30 ms·

Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

642 points by zeveb 9y ago

zeveb 9y ago
Note that this case involved a criminal who wished to expunge his conviction from search results. > ‘The right to be forgotten is meant to apply to information that is no longer relevant but disproportionately impacts a person,’ said Jim Killock, executive director, ‘The Court will have to balance the public’s right to access the historical record, the precise impacts on the person, and the public interest.’ ‘The public’s right to access the historical record’ seems to me to be an incredibly Orwellian phrase. It seems to me that there is an absolute right to access factual historical information.
- kenbaylor 9y ago
  Some of the factors that come into this include the very nature of criminal sentencing: A judge looks at the facts of the case, aggravating factors, previous convictions and sentencing guidelines, and determines an appropriate sentence. Then along comes a search engine and doubly punishes someone in what may be a disproportional way; e.g. it's highly unlikely you will come across the convictions of John Smith when you google him, but when you look up someone with a non-common name, it may be the very first search result; disproportionally disadvantaging them for jobs, business and even dating partners. The issue in this case was Google wanted to be the sole arbiter of what they would remove and what they would leave in, with no oversight from anyone. This would have crippled the GDPR even before it began. That said, it's early days for the right to be forgotten.
- gnud 9y ago
  While I see your point, here are some counter-examples: - Someone who was the victim of a high-profile crime, not wishing everyone they come into contact with to know about it - Someone being stalked/targeted, living on a secret address - Someone who was wrongfully convicted, later exonorated. Here a mandate to publish corrections would be good enough, but I don't think Google would be happy with that, either...
- citilife 9y ago
  I think it's mostly the historical record, as decided by the government
- rootlocus 9y ago
  > It seems to me that there is an absolute right to access factual historical information. I agree. However people are lazy and subjective and settle with bits of incomplete information either outdated, out of context, or even wrong.
- onion2k 9y ago
  It seems to me that there is an absolute right to access factual historical information. This isn't a comment about the case, or the right to be forgotten, but something quite important nonetheless - Google's search results are not "factual historical information". They're an index of webpages that anyone and everyone can create, saying whatever they like. Google claims their engine ranks pages that more reputable higher than others, but without any transparency around that we can't know whether or not we agree with it's decisions.
  - zeveb 9y ago
    > Google's search results are not "factual historical information". They're an index of webpages that anyone and everyone can create, saying whatever they like. I'd argue that the fact that a webpage says something is itself an historical fact, and shouldn't be forbidden to be said.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sigzero 9y ago
  > The right to be forgotten is meant to apply to information that is no longer relevant but disproportionately impacts a person Who the hell makes that call? That in and of itself should tell you this is a bad law.
  - IAmEveryone 9y ago
    First, Google. Then, if one side is unhappy, a judge. Example: this article. What exactly is wrong with judges making decisions? Seems to kinda be their job.
    - elmo45 9y ago
      This means that any time someone is unhappy with the decision, Google (or an other company) has to shell out tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. Maybe Google can keep doing that for a few months but a normal startup would just grant every single request rather than having to fight it in European courts. The decision should be made by some independent privacy committee which reviews all the facts, and right to be forgotten requests should go through that committee rather than directly to Google
Crontab 9y ago
I find this result disgusting.
- JonnyNova 9y ago
  Can you elaborate?
  - jayd16 9y ago
    I would say that in the US we mostly consider right to free speech more important than the right to be forgotten.
    - lallysingh 9y ago
      A judge heard the case for two individuals. That's a pretty fair way to do it. Americans also believe in the rule of law, versus the rule of the powerful.
      - jayd16 9y ago
        The reason we have the freedom of speech in the US is because its the powerful that abuse the ability to censor.
        lallysingh 9y ago
        Which powerful entity do you mean? The people who want things unlisted, or Google?
        dingo_bat 9y ago
        The government.
        lallysingh 9y ago
        I don't understand your point. I read this as similar to libel or truth in advertising laws.
Elessar 9y ago
We're rapidly moving to a point where an official (government) criminal record is not important to folks you want to interact with -- landlords, employers etc. They will instead turn to Google. As such, Google might as well be the official record for many people. And if one put themsleves in the shoes of a victim, or even a criminal who has served their time, Google's pagerank is doing them a disservice. I don't know if expunging records is the right thing to do, but it's worth discussing. There's no guarantee that searching a criminal's name will bring up the recent history where they've done their time, shown contrition, and is contributing to society. Instead it'll be the most highly cited -- likely news about their crime. As a society, we approve of jail being the mechanism to "forgive" a person's crime. As such, isn't it horrible that Google's pagerank will only turn up what they've done wrong in the past? Again, I don't know if expunging the records is the right thing to do (in fact I believe it's wrong), but I do think it's worth debating.
- JonnyNova 9y ago
  Google is claiming to be acting in the interests of the public without the same mechanisms accessible to the public for moderating how this ability is used. Today Google can cite public interest, but it is just aligned and not acting purely on the public's interest. Like Facebook holding all user data forever, Google will definitely want to hold all data forever because someone it might make shareholders money.
- danielfoster 9y ago
  If this is the case, then the government should pass laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of criminal record. Instead they've passed the puck (rather badly) to Google. And it's not like Google is the only way to find things. Should newspapers be required to delete pages about an individual or destroy print copies? What about other search engines such as Yandex or Baidu? Of course anyone could just search on Google.com, too. Mankind has done perfectly well without a "right to be forgotten" for hundreds of thousands of years.
  - tonyg 9y ago
    > Mankind has done perfectly well without a "right to be forgotten" for hundreds of thousands of years. On the other hand, mankind has done perfectly well without computers, an internet, or indeed indoor plumbing for hundreds of thousands of years. Sometimes new technologies demand new responses.
lovetrump 9y ago
Once a criminal, always a criminal... even if you get it expunged from your record?
- justherefortart 9y ago
  Your record just shows you've been caught. I don't know anyone that hasn't broken laws. Hell, they make new laws every day for us to break.
- steve918 9y ago
  Once accused of a crime and it gets printed in the local news paper you're always a criminal on Google. Doesn't matter if you were innocent or not even if the court dismisses your case.
mattnewton 9y ago
I think that simply deleting references to information is a crude way to solve this problem. People who want to continue to bias against ex-convicts (like landlords and employers) will use background check services that aren’t regulated here, but the general public will be deprived easy access to information. This seems ripe for abuse, especially for government officials.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Wouldn't it be far worse to delete the original information? It's better to just make it harder for someone's life to be ruined by it, don't you think?
  - pitaj 9y ago
    Yes it's not as bad as deleting the information, but it's still much much worse than just doing nothing about the information.
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      Worse for who? Allowing Google to render someone permanently unemployable based on ancient or false information is definitely not "better".
      - mattnewton 9y ago
