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Canadians have a ‘right to be forgotten’ on Google, Federal Court rules
- smitty1e 3y agoCitizen: "I was cancelled!" Government: "Apparently you've forgotten exercising your right to be forgotten. Fret not! We have remembered on your behalf. Some day you'll thank us. We're waiting."
- markhahn 3y agoSearch engines are factual; why should someone be allowed to override the facts? I'd be very happy if this were about correcting facts: about forcing the takedown of inaccurate content from websites. Google would then update its index to reflect the improved accuracy. Fix the problem, not hide it.
- pasc1878 3y agoUnfortunately by the time you have found this lies about you will have spread to many sites often outside the courts jurisdiction. How do you get all those sites taken down? Thus you have to make the indexer stop indexing you.
- thfuran 3y agoSo in order to prevent hypothetical misinformation, it is imperative to maintain the right to demand that accurate information not be spread?
- pasc1878 3y agoIt is not hypothetical - there are cases in Europe where the first entry in google for a person is an accusation against them that was proved false
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- thfuran 3y agoAnd the solution to that is to remove the factual information about them from search results?
- pasc1878 3y agoWhat else can you do - those sites are not under the courts jurasticion possibly in Russia, China, USA who do not honour requests from other countries either through spite or because their laws differ.
- dotnet00 3y agoNothing hypothetical about it, it's fairly common for even big news publishers like CNN to put out a headline that is so misleading that it's effectively a lie, and then either never follow up with a correction if the story turns out to be false or put out a much less publicized and still misleading "correction" such that the correction is buried in a few lines in the middle somewhere. If big publishers are doing this often on well known topics, it stands to reason that the much larger number of little publishers are also doing it with at least similar frequency for less well known topics.
- 3-cheese-sundae 3y agoYes, hence the existence of slander and libel laws.
- shitlord 3y agoDo you really have to get those sites taken down if they're not indexed by any major search engines? Very few people will be able to find them.
- eropple 3y ago"I would be much happier if we did a thing can only intermittently be accomplished by legal means and can be nullified at will by creating a new instance of a discardable entity, rather than doing a thing addressed to an identifiable and durable entity from which to request it."
- Turing_Machine 3y ago[dead]
- wredue 3y agoHow do you “fix” a search engine creating top results for your accusation of a crime while burying the acquittal? Unless you’re famous, your acquittal will basically never outrank your accusations in a search engine, and the accusations will follow you. Hence the ruling here.
- anigbrowl 3y agoSearch engines are factual Only in the sense that they index what other sites say, which might or might not be factual or honest.
- shitlord 3y agoSearch engines also curate nowadays. Search for something vaguely related to suicide, and the thing you're looking for will not appear among the first few search results.
- fknorangesite 3y ago> Search engines also curate ~~nowadays~~ and always have. It's impossible not to. Even merely putting one specific search result above another because it's "more relevant" is the very act of curation, because you are inherently defining "relevance."
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- vnchr 3y ago[flagged]
- Etheryte 3y agoAn alternative, much simpler explanation is that people downvote comments which they don't think are fitting for HN or don't provoke good discussion. I don't care about the ruling, but I do think some of the comments here are more fitting for Reddit than HN. In general though, I don't get taking issue with comment votes, it's just random internet points on a screen.
- randomdata 3y agoI'm not sure that stands up. 'Votes' are always positive feedback to the one on the receiving end. Assuming HN (or Reddit, or whatever) successfully filters bot activity, they provide indication that there are people in the vicinity of the comment and therefore it is likely that the comment is being read. Which is the reason why one comes to a forum and not to a private journal. As there is no formal analytics system, getting feedback (button presses, replies, etc.) is the only way to know you are contributing something that a larger community is taking in. And such feedback is what encourages contributing more. If there was something that the community doesn't like, naturally they would hide the fact that a community exist. No votes, no replies, no nothing. When one feels like they are simply writing in a private journal, they will grow bored of their activity pretty quickly. As the old adage goes: Don't feed the trolls.
- VancouverMan 3y ago> In general though, I don't get taking issue with comment votes, it's just random internet points on a screen. Most of the time, I want to be able to easily read each and every comment that was posted, regardless of what some other random people may think about those comments. I find it annoying how the votes and flagging can affect the appearance/visibility of a comment here. Downvoted comments are rendered in dimmer text, which makes the comments harder to read. I also have to log in so the "showdead" setting takes effect, just so I can see comments that were flagged and hidden. I wish I could use this site with all of the voting/flagging/content-hiding "functionality" disabled, ideally without having to log in and otherwise overriding the default behaviour.
