to anyone that looks -- the name of which escapes me at the moment), it's not going to be reasonable. It's not so much the merkle chain, but the fact that the data is already distributed. Getting everybody to resign the chain would be pretty hard, but getting them all to delete the data is unreasonable... "Pretty please. We got asked by a judge, you know!" So essentially, you need to make sure you don't put that kind of information in that kind of DB. (P.S. It's a bit of a shame that you're getting down voted for such a good question, but I suggest you substitute "merkle chain" for "blockchain" when you want to ask technical questions of this sort.)
  - e_d_e_v_at 9y ago
    I believe the program you're looking for is Certificate Transparency. To be honest, write-permanently databases have been around for a while (for example pgp keyservers that peer and distribute keys relatively quickly). Basically, it is a problem unsolved except by having seriously smart people who do this stuff for its own sake, hacking at the data directly, and are distributed across and able to effectively communicate from many jurisdictions.
- eadmund 9y ago
  They're incompatible: the 'right' to be forgotten means a 'right' to rewrite history, which is incompatible with an unforgeable, immutable log.
- rumcajz 9y ago
cromwellian 9y ago
To me, the most concerning thing is the level of government officials requesting delisting. Democracy requires transparency. If you've committed crimes, had financial judgements against you, or even been accused of sexual misconduct, I want to know about it. Powerful or high network individuals or corporations requesting delisting should have a much higher bar.
- iamdave 9y ago
  had financial judgements against you, You had me with the other two, I don't know about this one. In the absence of criminal financial malfeasance, or deliberately poor mishandling of instruments an official had some responsibility over as an individual acting in the public trust, I can't think of a compelling argument for why this needs to be the public's business. I can only presume, but I'm with pause to put words into your mouth that this is probably want you meant?
  - cromwellian 9y ago
    Exhibit A: Donald J Trump. Very high number of civil judgements against him (over 3000), indicating a highly unreliable person prone to con-artistry. While not having been criminally convicted (although he settled the TrumpU fraud case), the sheer weight of the judgements suggests with high confidence he is not to be trusted. Do you think stories about the thousands of judgements against him should have been delisted from the public prior to the election? I'd argue they are materially relevant to voters. The same goes for his tax returns, and the private financial dealings of political candidates. IMHO, if you run for public office, you deliberate opt-in to public scrutiny of your private financial and civil court history.
    - iamdave 9y ago
      >Do you think stories about the thousands of judgements against him should have been delisted from the public prior to the election? Shotgun reaction (knee-jerk, better phrase probably): no but Trump is such an exigent outlier here because of his immense footprint in various financial endeavors. Apply the same scrutiny to every citizen who steps up even to serve on city council, taken to it's extreme conclusion and you have John Q. Public getting grilled over his financials because someone found out he accidentally bounced a rent check in 2001 when he was in college. But that's also why I made the qualifier of someone with a fiduciary responsibility to certain public trusts. Trump clearly fits this as someone with vetted interests in a very large (private) corporation and other business interests. Don't get me wrong here: I definitely agree and value a thorough review of a candidate's worthiness for office, I'm still incredulous about the path we have to go down when we start looking at an individual's finances as an indicator of public service to the extent of running for office. Said a better way: I'm looking at the extremely long view of this and having reservations about our ability to remain objective on the matter. So if we scale back from the extreme conclusion of Mr. Public and his bounced rent check from 2001, what does the middle ground look like and what is the framework for how the logic ladder works over asking candidates running for public office to disclose their financial 'worthiness' (read: I'm using this separately from the obvious disclosures that one may already be morally obliged to turn over such as relations one's business may have to government entities they would invariably preside over) and you may end up convincing me to change my mind.
mirimir 9y ago
So are there any search engines that ignore RTBF? Edit: Public ones, I mean. I'm sure that major TLAs do.
dantheman 9y ago
We need to be careful with our words. There is no "Right to be forgotten". Framing[1] denotes the battlefield terrain, if you accept the frame you've already lost. A better title might be: Insights on the First Three Years of European Censorship of Google. 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/the-framing-wars.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/the-framing-wars....
- onion2k 9y ago
  There is no "Right to be forgotten". In the context of Google's search results, according to the European Union's "Data Protection Directive" that's based on an interpretation of the OECD's definition of privacy, yes there is. You can't just declare there isn't such a thing as the Right to be Forgotten as fact. You may choose not to recognise it, but there definitely is such an idea that many people believe is a right. In a wider context there are many countries where case law implies there is a Right to be Forgotten too, including the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten
- ginko 9y ago
  Why do you consider this a battlefield and why are you on the side of a multinational spying corporation?
- flipbrad 9y ago
  Not only is it (to some extent) found in existing law, but from May 25th this year, GDPR Article 17 would like to have a word: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:OJ.L_.2016.119.01.0001.01.ENG#d1e2606-1-1 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:O... It's not just an EU thing, either - several other courts, as far away as Japan, have also imposed similar rights/obligations.