        Employers go to Google to find this information because it is free, not because they are randomly searching or because Google is pushing this information to them. I believe many (maybe even most) will simply switch to other services that provide background checks. IANAL but I don’t see how this ruling anticipates this. Now, you could argue that services like that will be less susceptible to false information. I don’t know why that would be the case and there seems to be some evidence against it on the recent “checkr” funding thread on hacker news[0] This is a blunt technological tool to fix a delicate social issue. The information is still there, but behind a service. I believe deleting the information is already not in the public’s interests [1][2], and it looks like the law agrees to an extent[3], but the solution they came up with effective puts a tollbooth in front of it. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16822093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16822093 [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27423527 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27423527 [2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3156779/More-280-000-people-ask-Google-right-forgotten-request-MILLION-pages-wiped-search-engine-s-results.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3156779/More-280-000... [3] see paragraph 3 http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-17-right-to-erasure-'right-to-be-forgotten'-GDPR.htm http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-17-right-to-eras...
SirensOfTitan 9y ago
A human is multifaceted. In previous decades, disagreeing with a person politically did not disqualify their friendship--today that is increasingly the case. People tend to flandarize real people (that is, reduce them to singular elements) nowadays in a way that makes me skeptical most people would use information on crimes in productive ways. A person should not have to pay for their mistakes years and years after they've paid the price (in this case, jail time). As a generalization: the push against the right to be forgotten seems like a case of information bias. Does more information really help society make decisions? And even more importantly: how do we, as a society, process information like this in a way where it could be helpful (in the common case)?
comboy 9y ago
It's absolutely insane what they are doing (EU). Should libraries remove newspapers with my name if I don't like what's written there about me? It's pure censorship. It all stems from the fact that society hasn't yet adjusted to the reality that not everything on the Internet is true. People share between themselves lots of false beliefs. The Internet is just another medium. The problem is that if I put up a billboard that says John is a thief, they can find me and sue for defamation. If I do a website and use SEO, then it's not so easy, even though it serves similar purpose. But that is how the world works now. We are able to send information to many people, anonymously, often in a targeted way. That's how politics work, that's how ads work, that's how HN works. The problem is not the information, the problem is trust. It's not easy to solve, but it's doable.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  You say it’s doable. How?
  - comboy 9y ago
    I'm glad you asked :) I want to publish a website with thoughts so far and looking for more brains. What I have in mind is a global, multilayered web of trust. It would be a game changer. Of course, I don't mean it as a startup, it must be decentralized. I don't care who creates it, I just really want to have it. I'm sure you know about the small world effect[1]. Example of layer: coding skill. I assign weights to friends I know. Now if I want to know if X is a good coder I check what friends of my friends think about it and multiply it by weights I have assigned to those friends (recursive). But it's much more than just having reasonable opinion about coding skill of somebody who you want to hire or cooperate with. The crucial thing is that this rating is always relative. It depends on your place in the network. Any global rating can be and will be cheated. Also, it's perfectly fine that for different group of people different things have different values. It enables trustworthy reviews, trustworthy project dependencies, tenants, online stores, doctors, mechanics etc. Could probably help with scams and spam. If successful it has power to change politics inside out. I'm sorry I don't have a write up yet and I know that with an analytic mind you probably can find many problems with the potential implementation. Let's be clear, it's hard. But so very worth it. There are many problems to solve. Apart from bootstrapping it (which could probably be done with help of some other services) The big one to me is privacy. If I assign 2/10 coding skill to one of my friends I don't want him to find out. I've already came up with some potential solutions. But more people, preferably with cryptography background and definitely smarter than me are needed, who are interested in this problem and are willing to spend time thinking about it. I'm going to try to collect all my notes and thoughts into a website and post it on HN. (If you were able to deduce enough from this short description, you like it and you're interested, drop me an empty e-mail at wot@comboy.pl, I'll send you a single e-mail when I have some place to point to) 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_experiment
volak 9y ago
Entering into a deeper relationship with someone (employer/employee, landlord/tenant, etc) you want to know everything about the other person. This is not because you are some nosy person - its because breaking that relationship means risking lawsuits or damage to your property or a whole eviction process which can take months to years... Its a dangerous thing to "trust" someone when they'll have that level of control over your future so people use government records and google to know if they could possibly have an issue. This isn't a privacy issue its a minimizing risk issue. If you give people better options for minimizing risk then google results will matter less and less. For instance I'd be happy to hire a convict if I could a) pay him less than I normally would (initially) and b) fire him at any time for any reason. Same for renting. If we draw up a contract with a no-drugs no-weapons clause and allowed me to inspect the place once a month for the first year or so I'd be happy to rent to him. But these things sensible precautions are illegal. There may be good reasons because of them "evil corporations" blah blah. Sensible or not that's reality - so people understandably discriminate against people based on google results. Its a fairly understandable precaution given the amount of risk involved due to regulation. Therefore the fix isn't to make google "forget" things - that only increases risk dramatically. The fix is to make these relationships less risky by allowing business owners and landlords more control over their own personal.
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  So a convicted criminal should be eternally punished by losing any employment security and being paid less than their peers? That doesn't sound like a society I would like to live in. The other alternative is that these restrictions would begin with convicted criminals, and spread to the rest of the population. Just because someone hasn't been convicted doesn't mean they aren't a criminal with drugs and weapons in their house after all.
  - volak 9y ago
    Think you missed the part where I said these restrictions were temporary until trust is rebuilt. I have more of a reason to trust a stranger with a clean record than I do to trust a convicted criminal. Once the later demonstrates hes trustworthy these restrictions disappear.
emiliobumachar 9y ago
Meanwhile, when governments want to check the background of someone before hiring them into a position of trust involved in national security, they'll send agents to investigate. Methods include interviewing them hooked up to a polygraph, and asking their neighbors questions face to face. All for reasons that seem to me less important then the safety of my child while alone with a babysitter.
- walshemj 9y ago
  Because a dodgy spy can cause more damage kim philby lead to the deaths of a large number of people. And its more likely that a family member is a danger to you child - than say a babysitter who got busted at 15 for smoking pot behind the bleachers with her bf.
  - barsonme 9y ago
    > And its more likely that a family member is a danger to you child "X is worse than Y, therefore you shouldn't worry about Y" is a fallacy.
BurningFrog 9y ago
What I hate the most about this is the cute Orwellian euphemism for censorship.
danShumway 9y ago
