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Google wins privacy case: ‘Right to be forgotten’ applies only in EU
- tonyjstark 7y agoDid I understand that correctly: Google France "forgets" about things that I would like it to forget but Google Canada still knows? Shouldn't it be more about that if I'm European, I have the right to be forgotten, so all the information that I want to be removed should be removed, no matter which engine is used?
- oh_sigh 7y agoSo a French person can demand that a Canadian company must prevent Canadians from finding information about them? Maybe it makes sense that if the Canadian company is serving content to France they have to abide by the French rules, but I don't see any kind of case for blanket removal. Neither does the EU for that matter. Take note that the ruling says basically Google had to make it hard for a French person to access the Canadian version of their engine.
- Fradow 7y agoNo, and that's specifically what this ruling is about: a French person cannot demand that a Canadian company prevent Canadians from finding information about them. On the other end, a French person can demand that a Canadian company prevent French people from finding information about them (some exceptions might apply though). The Canadian company can also choose not to do business with the EU, in which case it doesn't have to abide by EU rules (some sites decided to do exactly that when GDPR rolled out).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- diffeomorphism 7y agoNot quite. The information is never removed in either case, just not listed in the search results. The newspaper article is still online but does not show up for Europeans, no matter which engine is used.
- Gpetrium 7y agoGoogle is an indexer, therefore it searches for information on the internet that correlates or is @tonyjstark. If you ask your government for a 'Rights to be Forgotten', they will request for everyone in their jurisdiction to remove you from it. Google EU and others then have to remove the indexed information associated with you. However, Google US, Bing Colombia, etc are not in your jurisdiction, so it can still index the information associated with you. Also, if the website that is being indexed is not within EU jurisdiction or has been copied elsewhere, then it also falls outside of EU jurisdiction. If legislation like these ones could encompass the whole world, certain powerful countries, corporations, individuals, etc would use it to ensure that only what was beneficial to them would be indexed, searchable and available.
- nocturnial 7y ago> If you ask your government for a 'Rights to be Forgotten', they will request for everyone in their jurisdiction to remove you from it. That's not how this works. You ask the entity in question to remove your data. You only ask your "government" to enforce that right if everything else fails. You're already assuming bad faith from the entity. Some requests are actually reasonable and when you talk to a human they will do it if you have a good reason.
- hartator 7y agoThe thing is the 1st amendment will be in direct contradiction of the right to be forgotten. I feel protecting freedom of speech is more important.
- Tomte 7y agoThat's right. But while the 1st amendment is very popular in America, across the parties, many people outside of America think it's bonkers. I happen to be one of them. And I also think that freedom of speech must be protected.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- NightlyDev 7y agoWhere is the asterisk? applies only in EU* * Also applies in Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland.
- judge2020 7y agoLikely because of their half-relationships with the EU in the form of EFTA/EEA.
- ecmascript 7y agoI have already used the "Right to be forgotten", but a lot of websites updates the url as soon as anything about you change. Which means you need to apply again if you for example change address, name or similar things. Where I am from, there are many websites that display your personal information (social security number, address, phone numbers etc) since the state gives it away for free and there is no way to block this. The fault is really not Googles, but at least this tool lets people get some peace since most of the people where I am from only use Google and when you are removed you are basically invisible. This is highly annoying, especially when you have been subject to criminals, but I get it. It is hard to block something else than a url.
- ecmascript 7y agoWhy do you downvote me? I shine a light on an actual valid use case for this. The state publishes information that you cannot remove as a citizen. HN has become so one-sided. I don't even know if I agree with the right to be forgotten but it certainly has had a positive effect for me and probably many others.
- chriswwweb 7y agoI didn't downvote you ... but your post mentions a misterious state that publishes personal information, you don't say what state, you don't show an example and you don't describe what kind of information is being shared ... I think you just got downvoted for not showing any proof / real example of what you describe and the person that downvoted you has doubts what you say is really a thing
- ecmascript 7y agoI live in Sweden. Hard to show an example without doxing someone. But here is an search on just such a site: https://www.merinfo.se/search?who=Kjell&where= https://www.merinfo.se/search?who=Kjell&where= Kjell is a common Swedish name, just click on any link and you will see the personal information about this person. Usually, there also pictures outside their homes with Google Street view. There are many of these sites, and the information comes from the government. The sites have a right to publish this information and there is nothing you can do in order for it to stop as an individual. The only real solution if you want to be a bit more anonymous is to write yourself on an adress which you don't live on. But that requires you to have such an adress to begin with and will mess with a lot of systems.
- knorker 7y agoWith "Right to be forgotten" now applying to proper news, I think it's great that this Orwellian rewriting of history is spared on most of the world. I'm sure you've seen news articles from 100 years ago describing relevant aspects about history, with lessons and describing how we became the society that we are. "Right to be forgotten" wants history to be ephemeral. You have no right (in the EU) to write about true facts from your life, for future generations, if anybody finds that truth embarrassing. I think that's scary as fuck, and a greater danger to freedom and democracy than Trump, Johnson, Kim, and Putin combined.