- xoa 3y agoA "right" to destroy other people's memories, and that it unironically goes under the shockingly Orwellian new speak "right to be forgotten", is one of the more horrifying recent things to see both spread and actually get embraced by so-called defenders of the people. There is no parallel in history. People absolutely can be naturally forgotten, but the principle that there is a right to have others forget naturally leads down a very, very ugly path. What people think about us and remember about us is NOT our data, it's theirs even if it's about us. If someone is spreading something factually and materially wrong there are already a myriad of tools to correct that. Edit: I think honesty and HN spirit compels me to steelman against my own argument as well. An argument can be made that there was a time when it was possible for someone willing to take some serious risk, cost, and effort to start anew from even a really bad past. Step back a century or two or earlier, and identities and persistent records could be pretty scattered. Somebody who did something pretty bad (but maybe not truly notorious) and served any time but was determined to reform could leave it all behind and travel a thousand miles away with a new name and build a new life (or die trying). The space for that has undoubtedly shrunken in some respects, and looks like it may continue to do so. I can accept that there can be reasonable differences of opinion on that. But against that is what it means to force it to happen. What such powerful legal tools will do when, with total inevitability, they are most effectively wielded by the most powerful as such tools always are. The people who already face the least accountability in many ways also tend to be the ones most able to make use of anything that may give them even a colorable case against critics and detractors. Some people truly reform, but of course some do not. And of course there are the principles involved. Is this something to use force over, because make no mistake, that's what it means to make something a right backed by law. That's what the very nature of "law" is, it's formalized opinions backed by power. The push for this new "right" feels different and dangerous to me then mere basic privacy, or worries about government (or even megacorp) surveillance.
- officialchicken 3y agoDespite the hand-wavy arguments and use of misinterpreted shock phrases like "Orwellian", a persons' memories (and biochemical retention mechanisms) are not the same as a computers. At a bare minimum, the former has a singular lifetime and there can only one instance - zero copies.
- omwow 3y agohttps://archive.ph/hQCDZ https://archive.ph/hQCDZ
- js8 3y agoI don't think people should have right to be forgotten, just like they shouldn't have the right to be killed by someone or right to be sold to slavery. I think people should rather own their mistakes, and should behave to be remembered fondly rather than disgracefully. Forgiving someone should happen on terms of person doing it.
- Etheryte 3y agoThis doesn't really address the core of the problem which is why people often wish to delist, defamation and intentionally inaccurate or misleading information. Anyone can go and make a website right now that claims that someone else is a child predator or a terrorist or what have you. Mix the fake information in with some real facts and plausible glue and you have your standard fake news level content. Should there be no way to get rid of such content aimed at you online? As a tangential side note, why shouldn't people have the right to be killed? Assisted suicide is legal in many countries for people who are e.g. battling a painful disease with no hope for a cure or improvement with modern medicine.
- kypro 3y agoDoes Canada not have laws against defamation? In the UK and US you could make a website and write that someone is a child predator but you probably get charged with libel.
- supertron 3y agoYou seem to be assuming that just because someone wants to be "forgotten" they've done something wrong. There is a vast number of situations where someone might want to be forgotten because someone else has done / is doing something wrong towards them.
- epakai 3y agoThen they should be made whole by that perpetrator. If that action can just be memory holed for a victim's sake then you have motivated the perpetrator to lean on them so their wrongdoing can be forgotten.
- herodoturtle 3y agoPerhaps it's worth noting the following in the article (before rushing to comment here based on the title alone): "The case began with a complaint to the federal Privacy Commissioner in 2017 from a man whose name and details are kept confidential in the ruling. The man said outdated and inaccurate information about him in newspaper articles found on the internet was leading to great personal harm, including physical assault, employment discrimination, severe social stigma and persistent fear. He wanted the information to be delisted – made unsearchable, unless someone knew the website urls featuring his name."
- spookie 3y agoQuite understandable.
- eli 3y agoIt really depends. Some people would consider it “outdated and inaccurate” to report they were arrested for some crime - even if that’s true. Should such articles be scrubbed from Google if they are causing harm? Removed from newspaper archives too?
- bashinator 3y agoThat would bring us back to parity with pre-Internet society, assuming said info could still be accessed through court and library archives.