This is kind of a trend I've been noticing, where Europe will try to fix a valid technological problem, but pick the most problematic or poorly implemented solution to do it. It's not clear to me what the difference is between a government censoring someone directly and a government making it impossible for anyone to find a piece of information. Right to Be Forgotten only works if it becomes prohibitively expensive for a company or individual to locate past articles. So who cares whether or not the original source has been taken down? It's not clear to me why it's not troubling to European citizens for their government to be in charge of what information is and isn't relevant to the public. Whenever I ask people about this, I get the response "well, that's why we have courts." I dunno, Europeans must trust their courts a lot more than I trust mine. It's not clear to me why this problem couldn't be solved more elegantly by creating anti-discrimination laws around criminal records. If a company gets 90% through the hiring process, runs a background check, and then immediately says "no", then you sue them. It's also not clear to me that this will be enforceable in the future. I consider distributed site indexing to be an unsolved problem, but I don't think its unsolvable, and people are actively working on it. If for some crazy reason a distributed web search starts getting used on par with DuckDuckGo in the next 5 years, what do you do about that? Ban the technology?
- lumisota 9y ago
  Discriminating on the basis of spent convictions is illegal in the UK (where this ruling took place).
  - danShumway 9y ago
    Oh cool, I didn't know that. Thanks for commenting. Is there something I'm missing about Right to be Forgotten then? Why is this needed if it's already illegal to discriminate against someone over minor crimes or scandals? Does the law not have much teeth or something?
    - kuschku 9y ago
      You don’t always know why companies discriminate against a potential employee. They don’t just tell you why they refused to hire someone. So, employers don’t get access to criminal records, and generally, newspapers can’t republish information about people in a way that would harm their life today. Even criminals whose cases were public when they went into jail have a right to a normal life after they’ve finished their sentence – sometimes this is included with a change of name, but ideally, it’d be better if we, as society, would just forgive, or forget.
dingo_bat 9y ago
Fuck the courts that rule in favor of censorship. I hope this makes every European employer check Google.com before hiring a single person.
sandov 9y ago
And people downvoted me when I said the EU was an enemy of freedom...
- ythn 9y ago
  But they are the champions of security and safety
- brynjolf 9y ago
  What freedom? The freedom of the individual to be forgotten? Or for the corporation? What freedom is EU the enemy of? I think the fact of the matter is this will give more freedom to those that need it.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
Maybe this opens up a opportunity for a new search engine that excludes people from the EU and allows a much less censored view of things.
- hartator 9y ago
  I think that's already the case, isn't US results not affected by this?
hartator 9y ago
> The man, who has not been named due to reporting restrictions surrounding the case I can see the win for freedom of speech there.
- deleted 9y ago
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enitihas 9y ago
I am just curious, what about the edge cases? What if a person commits acts of domestic violence with their romantic partners, and then gets Google to remove that record. Don't their future partners deserve to know? What if someone commits legal but shady acts in dealing with people. Why should they have a right to remove it from the public record?
- IAmEveryone 9y ago
  IT has never been all-or-nothing. Google currently makes such decisions. They recently released stats showing they deny about half of all requests. If one side is unhappy with Google's decision, they can sue. And the court system is almost completely devoted to the sort of question you're asking.
- F_r_k 9y ago
  What if they stole cookies ? Shouldn't store managers deserve to know ? Where do you put the limit then ?
  - 794CD01 9y ago
    The manager can make the decision whether they care that the person stole cookies.
- dhimes 9y ago
  What if a person commits acts of domestic violence with their romantic partners, and then gets Google to remove that record. What if a person is merely accused, but acquitted. Would you hire him/her if you had options?
- stale2002 9y ago
  The edge cases are already excluded. I think that murder and sexual crimes are discluded from someone's right to be forgotten. Perhaps there are a couple other types of crimes that could be as well.
mcfedr 9y ago
Seems crazy that this is brought to Google, the results are there because it's on the internet, go to the source and get them to remove it. Which coinsidently would probably be a much harder case to bring because these are generally reputable news sources and not a big US company everyone seems to have a bit of a problem with already.
CobrastanJorji 9y ago
> Explaining the decisions made on Friday, the judge said one of the men had continued to "mislead the public" while the other had "shown remorse". Okay, great, so Google's now required to judge right to be forgotten requests based on whether the criminal has "shown remorse." Yeah, that's not arbitrary or even a little impossible to do at scale. Let's grant that there are good cases for removing pages from a search index. If this is going to be the rubric, we should let the courts figure it out, and then an order should be issued to search engines to remove the content. This thing where you tell each search engine to remove content, the search engines decide based on, I dunno, court precedent or gut feeling or whatever, then you sue, then you appeal, I just don't see how that can work. Eventually Google will just start granting every single request regardless of merit because being challenged will get too expensive.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Yep. And keep in mind that Google can't just sit back and wait for a court to order something removed; Google has to pay Google employees to imitate these court precedents.
- talltimtom 9y ago
  Yes, google can’t immitate the courts. So they just have to honor the request. Besidde people heavily intetsted Nopone gests hurt g
  - jtbayly 9y ago
    Wait. Nobody get's hurt when a politician asks Google to "forget" (fill in the blank), and Google just does it because they requested it? That's not right. Everybody gets hurt by that.
- notatoad 9y ago
  This is the most ridiculous part of the whole "right to be forgotten" situation. The courts have completely abdicated their responsibility to control the process, instead forcing google (and apparently only google) to act as a court. If the right to be forgotten is an important right that Eu courts want to enforce, they should actually enforce it. Not just tell google to get it right.
baxter001 9y ago
Sounds vaguely like Glenn Mulcaire
spullara 9y ago
It is odd that this is google's responsibility. Why isn't this directed at the original source?
- lovich 9y ago
  Because having this information wasn't the problem. The problem now is that anyone anywhere can have access to all the data about you at any time. The scale of the ability has changed the behavior. The same issue comes up with cops tracking cars. It was never an issue for society for a cop to tail someone driving on public roads because they could only follow a few people given the resources necessary to tail someone. Now they can buy a few cameras that track license plates and have real time tracking of _everyone_ on the road with the ability to store the data forever until they decide it's useful, which is has changed the actual results of cops being allowed to track people. This right to be forgotten used to exist simply because you had to put effort into finding out data about people. People could move to another town and restart their life. The courts in this case appear to be trying to reset tat status quo
  - jakub-at 9y ago
    ^ THIS!
BadassFractal 9y ago
I once got contacted by a female account manager from a well known job boards company in the Valley. I googled for her to find her linkedin so we could link up, since we were going to be doing business together, likely for a while. What shocked me was that the first result that Google returned was a smear page against her from her ex boyfriend, something like janedoesisaslut.com or janedoecheats.com with a long essay about what she did, and a bunch of photos of her on it. It was about how, when they were together in college, allegedly the woman had slept with other guys, and the boyfriend got pretty upset about it. It was mortifying for me to run into it, and I can't even imagine how she must feel when the n.1 Google result for her name is that, forever. This must have happened over 10 years ago, and yet it kept haunting her to that day. I talked about this with a few lawyer friends and my understanding is that you can't actually be sued for it. Apparently, if you're not lying and just stating actual facts about what happened, you're not liable, and don't fall under defamation/libel category. You could start a JohnDoeWillGiveYouGonorrhea.com and that's totally legal. The person trying to take the site down would have to clearly prove that their lives were seriously impacted by its existence, and quantify the damages, which would be pretty hard to pull off. Real odd legal corner case.
- danso 9y ago
  I wonder how this would be treated under the EU law? It doesn't involve a legal conviction or something that has a codified statute of limitations. It may contain facts, but it also contains opinions, opinions which the site creator may still hold.