110 points by scrollaway 9y ago

I am a pretty big supporter of Right to Be Forgotten as a thing, and thought this was an excellent summary of how it's gone so far! When you add the 89% of the users being "private individuals", and that the next biggest category, 4.4%, is minors, it seems most of the requests definitely fall within the purpose intended. Without going into the details, 43% delisting rate seems likely quite fair, it doesn't seem like it's being over-implemented by any means, but a good number of requests are indeed being approved, this is a lot better than I expected, to be honest.

userbinator 9y ago
I'm the exact opposite: I believe that history should never be rewritten nor forgotten. The increasing "transientness" of information is, quite frankly, extremely scary --- when future historians looking back may see only a whitewashed representation of what things were really like. Besides, Google forgets enough even without being told to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840
- dieterrams 9y ago
  I’m sure any future historians working on a scale where these delistings would be relevant would be working with tools that would be able to do the equivalent of a content-aware fill on the missing data.
  - arebop 9y ago
    I.e., the tools will make up a plausible story, such as the story that best fits the available evidence excluding the forgotten bits? That's not very reassuring for those who worry about the loss of history.
    - dieterrams 9y ago
      I’m being slightly tongue-in-cheek, but what history can be researched or delivered in human-digestible form where the histories of the delisted at the scale you’re concerned about wouldn’t be so lossily compressed as to amount to roughly the same thing? Not everyone will be delisted, the usual tools of extrapolation and demography are still available to the historian, and merely because information is not accessible via Google does not mean it is not available.
- taneq 9y ago
  > The increasing "transientness" of information is, quite frankly, extremely scary Information has always been transient, except that which we put great effort into preserving, until very recently. The idea that every bit of data, every photograph, every snippet of text should be immortalized and exhaustively searchable is only a few decades old has in no way been proven to be 'better'.
  - cinquemb 9y ago
    >…few decades old has in no way been proven to be 'better'. As long as someone can leverage such information for any sort of 'gains', the incentives to store/collect information with these capabilities will persist and grow (esp as it becomes cheaper to do so). It will be interesting to see in the future what kind of databases pop up that with information on those who seek to scrub themselves from sites. I know the project I was working had companies wanting to pay us to remove information we mined/crowd-sourced about people (which we declined on principle that we found that it was increasingly valuable to people to be able to leverage this information on whatever contextual basis they chose to view it through). The Google's and Facebook's have had to comply since they ultimately take money from advertisers based in the EU (i.e. have assets with exposure to EU political risks that may entail when banking/employing workers in the EU when engaging with these sorts of actvities), future organizations/platforms (from relatively centralized to decentralized) that monetize their traffic/platforms by mining crypto on their users platform won't have to though.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  The highlight point is that Right To Be Forgotten is very specific on what types of information should be forgotten. (As shown, only 43% of requests for removal were approved.) If you consider the type of content that is required to be forgotten, this concern isn't really reasonable. Surely you would have objection to posting your social security number here, and entering it into a never forgotten, permanent pool of information for us to reference and use, right? RTBF specifically excludes any information that has historical significance or relevance to the public interest, so things like nude photos of you your ex posted is fair game, but the corruption scandal a politician is hoping to cover up is not. As another commenter pointed out, history of the mundane (such as things RTBF permits removal of) is so voluminous in nature, that removal of some private citizens' data will not meaningfully reduce the historical value of the Internet (or what remains of it) in the future. I'm far more concerned about valuable sites and content shut down due to lack of finance or interest, than the removal of personal information that's harmful to people alive today.
- aaron695 9y ago
  > when future historians looking back may see only a whitewashed representation of what things were really like. Give the many orders of magnitude of info these days being recorded and stored historians will have way to much junk to deal with. Besides which, why should people live in pain today for someones hobby in the future? This law is specifically to help individuals. And it doesn't even delete data, it just makes it a little harder to find. If anything it makes future peoples hobbies more relevant.
- Xylakant 9y ago
  Why should history not be forgotten? It used it be that way all the time before we managed to build information storage large enough to capture this huge amount of data. And at what cost does it come that we never forget? Not all too long ago (1993-1997), there was a large trial against 25 people for alleged child abuse in germany. (1) All were eventually cleared, one person died while in prison before the trial ended. It was one of the largest case of false accusations for child abuse. The names were all over the press. Should those people not have the right to have that memory fade? To have history be forgotten at some point? > Besides, Google forgets enough even without being told to: That was not the case when the laws were drafted and enacted. (Wormser Prozesse, sorry, german only https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormser_Prozesse https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormser_Prozesse)
  - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    Should those people have the 'right' to be remembered, falsely, as child abusers? Should anything and everything every written about the case be expunged? Should individuals be responsible for purging their diaries of such information too? Why not? Someone might upload it to the Internet in the future and, because everyone else officially 'forgot', who will remain to remember that this is officially prohibited information?
- keiferski 9y ago
  Sorry but I really fundamentally disagree with this line of thought. My existence and my rights, right now, are vastly more important than some theoretical future information-hungry archeologist.
greglindahl 9y ago
As a supporter of RTBF, what do you think about its impact on startup search engines? I'm advising a startup in Europe -- 3 people, self-funded -- and am not looking forward to them launching and hitting a buzz-saw of RTBF requests.
- matt4077 9y ago
  That seems like a problem such a startup would love to have. In any case, one cost-saving advice would be to piggy-back on Google's process: simply check if they delisted the search result and follow. I can't think of a specific law this would actually infringe.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    Does Google have a public API to check for URL delisting, or are you thinking about bending the search API for that?
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      If I were to try to implement this, I'd safely assume any link I'm asked to delist, Google was also asked to delist. Therefore, if I can't find it in Google Search with a query where the page in question should be the top or only result, it means Google delisted it. That being said, I don't feel anyone should assume Google's decisions are inherently right, and do something just because Google did it.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Google takes active counter-measures against the sort of automated queries that this would involve. It's also against their TOS, and might be considered criminal in some places.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  I am not sure how much they need to worry. Bear in mind, they only need to act if they get a request. Consider how successful your startup's search engine would have to be before individuals and companies would start submitting RTBF requests to them! People are worried about how they appear on Google because Google is people's default. (In Europe, Google's somewhere in the 90% of search range, I think, you'd know better than I.) People don't want the first impression people get of them in the world's index to be unfair. That's why RTBF doesn't really even bother removing the original content from the web, they just want Google's index cleaned out. I think if the startup you're advising ever has to seriously worry about RTBF, that startup has already succeeded. (And, as an aside, pass on my best wishes to them. We need more choices in the search space!)
woolvalley 9y ago
RTBF is a nice sounding thing, but feels like it's too easy to abuse to create a censorship regime. Generally with law, if an abuse is possible, power users will eventually exploit that abuse potential to the fullest extent possible.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >RTBF is a nice sounding thing, but feels like it's too easy to abuse to create a censorship regime. Privacy is not that alike censorship for the individual. That's not a regime, it's a right. For public affairs we have all kinds of records from the media anyway. And people should have the right for their past crimes to be forgotten, even murder or whatever. What you did in your 20s is not necessarily who you are in your 50s. And since public bias, society gossip/meanness nature will be with us for the foreseeable future, we can at least kill the technology and "permanent records" that feed it.
  - cortesoft 9y ago
    Ok, but do people have a right to remember, too? If you murdered my daughter 30 years ago, I have a right to keep telling people about what happened, including about the person who did it. I shouldn't be censored from talking about what happened to me, just because the person who killed my child wants to forget about it.
    - FooBarWidget 9y ago
      But that already does not happen under the GDPR right? Criminal record keeping still works the way it used to. And what about the person who was wrongly accused/convicted of murder? He deserves to have his incorrect history forgotten, does he not?
    - coldtea 9y ago
      >Ok, but do people have a right to remember, too? If you murdered my daughter 30 years ago, I have a right to keep telling people about what happened, including about the person who did it. 30 years on? Why? What good can come out of it? Assuming that the person has served its time (or did it by accident or something)?
rovek 9y ago
> When you add the 89% of the users being "private individuals", and that the next biggest category, 4.4%, is minors, it seems most of the requests definitely fall within the purpose intended Not necessarily, from the article: > The top 1,000 requesters, 0.25% of individuals filing RTBF requests, were responsible for 15% of the requests. Many of these frequent requesters are in fact not individuals themselves, but law firms and reputation management services representing individuals.

