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I'm a bit torn in this case. I'm generally for the right to be forgotten, especially in cases like this one, after the criminal has served a lifetime in prison
by jonathanstrange 7y ago
I'm a bit torn in this case. I'm generally for the right to be forgotten, especially in cases like this one, after the criminal has served a lifetime in prison and has been re-integrated into society. However, the decision has some strange aspects to it and elicits the usual ignorance about the Internet.
From what I've read, the judges primarily bemoaned that it is so easy to search for his case by his name. Instead, the German magazine Der Spiegel is supposed to kind of obfuscate the original articles in their online archive, making discovery harder, but not necessarily to delete them or alter his name in them. The idea is that the stories should be harder to find in searches by name. In my opinion that makes no sense, neither technically nor from the point of view of the 'right to be forgotten' - and in a case like this, the stories are all over the net anyway.
- NullPrefix 7y ago>lifetime I'm not sure if we have the same definition of that word. Maybe it is one of those marketing-speak lifetimes?
- jonathanstrange 7y agoFor your information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_Germany
- jakub_g 7y agoThere's a meta-tag to prevent indexing a page (assuming the bots are good and follow it): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noindex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noindex The question is whether the court would be happy with just this. Does the verdict say it's up to Der Spiegel to get this unsearchable, or up to some search engines like Google to remove it from their indexes? BTW: TIL that Yandex also supports <noindex> HTML tag: <noindex>Don't index this text.</noindex>
- Kbelicius 7y ago> The idea is that the stories should be harder to find in searches by name. In my opinion that makes no sense, neither technically nor from the point of view of the 'right to be forgotten' In the case of the "right to be forgotten" no kind of obfuscation is needed from the publisher. Article stays where it is in its originality the only thing that happens is that article is no longer shown in search results of search engines when searching the mans name. If you search for the name of the victim those articles still might show as search results.
- DangerousPie 7y agoMakes perfect sense to me. The aim is not to eradicate all evidence of the crime. The aim is just to allow him to lead a normal life where he doesn't have to worry that a single Google search of his name would lead to him getting fired.
- larnmar 7y agoFrom my reading of the 1982 Spiegel article (which you can still find if you google his name, Paul Termann) he was 44 when he committed his crime. He’d be 81 now. I don’t think getting fired is his concern.