  - krageon 9y ago
    The way it would be treated is the domain would be taken down (if that were requested by the victim). I'm not sure if that is EU law or something local. I am fairly certain a lot of EU countries have local provisions that effectively mean the same.
nordras 9y ago
well, they also won it
microcolonel 9y ago
Your "right to be forgotten" is my "duty to be misinformed".
blauditore 9y ago
How does Google "remove" entries? Do they just exclude certains pages from results? If so, that's not really a solution since that information is still publicly available. It would make much more sense to remove all web pages (from newspapers etc.) containing the actual data, and ideally Google would forget about it as well soon. But then again, that would be a lot of work and it's easier to just take down the gateway. But it's ridiculous.
davesque 9y ago
I'm a bit surprised at all the negative reactions I'm seeing here in response to this. This really seems like a win for individual rights which the tech community is normally all about. As I see it, the heart of the matter is that the average person is really bad at placing any random fact they learn about someone (or something) in its proper context. So that means people should have some legal leverage when it comes to all the information (accurate or not) that is available about them online.
- ythn 9y ago
  To me it seems like Yet Another Barrier To Entry For Tech Startups (TM). I remember the good old days (re: 10 years ago) when you could make all sorts of cool things without being bogged down by regulations. I guess that era is over (at least for certain categories of tech like search engines). Also, your right to be forgotten seems to be infringing on my right to remember.
  - ben_jones 9y ago
    Are you serious or do you yearn for the days when cars didn't have seat belts and paint still contained lead? Start-ups will adapt or they don't deserve to exist.
    - ythn 9y ago
      I'm not saying all regulation is bad. But some regulation is has a major stifling effect on innovation and startups simply because the cost of compliance is too high for new players (but manageable for established big boys).
    - gohbgl 9y ago
      Cars had been equipped with seat belts before it was required by law.
- pitaj 9y ago
  Right to be Forgotten is not an individual right in the classic sense. It is a positive right, one which is really a privilege enforced by the state under the pretext of a "right". Whereas owning and using an illicit drug (as one example of the kind of individual rights we support) does not require coercing others (be they corporations or individuals) into doing anything, RTBF does. It requires the state coercing (in this case) corporations into censoring (this this case) true, publicly known information visible on their websites.
Paul-ish 9y ago
Can people use proxies through other countries to see unfiltered results, or are the results removed in all countries?
M2Ys4U 9y ago
Here is the full judgment: https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/nt1-Nnt2-v-google-2018-Eewhc-799-QB.pdf https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/nt1-...
jradd 9y ago
Perhaps Google the service provider or ISP or carrier could censor search results according to the specific geo the query originates from. i.e. in many states it is not illegal to conspire to intercept communications so long as one of the parties are aware, or if this is a place of business.
cromwellian 9y ago
I have a feeling one day public titles, marriage, and criminal records will be in a blockchain ledger, and it'll be impossible for government to order them expunged. The way the governments are handling this is trying to impose secrecy with security through obscurity. But the public records exist somewhere, and anyone wanting to do a background check will eventually be able to track it down. Imagine this case was instead about a Wikipedia article about this guy, and Wikipedia lost the case and was ordered to revert the article and expunge all edit history. Due to the way Wikipedia is cloned by many sources, and preserved by many archives around the world, it will become increasingly problematic to erase information. If the government can go around ordering archives to expunge truthful public or historical records, it's very problematic IMHO. The notion of truth and objective reality is already under assault since the 2016 election, and the deep fakery and trolling bots will only get worse. What few institutions we have online that can try to weed out and present consensus truth would then be suspect if governments gain global jurisdiction to make edits.
- lerpa 9y ago
  And that's how we went back to book burning, again.
blklivesmatter 9y ago
Google should be forgotten totally.
TheMagicHorsey 9y ago
Why does anyone have a right to be forgotten after committing a crime or defrauding others? Others bear the cost and you get the luxury of starting over? After seeing so many serial scammers on the Internet getting away with crime time and again by finding new, naive victims after we catch them, it gets really tiresome when the government gives the scammers tools to force us to take down reviews and warnings.
- wannabedevelopr 9y ago
  Justice systems work differently in Europe than in the States; Rehabilitation and reintegration being key not throwing someone in a hole and loose the key.
timmytim 9y ago
Every company that is fighting DDPR needs to fire legal and compliance. It literally says 'blah blah <stuff none of them want to do> by this/specific/date, NO EXCEPTIONS'
known 9y ago
Is right to be forgotten applicable in Court Judgements? https://indiankanoon.org/court_case_online.html https://indiankanoon.org/court_case_online.html
Somaia 9y ago
Ashik526
Somaia 9y ago
ashik526
eclat 9y ago
"The right to be forgotten is meant to apply to information that is no longer relevant but disproportionately impacts a person," said Jim Killock, executive director. "The Court will have to balance the public's right to access the historical record, the precise impacts on the person, and the public interest." I feel like every single comment on here has missed the point. This isn't about removing relevant information, it's about removing information that disproportionately affects an individual and is of no public interest. For example, if someone famous puts a gerbil up their bottom and gets sentenced for animal cruelty, and that gets widely publicised, it might be true but it affects that person extremely negatively at no cost or benefit to the rest of society. This is the case here: a man served his time and the court ruled that his case was not sufficiently relevant for the public interest to still be publically accessible - he cannot be descriminated against because of his past action. In developed countries this would never happen when the case is relevant for that person or society, for example a high ranking corruption case or if the person becomes a convicted paedophile.
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  Uh, i think society deserves to know that man abused an animal and is potentially dangerous/mentally unstable. If you’re a young woman about to go on a date with someone i’m sure you’d want to know about that incident
  - kotajacob 9y ago
    I agree that it should stay public, but because giving the government the power to destroy information and erase history in any sense is a very slippery slope. That said in the above case the man in question would have served his time and be by all counts considered to have been rehabilitated. So it shouldn't be able to be used to discriminate against him. If for some reason he isn't rehabilitated that's a problem with the justice system.
datburg 9y ago
Google and the confusing umbrella phoeniecisms
deleted 9y ago
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codesnik 9y ago
Right to be remembered about being forgotten.
walshemj 9y ago
Interesting that the one that won NT2 (conspiracy to intercept communications) looks like one of those dodgy PI's that the tabloids / News international uses.
chunkyslink 9y ago
Hmm. This is interesting. I can see how a non violent criminal who has served their time and been punished might not be able to move on with their life when they are only found in Google for the ONE bad thing they did. This should never be applied to violent criminals.
- zaarn 9y ago
  What if someone was a violent criminal in the past, like due to an Alcohol addiction, but went through therapy in prison and is now a peaceful citizen? Serving your time in jail is sufficient to pay for your crimes, IMO. Unless there is a good reason, ie public interest as the law states, we shouldn't rubberstamp all criminals as evil (or all violent criminals). Part of getting them back into society is rehabilitation which means we give them another chance to integrate and follow the law.
  - chunkyslink 9y ago
    I just think that a violent crime is not excusable in any circumstance. Yes they have served their time, but if someone is capable of violence even once, it should not be possible to hide this information.