- graypegg 3y agoIn my own opinion, if you’re arrested, have paid the standard debt to society that we all (in theory) have agreed on, and gone back into society seeking a job… forcing people to constantly deal with their old (non violent) crimes seems like extra-judicial punishment for very little benefit. Even worse to leave that punishment to a private company.
- eli 3y agoHmm so is that just crimes or anyone can get anything bad they’ve done removed from the internet?
- Simulacra 3y agoNow do America. I know - a lot of Silicon Valley business models are built on scraping and utilizing and selling personal data - but people should have control over that data and they should have the right to say no.
- philipov 3y agoI don't have an opinion on whether there should be a right to be forgotten or not, but it doesn't do the thing you described. We need GDPR or a similar protection. And to do that, it needs to be regulatory legislation, not court rulings.
- Kalium 3y agoWhat about when it's news articles? Should people have a right to control those that might contain their name?
- mgbmtl 3y agoI think the problem is not so much the news article, but that it pops up front and centre when doing a trivial search. Also, considering the low levels of alphabetization, most people won't even bother reading the article, just the (often clickbait) snippet. I'm not blaming the newspaper, I'm saying search results should be held to higher standards.
- criddell 3y agoSometimes yes, sometimes no. You could be arrested tomorrow in a case of mistaken identity. Every time somebody searches for “Kalium”, the first result might be details about how you were arrested for some terrible crime and the follow-up a few day later about how charges were dropped would rank way lower because that never made the front page.
- bdzr 3y agoSo who decides if an individual person has the right to be forgotten?
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- swader999 3y agoHi Google, please forget me? Sure Dave, please wash your hands for a valid finger print and move in close so I can scan your retina. Closer Dave...
- rgrieselhuber 3y agoReminds me of this: https://www.skeletonclaw.com/image/710734055173472257 https://www.skeletonclaw.com/image/710734055173472257
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- swader999 3y agoThis is great Canada, now do the CRA please.
- Mister_Snuggles 3y agoThis seems like a poor solution to the death of journalism. There aren't enough details to go on in the story, but I'm going to make an assumption that this person was charged with a crime, stories were written about the charges, but when the charges were dropped or he was acquitted there was no followup story written and no update made to the original story. Journalism in Canada is dying. Most of the newspapers in Canada are owned by one company and newsrooms have been consolidated and shrunk. I used to read my city's two major newspapers - they'd report a different subset of what was happening, and where they reported on the same thing the stories and takes would be different. Both were biased, but biased in different directions, so I felt that I was getting a semi-balanced view by reading both. Now both papers are owned by the same company, have the same reporters, same editors, report on the same things, and run identical stories. There's no balanced view and not enough reporters to follow up on every little thing that gets reported. Ideally searching for this person's name would show the newest stories first ("person acquitted of crime", "charges dropped", etc), but if those stories never get written they will never show up in a search engine. And very few people will dig into CanLII to find the outcome, if it even makes it far enough to get into CanLII. I don't know what the solution is. Maybe the media shouldn't name names until someone is convicted? But that would likely have unintended consequences.
- charles_f 3y agoI'm getting my news from a couple journals of Glacier Media group, that gives me a pretty good idea of the best deals at Cambodian Tyre, and how many cats got strained during the last marmot festival.
- Crontab 3y agoMore like the right to suppress history.
- brap 3y agoThis is definitely going to be used in ways legislators haven't(?) intended.
- jmyeet 3y agoCue all the Canadian politicians asking to be forgotten for inviting and celebrating an actual Nazi in Parliament this week. I'm wary of the "right to be forgotten". In this particular case, the complainant (allegedly) had false information posted about them that was detrimental. This can certainly happen. But why aren't the outlets who posted that false information on the hook? There is a balance between people having a permanent mark against them for doing something stupid and the public having a right to know when, say, someone actually commits a crime. There are PR firms that specialize in "reputation repair" where wealthy people will pay a bunch of money to have anything disparaging about them removed from the Internet or just buried. This can take the form of takedowns but can be way more isidious eg buying a local newspaper to simply bury a story.
- Sunspark 3y agoIf someone has the same name as someone who committed an offence that's a problem right? This permanent memory doesn't extend to yourself only, it covers OTHER PEOPLE who have the same name as you. You are with them, for better or worse. I could see it being necessary for some people to have to literally change their name just so they wouldn't be the same search result as the other person.