- psv1 7y agoAs I was reading through your comment, I was preparing to write a response explaining how you're completely misunderstanding what the law means and how it works. Then I read your last sentence and figured out that there is no point in trying to explain anything.
- cirno 7y agoI hope that for your own sake, you are never in a position where you are unable to find work because employers stumble across false allegations made against you that are shown as the top result for your name on Google search. Because that's a very real thing that happens to a large number of people who have made enemies through ex-lovers, jilted coworkers, and just garden variety online trolls that maybe didn't take kindly to a random post you made online somewhere.
- holstvoogd 7y agoWhile one might want to remove false allegations by an ex, the next might call an expose of their corruption as a local politician false allegations. As with many things, it is all a double edged sword. Medical confidentiality? Great! Until the patient is a commercial pilot, the doctor his psych that tells him he should not be flying and the pilot decides to not tell his boss and fly his plane with everyone aboard into a mountain... (Happened a few years back) We have to balance risks & rewards with these kinds of laws.
- Grumbledour 7y agoThis law is really terrible, but maybe decisions like this will help abolish it. After all, if one can find the information with a VPN, it becomes less useful to enforce this law and people who want to change their record will do it the old way, applying to the person publishing the information or the courts to get it removed instead of getting it delistet in search engines.
- StreamBright 7y ago>> This law is really terrible Why?
- DocTomoe 7y agoIt moves responsibility from the publisher to the indexer. Essentially, it's like your privacy rights were violated in a novel, so instead of going after the publisher to cease and desist, you sue every single library (and technically every non-organizational owner of said novel) to burn their copy.
- easymodex 7y agoWell, it's actually like there is just 1 novel in somebody's basement which noone will ever stumble upon... unless it's in top 3 hits when looking up your name at the one single library that everyone is using.
- DocTomoe 7y ago... or someone happens to search for any other information in that book.
- Grumbledour 7y agoPretty much this. In addition to that, the responsibility to decide what should be taken down/delisted is also moved from the publisher/courts of law to the indexer, so there is no due process.
- 7y ago
- DannyB2 7y agoCan this now be renamed to: The Right To Invoke The Streisand Effect How about an archive (outside the EU) of every Right To Be Forgotten request, and links to what was not to be remembered. The people of the EU can be the most forgetful people on the planet. But everyone else can remember. However, it is impolite to point and laugh. So don't. Keep it to a low snicker.
- s_dev 7y agoI think the EU is right to take a serious attitude to data privacy even if it doesn't always get it exactly right. These are new issues and the other approach is the the US approach which means tolerating the likes of Equifax et al data breaches with no real compensation or recourse. So I'd take the EU apprach with its flaws over the US approach with its flaws.
- tantalor 7y agoRight to be Forgotten has nothing to do with data privacy
- hartator 7y agoIt is part of the gdpr law.
- danShumway 7y agoIs it? My understanding is the Right to Be Forgotten predates GDPR by a fairly long period.
- Grumbledour 7y agoThe law just seems to target the problem much too late in the chain of events. For example, in Germany, people have a right to anonymity, that forbids newspapers to identify persons (print full names, photos, addresses) unless making them public would be in the public interest. While this isn't perfect and of course open to interpretation, it seems to me that having privacy protections (and due process where they fail) is much better lawmaking than trying the fix things down the road when the privacy is already breached. Especially if the fixes are this ham-fisted.
- binarnosp 7y agoI should have the right to remove embarrassing things I've done 20 years ago when I was a teenager from a public indexer, the same way I can request the phone book to delist my phone number: this does not mean that the phone company has to delete my number, it just cannot be indexed. A stupid example? just put a "like" on Medium next to an article regarding something that embarrasses you and few days later that article will appear on Google when looking for your name, and then you would love to have the GDPR at your disposal to permanently delete your Medium account.
- tantalor 7y agoBad analogy for several reasons: - phone numbers are not personal, embarrassing stories - a phone book is a primary source, but a search engine is not
- dymk 7y agoA phone book is not a primary source, the phone company's registry is.
- pgcj_poster 7y ago> phone numbers are not personal, embarrassing stories Right, which makes the right to be forgotten even more important than the right to be removed from a phone book. When you're disputing an analogy, the discrepancies have to actually be relevant and support your point. You can just say "you can't compare A and B because A is not B."