642 points by zeveb 9y ago

Note that this case involved a criminal who wished to expunge his conviction from search results. > ‘The right to be forgotten is meant to apply to information that is no longer relevant but disproportionately impacts a person,’ said Jim Killock, executive director, ‘The Court will have to balance the public’s right to access the historical record, the precise impacts on the person, and the public interest.’ ‘The public’s right to access the historical record’ seems to me to be an incredibly Orwellian phrase. It seems to me that there is an absolute right to access factual historical information.

kenbaylor 9y ago
Some of the factors that come into this include the very nature of criminal sentencing: A judge looks at the facts of the case, aggravating factors, previous convictions and sentencing guidelines, and determines an appropriate sentence. Then along comes a search engine and doubly punishes someone in what may be a disproportional way; e.g. it's highly unlikely you will come across the convictions of John Smith when you google him, but when you look up someone with a non-common name, it may be the very first search result; disproportionally disadvantaging them for jobs, business and even dating partners. The issue in this case was Google wanted to be the sole arbiter of what they would remove and what they would leave in, with no oversight from anyone. This would have crippled the GDPR even before it began. That said, it's early days for the right to be forgotten.
gnud 9y ago
While I see your point, here are some counter-examples: - Someone who was the victim of a high-profile crime, not wishing everyone they come into contact with to know about it - Someone being stalked/targeted, living on a secret address - Someone who was wrongfully convicted, later exonorated. Here a mandate to publish corrections would be good enough, but I don't think Google would be happy with that, either...
citilife 9y ago
I think it's mostly the historical record, as decided by the government
rootlocus 9y ago
> It seems to me that there is an absolute right to access factual historical information. I agree. However people are lazy and subjective and settle with bits of incomplete information either outdated, out of context, or even wrong.
onion2k 9y ago
It seems to me that there is an absolute right to access factual historical information. This isn't a comment about the case, or the right to be forgotten, but something quite important nonetheless - Google's search results are not "factual historical information". They're an index of webpages that anyone and everyone can create, saying whatever they like. Google claims their engine ranks pages that more reputable higher than others, but without any transparency around that we can't know whether or not we agree with it's decisions.
- zeveb 9y ago
  > Google's search results are not "factual historical information". They're an index of webpages that anyone and everyone can create, saying whatever they like. I'd argue that the fact that a webpage says something is itself an historical fact, and shouldn't be forbidden to be said.
deleted 9y ago
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sigzero 9y ago
> The right to be forgotten is meant to apply to information that is no longer relevant but disproportionately impacts a person Who the hell makes that call? That in and of itself should tell you this is a bad law.
- IAmEveryone 9y ago
  First, Google. Then, if one side is unhappy, a judge. Example: this article. What exactly is wrong with judges making decisions? Seems to kinda be their job.
  - elmo45 9y ago
    This means that any time someone is unhappy with the decision, Google (or an other company) has to shell out tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. Maybe Google can keep doing that for a few months but a normal startup would just grant every single request rather than having to fight it in European courts. The decision should be made by some independent privacy committee which reviews all the facts, and right to be forgotten requests should go through that committee rather than directly to Google

Crontab 9y ago

I find this result disgusting.

JonnyNova 9y ago
Can you elaborate?
- jayd16 9y ago
  I would say that in the US we mostly consider right to free speech more important than the right to be forgotten.
  - lallysingh 9y ago
    A judge heard the case for two individuals. That's a pretty fair way to do it. Americans also believe in the rule of law, versus the rule of the powerful.
    - jayd16 9y ago
      The reason we have the freedom of speech in the US is because its the powerful that abuse the ability to censor.
      - lallysingh 9y ago
        Which powerful entity do you mean? The people who want things unlisted, or Google?
        dingo_bat 9y ago
        The government.
        lallysingh 9y ago
        I don't understand your point. I read this as similar to libel or truth in advertising laws.

Elessar 9y ago

We're rapidly moving to a point where an official (government) criminal record is not important to folks you want to interact with -- landlords, employers etc. They will instead turn to Google. As such, Google might as well be the official record for many people. And if one put themsleves in the shoes of a victim, or even a criminal who has served their time, Google's pagerank is doing them a disservice. I don't know if expunging records is the right thing to do, but it's worth discussing. There's no guarantee that searching a criminal's name will bring up the recent history where they've done their time, shown contrition, and is contributing to society. Instead it'll be the most highly cited -- likely news about their crime. As a society, we approve of jail being the mechanism to "forgive" a person's crime. As such, isn't it horrible that Google's pagerank will only turn up what they've done wrong in the past? Again, I don't know if expunging the records is the right thing to do (in fact I believe it's wrong), but I do think it's worth debating.

JonnyNova 9y ago
Google is claiming to be acting in the interests of the public without the same mechanisms accessible to the public for moderating how this ability is used. Today Google can cite public interest, but it is just aligned and not acting purely on the public's interest. Like Facebook holding all user data forever, Google will definitely want to hold all data forever because someone it might make shareholders money.
danielfoster 9y ago
If this is the case, then the government should pass laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of criminal record. Instead they've passed the puck (rather badly) to Google. And it's not like Google is the only way to find things. Should newspapers be required to delete pages about an individual or destroy print copies? What about other search engines such as Yandex or Baidu? Of course anyone could just search on Google.com, too. Mankind has done perfectly well without a "right to be forgotten" for hundreds of thousands of years.
- tonyg 9y ago
  > Mankind has done perfectly well without a "right to be forgotten" for hundreds of thousands of years. On the other hand, mankind has done perfectly well without computers, an internet, or indeed indoor plumbing for hundreds of thousands of years. Sometimes new technologies demand new responses.

lovetrump 9y ago

Once a criminal, always a criminal... even if you get it expunged from your record?

justherefortart 9y ago
Your record just shows you've been caught. I don't know anyone that hasn't broken laws. Hell, they make new laws every day for us to break.
steve918 9y ago
Once accused of a crime and it gets printed in the local news paper you're always a criminal on Google. Doesn't matter if you were innocent or not even if the court dismisses your case.

mattnewton 9y ago

I think that simply deleting references to information is a crude way to solve this problem. People who want to continue to bias against ex-convicts (like landlords and employers) will use background check services that aren’t regulated here, but the general public will be deprived easy access to information. This seems ripe for abuse, especially for government officials.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Wouldn't it be far worse to delete the original information? It's better to just make it harder for someone's life to be ruined by it, don't you think?
- pitaj 9y ago
  Yes it's not as bad as deleting the information, but it's still much much worse than just doing nothing about the information.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Worse for who? Allowing Google to render someone permanently unemployable based on ancient or false information is definitely not "better".
    - mattnewton 9y ago
      Employers go to Google to find this information because it is free, not because they are randomly searching or because Google is pushing this information to them. I believe many (maybe even most) will simply switch to other services that provide background checks. IANAL but I don’t see how this ruling anticipates this. Now, you could argue that services like that will be less susceptible to false information. I don’t know why that would be the case and there seems to be some evidence against it on the recent “checkr” funding thread on hacker news[0] This is a blunt technological tool to fix a delicate social issue. The information is still there, but behind a service. I believe deleting the information is already not in the public’s interests [1][2], and it looks like the law agrees to an extent[3], but the solution they came up with effective puts a tollbooth in front of it. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16822093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16822093 [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27423527 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27423527 [2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3156779/More-280-000-people-ask-Google-right-forgotten-request-MILLION-pages-wiped-search-engine-s-results.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3156779/More-280-000... [3] see paragraph 3 http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-17-right-to-erasure-'right-to-be-forgotten'-GDPR.htm http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-17-right-to-eras...