sjroot 9y ago

I have been following Elie and his team's work for a while now, and enjoyed this read, but I am curious as to why it was posted on his personal website as opposed to Google's Research Blog (https://research.googleblog.com https://research.googleblog.com). He is one of four authors and this was clearly not a personal effort of his. Not to mention, it would reach a larger audience if shared by Google directly.

ebursztein 9y ago
Hey :) We did have an official post today: https://www.blog.google/topics/google-europe/updating-our-right-be-forgotten-transparency-report/ https://www.blog.google/topics/google-europe/updating-our-ri... that is focused on the improved transparency report rather than the research paper and I am sure it will reach a larger audience. You will recognize the infographic that I borrowed from it :) When we make a paper public I have the habit to share a short summary (sometime with a delay thus) of what the paper is about on my personal blog. Kurt, Luca and Yuan helped with the summary on a personal capacity which is why they are co-author of the blog post. Bottom line this is not the official post, we do have one, it is just a summary a few authors of the paper wrote in personal capacity to share some of the finding we found the most interesting.
- sjroot 9y ago
  I didn't see the Google Blog post - thank you for pointing me in the right direction! And great work.

TangoTrotFox 9y ago

The article omits what I think is probably the most important datum: '0.2% of requesters accounted for 20.8% of all accepted delistings. Many of these frequent requesters were individuals using law firms and reputation management services.' That's a total of about 214,000 URLS deleted on account of 1000 individuals. The most prolific requester requested 5,768 URLs relating them be removed. It's unstated how many of these were approved. The sort of individuals using law firms and reputation management services to try to erase information about themselves from public access, are generally going to be the individuals whose information has the most probable public utility. But they're also the individuals who can most threaten Google with lawsuits and other difficulties should they not comply. The internet is something that will live on long after we're all dead, and it is creating a living chronicle of the times. The more this chronicle is interfered with, the less valuable this information will be. Einstein's 'marital demands' [1] (not what you might think) of his wife would almost certainly fall within this 'right to be forgotten' yet they now provide a all too rare glimpse at the less 'sculptured' life of one of the most important figures in history. This yin and yang, good and bad, nature of people helps provide a more balanced, and less idealistic view of actors in the past - and present. Perhaps the thing becoming ever more clear is that search is something that needs to be decentralized. It's all too easy for the player in control to exploit the data for their own personal benefit, and they also end up working as a single point of failure for access to said information. [1] - http://www.openculture.com/2013/12/albert-einstein-imposes-on-his-first-wife-a-cruel-list-of-marital-demands.html http://www.openculture.com/2013/12/albert-einstein-imposes-o...

throwaway2048 9y ago
Einstein was a highly public figure, its unlikely that such things would be removed from public view, or a lawsuit to such effect would be winnable. Information parties like Google has goes far beyond what you see publicly, and its not being retained for your benefit, its being retained for Google's, and Google's and your goals are not in alignment.
IntronExon 9y ago
The internet is something that will live on long after we're all dead Yup, but how much of what’s online today will? Bitrot kills, and it seems like a lot of today’s content will be gone long before we are. By conflating the net with the content you’ve avoided that key issue.

forapurpose 9y ago

I've been wondering: How will Right To Be Forgotten be implemented in blockchain products, where forgetting is supposed to be impossible? Am I misunderstanding something fundamental about blockchains?

mikekchar 9y ago
Indeed, this is an excellent thing to consider when you are using immutable databases. GDPR is another such requirement that people are now having to struggle with. Essentially, you need to be able to rewrite the DB with the new information. For merkle chains that are in the public record (like Google's scheme to to publish certificate requests so that CA shenanigans are obvious to anyone that looks -- the name of which escapes me at the moment), it's not going to be reasonable. It's not so much the merkle chain, but the fact that the data is already distributed. Getting everybody to resign the chain would be pretty hard, but getting them all to delete the data is unreasonable... "Pretty please. We got asked by a judge, you know!" So essentially, you need to make sure you don't put that kind of information in that kind of DB. (P.S. It's a bit of a shame that you're getting down voted for such a good question, but I suggest you substitute "merkle chain" for "blockchain" when you want to ask technical questions of this sort.)
- e_d_e_v_at 9y ago
  I believe the program you're looking for is Certificate Transparency. To be honest, write-permanently databases have been around for a while (for example pgp keyservers that peer and distribute keys relatively quickly). Basically, it is a problem unsolved except by having seriously smart people who do this stuff for its own sake, hacking at the data directly, and are distributed across and able to effectively communicate from many jurisdictions.
eadmund 9y ago
They're incompatible: the 'right' to be forgotten means a 'right' to rewrite history, which is incompatible with an unforgeable, immutable log.
rumcajz 9y ago