- holstvoogd 7y agoWhat everybody here seems to miss, is that the right to be forgotten is aimed at you right to ask a company to delete all personal data they have on you. The question then is, how does this apply to search engines/indexers? I don't think it necessarily should, however since 'indexers' are not a recognized role in data processing laws, it takes some case law to figure these things out properly. By the letter of the law, if something about me is indexed by google, they are processing my personal data and I have the right to ask them to stop doing that and delete it. Realistically though, this can lead to abuse by public people same as the DCMA does for companies. So, still some work to be done. But I am glad that I have a legal way to force for instance a marketing deparment to stop harassing me with spam mail/calls. In practice, the threat of making a official request is often enough to motivate them ;)
- merb 7y agothe problem ist, that if google wants to "forget" your data, they need to save two things. - the data they need to "forget" - the request for forgetting the data google is just an index over sites, if they do NOT want to remove things, google will index it forever. thus thats why I hate the "right to be forgotten" law. it uses the wrong approach. it targets google, which does not provide the data. unfortunatly most often people want to silence news outlets which do not NEED to remove the data. so its extremly complicated. I dislike both and I think the law should remove data from the web if it targets people and is relatively old (discussable). This would eliminate the problem completly AND all search engines would need to stop it. Or better implement a banned.txt or something that news outlets/sites need to implement if they are targeted, so that even archives can remove the data. all in all the law is pretty stupid in its current state. because it does not fix the problem it just duck tapes it.
- sesutton 7y agoAs far as I can tell the only logical reason is political. It would be far less popular to force news organizations, which might be influential and local, to delete data than forcing an unpopular foreign corporation to do it.
- 7y ago
- blue_devil 7y agoPeople seem to conflate the collection of personal data and the (selective) censoring of information. The Right to be Forgotten, if applied to books would be Orwellian but somehow it's ok when the information is digitally aggregated/distributed?
- Dylan16807 7y agoYes, there is a difference between data you collected about someone and a work they published.
- CDSlice 7y agoBut Google is just indexing published works. It would be like forcing the library to hide all results for George Orwell. Google isn't collecting data about you, the publishers are. Google just lets other people easily find it.
- Dylan16807 7y agoThe "easily find it" part is the bigger problem facing us in modern times. Companies are collecting all these scraps of info into huge databases on people. The problem isn't an old newspaper article in a basement.
- bloak 7y agoJustify that "just"! To me there seems to be a huge practical difference between information about someone being online somewhere and that information being made available to anyone who types that person's name into a browser. It would be a lot easier if newspapers could stop printing names of people who are not public figures. In some countries newspapers already don't do that. No doubt it's highly titillating for people to read about how AB was brutally raped and how XY has been arrested as a suspect (XY being released without charge the next day may or may not be considered newsworthy), but surely the story would be just as titillating without the names? Then we wouldn't have to argue about how to stop Google from indexing those names.
- curt15 7y ago
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoHow does this apply on the basis of the content's origin? If google indexes content hosted in france, transmits (exports) that data to canada, and then the french person whose content it is (or is about) requests it be forgotten, is that any different from the same story except the content is hosted in canada? I'm thinking about a french outlet reporting the same news as a canadian one. It seems reasonable to have some kind of "export" controls, like if you want to index our country's data, you have to abide by our content laws regarding it. Meanwhile, we'll let you do whatever with data you index from elsewhere. You can't show Canadians the forgotten French story, but you can still show them the Canadian paper's version of it. And if you don't abide by that, we won't let google canada export this data from france in the first place.
- Silhouette 7y agoUnder the EU data protection regime, it's already the step where you export personal data to somewhere outside that matters in your scenario. There are obligations on those exporting personal data to places beyond the EEA ensure that adequate safeguards are in place to protect it to an equivalent standard. This is somewhat controversial, because arguably it is impossible to meet that standard if you export to somewhere like the US, where there are laws allowing the national government to obtain personal data from those within its own reach, which no contractual safeguards or similar provisions can override. EU nations have similar rules, but only recognise their own national security interests as a valid reason to override the normal protections, not the analogous interests of any third country (that is, country that isn't an EU member state). The UK now has similar concerns in connection with Brexit.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoAs incomplete as it is, fining google france for google canada's use of illegally exported data seems great then. You want the EU market, you abide by EU export laws.
- swiley 7y agoI'm still not convinced this is possible. How do you authenticate these sorts of requests so that people aren't able to delete other people's data?
- advisedwang 7y agoThis is great! It means we're able to have states that care about privacy pushing the boundary on how we can regulate to achieve this without landing in an cross-jurisdictional nightmare.
- jackmaney 7y agoGood.
- shadowgovt 7y agoSilly implementation question: To implement a right to be forgotten, I assume one must keep a list of things that must be forgotten by indexers. Doesn't the existence of that list defeat the purpose of the right to be forgotten if it's leaked? It'd be the ultimate Streisand Effect directory.
- twobat 7y agoLet's not forget that this law is for people with money. Most common people will not have enough resources to compel anyone the size of Google.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 7y agoFiling is pretty cheap: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/legal-removal-request?complaint_type=rtbf&pli=1 https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/legal-removal-reques...
- Hitashihamamoto 7y agoWhile we all are busy talking about this, has anyone thought about this - Is Google still sticking to its original motto of organizing the world's information?