SirensOfTitan 9y ago

A human is multifaceted. In previous decades, disagreeing with a person politically did not disqualify their friendship--today that is increasingly the case. People tend to flandarize real people (that is, reduce them to singular elements) nowadays in a way that makes me skeptical most people would use information on crimes in productive ways. A person should not have to pay for their mistakes years and years after they've paid the price (in this case, jail time). As a generalization: the push against the right to be forgotten seems like a case of information bias. Does more information really help society make decisions? And even more importantly: how do we, as a society, process information like this in a way where it could be helpful (in the common case)?

comboy 9y ago

It's absolutely insane what they are doing (EU). Should libraries remove newspapers with my name if I don't like what's written there about me? It's pure censorship. It all stems from the fact that society hasn't yet adjusted to the reality that not everything on the Internet is true. People share between themselves lots of false beliefs. The Internet is just another medium. The problem is that if I put up a billboard that says John is a thief, they can find me and sue for defamation. If I do a website and use SEO, then it's not so easy, even though it serves similar purpose. But that is how the world works now. We are able to send information to many people, anonymously, often in a targeted way. That's how politics work, that's how ads work, that's how HN works. The problem is not the information, the problem is trust. It's not easy to solve, but it's doable.

abritinthebay 9y ago
You say it’s doable. How?
- comboy 9y ago
  I'm glad you asked :) I want to publish a website with thoughts so far and looking for more brains. What I have in mind is a global, multilayered web of trust. It would be a game changer. Of course, I don't mean it as a startup, it must be decentralized. I don't care who creates it, I just really want to have it. I'm sure you know about the small world effect[1]. Example of layer: coding skill. I assign weights to friends I know. Now if I want to know if X is a good coder I check what friends of my friends think about it and multiply it by weights I have assigned to those friends (recursive). But it's much more than just having reasonable opinion about coding skill of somebody who you want to hire or cooperate with. The crucial thing is that this rating is always relative. It depends on your place in the network. Any global rating can be and will be cheated. Also, it's perfectly fine that for different group of people different things have different values. It enables trustworthy reviews, trustworthy project dependencies, tenants, online stores, doctors, mechanics etc. Could probably help with scams and spam. If successful it has power to change politics inside out. I'm sorry I don't have a write up yet and I know that with an analytic mind you probably can find many problems with the potential implementation. Let's be clear, it's hard. But so very worth it. There are many problems to solve. Apart from bootstrapping it (which could probably be done with help of some other services) The big one to me is privacy. If I assign 2/10 coding skill to one of my friends I don't want him to find out. I've already came up with some potential solutions. But more people, preferably with cryptography background and definitely smarter than me are needed, who are interested in this problem and are willing to spend time thinking about it. I'm going to try to collect all my notes and thoughts into a website and post it on HN. (If you were able to deduce enough from this short description, you like it and you're interested, drop me an empty e-mail at wot@comboy.pl, I'll send you a single e-mail when I have some place to point to) 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_experiment

volak 9y ago

Entering into a deeper relationship with someone (employer/employee, landlord/tenant, etc) you want to know everything about the other person. This is not because you are some nosy person - its because breaking that relationship means risking lawsuits or damage to your property or a whole eviction process which can take months to years... Its a dangerous thing to "trust" someone when they'll have that level of control over your future so people use government records and google to know if they could possibly have an issue. This isn't a privacy issue its a minimizing risk issue. If you give people better options for minimizing risk then google results will matter less and less. For instance I'd be happy to hire a convict if I could a) pay him less than I normally would (initially) and b) fire him at any time for any reason. Same for renting. If we draw up a contract with a no-drugs no-weapons clause and allowed me to inspect the place once a month for the first year or so I'd be happy to rent to him. But these things sensible precautions are illegal. There may be good reasons because of them "evil corporations" blah blah. Sensible or not that's reality - so people understandably discriminate against people based on google results. Its a fairly understandable precaution given the amount of risk involved due to regulation. Therefore the fix isn't to make google "forget" things - that only increases risk dramatically. The fix is to make these relationships less risky by allowing business owners and landlords more control over their own personal.

toomanybeersies 9y ago
So a convicted criminal should be eternally punished by losing any employment security and being paid less than their peers? That doesn't sound like a society I would like to live in. The other alternative is that these restrictions would begin with convicted criminals, and spread to the rest of the population. Just because someone hasn't been convicted doesn't mean they aren't a criminal with drugs and weapons in their house after all.
- volak 9y ago
  Think you missed the part where I said these restrictions were temporary until trust is rebuilt. I have more of a reason to trust a stranger with a clean record than I do to trust a convicted criminal. Once the later demonstrates hes trustworthy these restrictions disappear.

emiliobumachar 9y ago

Meanwhile, when governments want to check the background of someone before hiring them into a position of trust involved in national security, they'll send agents to investigate. Methods include interviewing them hooked up to a polygraph, and asking their neighbors questions face to face. All for reasons that seem to me less important then the safety of my child while alone with a babysitter.

walshemj 9y ago
Because a dodgy spy can cause more damage kim philby lead to the deaths of a large number of people. And its more likely that a family member is a danger to you child - than say a babysitter who got busted at 15 for smoking pot behind the bleachers with her bf.
- barsonme 9y ago
  > And its more likely that a family member is a danger to you child "X is worse than Y, therefore you shouldn't worry about Y" is a fallacy.