cromwellian 9y ago

To me, the most concerning thing is the level of government officials requesting delisting. Democracy requires transparency. If you've committed crimes, had financial judgements against you, or even been accused of sexual misconduct, I want to know about it. Powerful or high network individuals or corporations requesting delisting should have a much higher bar.

iamdave 9y ago
had financial judgements against you, You had me with the other two, I don't know about this one. In the absence of criminal financial malfeasance, or deliberately poor mishandling of instruments an official had some responsibility over as an individual acting in the public trust, I can't think of a compelling argument for why this needs to be the public's business. I can only presume, but I'm with pause to put words into your mouth that this is probably want you meant?
- cromwellian 9y ago
  Exhibit A: Donald J Trump. Very high number of civil judgements against him (over 3000), indicating a highly unreliable person prone to con-artistry. While not having been criminally convicted (although he settled the TrumpU fraud case), the sheer weight of the judgements suggests with high confidence he is not to be trusted. Do you think stories about the thousands of judgements against him should have been delisted from the public prior to the election? I'd argue they are materially relevant to voters. The same goes for his tax returns, and the private financial dealings of political candidates. IMHO, if you run for public office, you deliberate opt-in to public scrutiny of your private financial and civil court history.
  - iamdave 9y ago
    >Do you think stories about the thousands of judgements against him should have been delisted from the public prior to the election? Shotgun reaction (knee-jerk, better phrase probably): no but Trump is such an exigent outlier here because of his immense footprint in various financial endeavors. Apply the same scrutiny to every citizen who steps up even to serve on city council, taken to it's extreme conclusion and you have John Q. Public getting grilled over his financials because someone found out he accidentally bounced a rent check in 2001 when he was in college. But that's also why I made the qualifier of someone with a fiduciary responsibility to certain public trusts. Trump clearly fits this as someone with vetted interests in a very large (private) corporation and other business interests. Don't get me wrong here: I definitely agree and value a thorough review of a candidate's worthiness for office, I'm still incredulous about the path we have to go down when we start looking at an individual's finances as an indicator of public service to the extent of running for office. Said a better way: I'm looking at the extremely long view of this and having reservations about our ability to remain objective on the matter. So if we scale back from the extreme conclusion of Mr. Public and his bounced rent check from 2001, what does the middle ground look like and what is the framework for how the logic ladder works over asking candidates running for public office to disclose their financial 'worthiness' (read: I'm using this separately from the obvious disclosures that one may already be morally obliged to turn over such as relations one's business may have to government entities they would invariably preside over) and you may end up convincing me to change my mind.

mirimir 9y ago

So are there any search engines that ignore RTBF? Edit: Public ones, I mean. I'm sure that major TLAs do.

dantheman 9y ago

We need to be careful with our words. There is no "Right to be forgotten". Framing[1] denotes the battlefield terrain, if you accept the frame you've already lost. A better title might be: Insights on the First Three Years of European Censorship of Google. 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/the-framing-wars.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/the-framing-wars....

onion2k 9y ago
There is no "Right to be forgotten". In the context of Google's search results, according to the European Union's "Data Protection Directive" that's based on an interpretation of the OECD's definition of privacy, yes there is. You can't just declare there isn't such a thing as the Right to be Forgotten as fact. You may choose not to recognise it, but there definitely is such an idea that many people believe is a right. In a wider context there are many countries where case law implies there is a Right to be Forgotten too, including the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten
ginko 9y ago
Why do you consider this a battlefield and why are you on the side of a multinational spying corporation?
flipbrad 9y ago
Not only is it (to some extent) found in existing law, but from May 25th this year, GDPR Article 17 would like to have a word: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:OJ.L_.2016.119.01.0001.01.ENG#d1e2606-1-1 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:O... It's not just an EU thing, either - several other courts, as far away as Japan, have also imposed similar rights/obligations.