BurningFrog 9y ago

What I hate the most about this is the cute Orwellian euphemism for censorship.

danShumway 9y ago

This is kind of a trend I've been noticing, where Europe will try to fix a valid technological problem, but pick the most problematic or poorly implemented solution to do it. It's not clear to me what the difference is between a government censoring someone directly and a government making it impossible for anyone to find a piece of information. Right to Be Forgotten only works if it becomes prohibitively expensive for a company or individual to locate past articles. So who cares whether or not the original source has been taken down? It's not clear to me why it's not troubling to European citizens for their government to be in charge of what information is and isn't relevant to the public. Whenever I ask people about this, I get the response "well, that's why we have courts." I dunno, Europeans must trust their courts a lot more than I trust mine. It's not clear to me why this problem couldn't be solved more elegantly by creating anti-discrimination laws around criminal records. If a company gets 90% through the hiring process, runs a background check, and then immediately says "no", then you sue them. It's also not clear to me that this will be enforceable in the future. I consider distributed site indexing to be an unsolved problem, but I don't think its unsolvable, and people are actively working on it. If for some crazy reason a distributed web search starts getting used on par with DuckDuckGo in the next 5 years, what do you do about that? Ban the technology?

lumisota 9y ago
Discriminating on the basis of spent convictions is illegal in the UK (where this ruling took place).
- danShumway 9y ago
  Oh cool, I didn't know that. Thanks for commenting. Is there something I'm missing about Right to be Forgotten then? Why is this needed if it's already illegal to discriminate against someone over minor crimes or scandals? Does the law not have much teeth or something?
  - kuschku 9y ago
    You don’t always know why companies discriminate against a potential employee. They don’t just tell you why they refused to hire someone. So, employers don’t get access to criminal records, and generally, newspapers can’t republish information about people in a way that would harm their life today. Even criminals whose cases were public when they went into jail have a right to a normal life after they’ve finished their sentence – sometimes this is included with a change of name, but ideally, it’d be better if we, as society, would just forgive, or forget.

dingo_bat 9y ago

Fuck the courts that rule in favor of censorship. I hope this makes every European employer check Google.com before hiring a single person.

sandov 9y ago

And people downvoted me when I said the EU was an enemy of freedom...

ythn 9y ago
But they are the champions of security and safety
brynjolf 9y ago
What freedom? The freedom of the individual to be forgotten? Or for the corporation? What freedom is EU the enemy of? I think the fact of the matter is this will give more freedom to those that need it.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

Maybe this opens up a opportunity for a new search engine that excludes people from the EU and allows a much less censored view of things.

hartator 9y ago
I think that's already the case, isn't US results not affected by this?

hartator 9y ago

> The man, who has not been named due to reporting restrictions surrounding the case I can see the win for freedom of speech there.

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enitihas 9y ago

I am just curious, what about the edge cases? What if a person commits acts of domestic violence with their romantic partners, and then gets Google to remove that record. Don't their future partners deserve to know? What if someone commits legal but shady acts in dealing with people. Why should they have a right to remove it from the public record?

IAmEveryone 9y ago
IT has never been all-or-nothing. Google currently makes such decisions. They recently released stats showing they deny about half of all requests. If one side is unhappy with Google's decision, they can sue. And the court system is almost completely devoted to the sort of question you're asking.
F_r_k 9y ago
What if they stole cookies ? Shouldn't store managers deserve to know ? Where do you put the limit then ?
- 794CD01 9y ago
  The manager can make the decision whether they care that the person stole cookies.
dhimes 9y ago
What if a person commits acts of domestic violence with their romantic partners, and then gets Google to remove that record. What if a person is merely accused, but acquitted. Would you hire him/her if you had options?
stale2002 9y ago
The edge cases are already excluded. I think that murder and sexual crimes are discluded from someone's right to be forgotten. Perhaps there are a couple other types of crimes that could be as well.

mcfedr 9y ago

Seems crazy that this is brought to Google, the results are there because it's on the internet, go to the source and get them to remove it. Which coinsidently would probably be a much harder case to bring because these are generally reputable news sources and not a big US company everyone seems to have a bit of a problem with already.

CobrastanJorji 9y ago

> Explaining the decisions made on Friday, the judge said one of the men had continued to "mislead the public" while the other had "shown remorse". Okay, great, so Google's now required to judge right to be forgotten requests based on whether the criminal has "shown remorse." Yeah, that's not arbitrary or even a little impossible to do at scale. Let's grant that there are good cases for removing pages from a search index. If this is going to be the rubric, we should let the courts figure it out, and then an order should be issued to search engines to remove the content. This thing where you tell each search engine to remove content, the search engines decide based on, I dunno, court precedent or gut feeling or whatever, then you sue, then you appeal, I just don't see how that can work. Eventually Google will just start granting every single request regardless of merit because being challenged will get too expensive.

greglindahl 9y ago
Yep. And keep in mind that Google can't just sit back and wait for a court to order something removed; Google has to pay Google employees to imitate these court precedents.
talltimtom 9y ago
Yes, google can’t immitate the courts. So they just have to honor the request. Besidde people heavily intetsted Nopone gests hurt g
- jtbayly 9y ago
  Wait. Nobody get's hurt when a politician asks Google to "forget" (fill in the blank), and Google just does it because they requested it? That's not right. Everybody gets hurt by that.
notatoad 9y ago
This is the most ridiculous part of the whole "right to be forgotten" situation. The courts have completely abdicated their responsibility to control the process, instead forcing google (and apparently only google) to act as a court. If the right to be forgotten is an important right that Eu courts want to enforce, they should actually enforce it. Not just tell google to get it right.

baxter001 9y ago

Sounds vaguely like Glenn Mulcaire

spullara 9y ago

It is odd that this is google's responsibility. Why isn't this directed at the original source?

lovich 9y ago
Because having this information wasn't the problem. The problem now is that anyone anywhere can have access to all the data about you at any time. The scale of the ability has changed the behavior. The same issue comes up with cops tracking cars. It was never an issue for society for a cop to tail someone driving on public roads because they could only follow a few people given the resources necessary to tail someone. Now they can buy a few cameras that track license plates and have real time tracking of _everyone_ on the road with the ability to store the data forever until they decide it's useful, which is has changed the actual results of cops being allowed to track people. This right to be forgotten used to exist simply because you had to put effort into finding out data about people. People could move to another town and restart their life. The courts in this case appear to be trying to reset tat status quo
- jakub-at 9y ago
  ^ THIS!

BadassFractal 9y ago

I once got contacted by a female account manager from a well known job boards company in the Valley. I googled for her to find her linkedin so we could link up, since we were going to be doing business together, likely for a while. What shocked me was that the first result that Google returned was a smear page against her from her ex boyfriend, something like janedoesisaslut.com or janedoecheats.com with a long essay about what she did, and a bunch of photos of her on it. It was about how, when they were together in college, allegedly the woman had slept with other guys, and the boyfriend got pretty upset about it. It was mortifying for me to run into it, and I can't even imagine how she must feel when the n.1 Google result for her name is that, forever. This must have happened over 10 years ago, and yet it kept haunting her to that day. I talked about this with a few lawyer friends and my understanding is that you can't actually be sued for it. Apparently, if you're not lying and just stating actual facts about what happened, you're not liable, and don't fall under defamation/libel category. You could start a JohnDoeWillGiveYouGonorrhea.com and that's totally legal. The person trying to take the site down would have to clearly prove that their lives were seriously impacted by its existence, and quantify the damages, which would be pretty hard to pull off. Real odd legal corner case.

danso 9y ago
I wonder how this would be treated under the EU law? It doesn't involve a legal conviction or something that has a codified statute of limitations. It may contain facts, but it also contains opinions, opinions which the site creator may still hold.
- krageon 9y ago
  The way it would be treated is the domain would be taken down (if that were requested by the victim). I'm not sure if that is EU law or something local. I am fairly certain a lot of EU countries have local provisions that effectively mean the same.

nordras 9y ago

well, they also won it

microcolonel 9y ago

Your "right to be forgotten" is my "duty to be misinformed".

blauditore 9y ago

How does Google "remove" entries? Do they just exclude certains pages from results? If so, that's not really a solution since that information is still publicly available. It would make much more sense to remove all web pages (from newspapers etc.) containing the actual data, and ideally Google would forget about it as well soon. But then again, that would be a lot of work and it's easier to just take down the gateway. But it's ridiculous.

davesque 9y ago

I'm a bit surprised at all the negative reactions I'm seeing here in response to this. This really seems like a win for individual rights which the tech community is normally all about. As I see it, the heart of the matter is that the average person is really bad at placing any random fact they learn about someone (or something) in its proper context. So that means people should have some legal leverage when it comes to all the information (accurate or not) that is available about them online.

ythn 9y ago
To me it seems like Yet Another Barrier To Entry For Tech Startups (TM). I remember the good old days (re: 10 years ago) when you could make all sorts of cool things without being bogged down by regulations. I guess that era is over (at least for certain categories of tech like search engines). Also, your right to be forgotten seems to be infringing on my right to remember.
- ben_jones 9y ago
  Are you serious or do you yearn for the days when cars didn't have seat belts and paint still contained lead? Start-ups will adapt or they don't deserve to exist.
  - ythn 9y ago
    I'm not saying all regulation is bad. But some regulation is has a major stifling effect on innovation and startups simply because the cost of compliance is too high for new players (but manageable for established big boys).
  - gohbgl 9y ago
    Cars had been equipped with seat belts before it was required by law.
pitaj 9y ago
Right to be Forgotten is not an individual right in the classic sense. It is a positive right, one which is really a privilege enforced by the state under the pretext of a "right". Whereas owning and using an illicit drug (as one example of the kind of individual rights we support) does not require coercing others (be they corporations or individuals) into doing anything, RTBF does. It requires the state coercing (in this case) corporations into censoring (this this case) true, publicly known information visible on their websites.

Paul-ish 9y ago

Can people use proxies through other countries to see unfiltered results, or are the results removed in all countries?

M2Ys4U 9y ago

Here is the full judgment: https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/nt1-Nnt2-v-google-2018-Eewhc-799-QB.pdf https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/nt1-...

jradd 9y ago

Perhaps Google the service provider or ISP or carrier could censor search results according to the specific geo the query originates from. i.e. in many states it is not illegal to conspire to intercept communications so long as one of the parties are aware, or if this is a place of business.

cromwellian 9y ago

I have a feeling one day public titles, marriage, and criminal records will be in a blockchain ledger, and it'll be impossible for government to order them expunged. The way the governments are handling this is trying to impose secrecy with security through obscurity. But the public records exist somewhere, and anyone wanting to do a background check will eventually be able to track it down. Imagine this case was instead about a Wikipedia article about this guy, and Wikipedia lost the case and was ordered to revert the article and expunge all edit history. Due to the way Wikipedia is cloned by many sources, and preserved by many archives around the world, it will become increasingly problematic to erase information. If the government can go around ordering archives to expunge truthful public or historical records, it's very problematic IMHO. The notion of truth and objective reality is already under assault since the 2016 election, and the deep fakery and trolling bots will only get worse. What few institutions we have online that can try to weed out and present consensus truth would then be suspect if governments gain global jurisdiction to make edits.

lerpa 9y ago
And that's how we went back to book burning, again.

blklivesmatter 9y ago

Google should be forgotten totally.

TheMagicHorsey 9y ago

Why does anyone have a right to be forgotten after committing a crime or defrauding others? Others bear the cost and you get the luxury of starting over? After seeing so many serial scammers on the Internet getting away with crime time and again by finding new, naive victims after we catch them, it gets really tiresome when the government gives the scammers tools to force us to take down reviews and warnings.

wannabedevelopr 9y ago
Justice systems work differently in Europe than in the States; Rehabilitation and reintegration being key not throwing someone in a hole and loose the key.

timmytim 9y ago

Every company that is fighting DDPR needs to fire legal and compliance. It literally says 'blah blah <stuff none of them want to do> by this/specific/date, NO EXCEPTIONS'

known 9y ago

Is right to be forgotten applicable in Court Judgements? https://indiankanoon.org/court_case_online.html https://indiankanoon.org/court_case_online.html

Somaia 9y ago

Ashik526

Somaia 9y ago

ashik526

eclat 9y ago

"The right to be forgotten is meant to apply to information that is no longer relevant but disproportionately impacts a person," said Jim Killock, executive director. "The Court will have to balance the public's right to access the historical record, the precise impacts on the person, and the public interest." I feel like every single comment on here has missed the point. This isn't about removing relevant information, it's about removing information that disproportionately affects an individual and is of no public interest. For example, if someone famous puts a gerbil up their bottom and gets sentenced for animal cruelty, and that gets widely publicised, it might be true but it affects that person extremely negatively at no cost or benefit to the rest of society. This is the case here: a man served his time and the court ruled that his case was not sufficiently relevant for the public interest to still be publically accessible - he cannot be descriminated against because of his past action. In developed countries this would never happen when the case is relevant for that person or society, for example a high ranking corruption case or if the person becomes a convicted paedophile.

oculusthrift 9y ago
Uh, i think society deserves to know that man abused an animal and is potentially dangerous/mentally unstable. If you’re a young woman about to go on a date with someone i’m sure you’d want to know about that incident
- kotajacob 9y ago
  I agree that it should stay public, but because giving the government the power to destroy information and erase history in any sense is a very slippery slope. That said in the above case the man in question would have served his time and be by all counts considered to have been rehabilitated. So it shouldn't be able to be used to discriminate against him. If for some reason he isn't rehabilitated that's a problem with the justice system.

datburg 9y ago

Google and the confusing umbrella phoeniecisms

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

codesnik 9y ago

Right to be remembered about being forgotten.

walshemj 9y ago

Interesting that the one that won NT2 (conspiracy to intercept communications) looks like one of those dodgy PI's that the tabloids / News international uses.

chunkyslink 9y ago

Hmm. This is interesting. I can see how a non violent criminal who has served their time and been punished might not be able to move on with their life when they are only found in Google for the ONE bad thing they did. This should never be applied to violent criminals.

zaarn 9y ago
What if someone was a violent criminal in the past, like due to an Alcohol addiction, but went through therapy in prison and is now a peaceful citizen? Serving your time in jail is sufficient to pay for your crimes, IMO. Unless there is a good reason, ie public interest as the law states, we shouldn't rubberstamp all criminals as evil (or all violent criminals). Part of getting them back into society is rehabilitation which means we give them another chance to integrate and follow the law.
- chunkyslink 9y ago
  I just think that a violent crime is not excusable in any circumstance. Yes they have served their time, but if someone is capable of violence even once, it should not be possible to hide this information.