- Nasrudith 3y agoSounds like a management being too fucking stupid to live problem. If the idea of a Bob Smith committing bestiality doesn't mean all Bob Smiths fuck animals is a foreign concept to them. Or that given Bob Smiths are different people.
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- flippertybit 3y ago[flagged]
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- flippertybit01 3y ago[flagged]
- alphanullmeric 3y agoAnother right that requires someone else to do something for you rather than refrain from doing something to you. I guess the whole “force is only justified against force” thing is not believed by most Canadians.
- wmf 3y agoNot exactly a new debate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
- noonething 3y agoPrivacy is ingrained into Canada's laws and can't be changed willy-nilly. It'll be interesting to see how we deal with it and the 'blabbermouth' nature of tech.
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- tamimio 3y agoI can’t read the article it’s paywalled, but what if this used to cancel someone and erase all their information as if they never existed in the internet? Just because of wrong thinking?
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- kranke155 3y agoIn Europe this has been used by a lot of shady characters, including a drug dealing diplomatic visa buying individual in my country, to remove all mentions of whatever they can on Google. If I Google certain shady politicians and businessmen in my country vs DuckDuckGo the difference is stark.
- voisin 3y agoI would rather that right to be forgotten exist for that individual than not exist for anyone.
- Duwensatzaj 3y agoSo you want Google to lie about reality and punish people who state the truth. I honestly can’t understand why.
- eurticket 3y agoBecause people shouldn't be judged on only the things that make it into search results. People are complex and not their mistakes. Once you serve a punishment you should be free to live & not forever branded a criminal.
- squigz 3y agoAhh yes... because Google would never do that before!
- godelski 3y agoI think this comes down to failure modes. No system is going to be perfect (you'd need an infinite amount of resources) so you need to design failure methods into it. The same is true about laws. In fact, I'd say that this is a big reasons "laws are meant to be broken" because the ecosystem is always changing and intent and implementation don't always align. Sometimes laws that seem very good are incredibly stupid in certain situations. This is why we should never rule by the letter of the law alone. There's a famous philosopher who came up with the (namesake) "Blackstone's Ratio". In short "It is better that a ten guilty men go free than a innocent man be stricken of his freedom." Blackstone influenced many of the early founders for countries in the Americas. So we have to ask ourselves, is this a thing that is beneficial to normal people. Is their right to be forgotten and their privacy important? You know people will always abuse this system, but is it better existing than if it hadn't? You will __always__ be able to point to abusers with __any__ system, so the truth is pointing at abusers itself isn't an argument against something. It needs more context. If the system is only used by abusers, then this is a problem. But terrorists and pedos use encryption (the common fingers being pointed) but so do normal people and it is highly valuable to normal people and their daily lives. Idk if removing your identity from Google is as important as that, but we should make sure we include more context than saying "people abuse it." That's a statement that will always be true.
- slowhadoken 3y agoTech companies that make money off of hoarding your data have clear incentives to push the idea of security over privacy.
- icegreentea2 3y agoI've been trying to follow this case, and I'd love for someone with actual legal background to correct me if I'm wrong. But as far I can tell from reading the rulings and PIPEDA is that technically all the courts have said so far is that commercial search engines are not blanket exempt from PIPEDA, and that they are not exempt from PIPEDA in the context of the original complaint (the actual guy complaining that his name is giving untrue and damaging results on google). Google has been trying to argue that the Privacy Commissioner needs to consider charter implications of PIPEDA applying (and allowing right to be forgotten), while the Commissioner and the courts have been stating that they will first rule on if google search engine results are in scope of PIPEDA before considering if delisting would unduly limit Charter rights. Finally, as I understand it, PIPEDA effectively grants the Privacy Commissioner investigatory powers, and that enforcement and remedies are supposed to be enforced by courts (ie, another lawsuit). That said, the Privacy Commissioner has published a draft position on online reputation that says it does believe that delisting/deindexing can sometimes be an appropriate remedy, so the obvious follow up steps would be the Privacy Comissioner/original complaint proceeding. In other words, even if Google fails to win an appeal on this set of rulings, there will almost certainly be another round of court cases on if delisting ("right to be forgotten") is actually Charter compliant.
- paxys 3y agoPoliticians pass a law saying Google must artificially suppress unflattering news about politicians, and the entire citizenry is cheering it on. Wild. Thank god for the first amendment.
- incomingpain 3y agoUnder Canadian law, any 'news' who receive money from a non-canadian source. So for example, receiving money from tim hortons to advertise their new donut, you now may not report on politics. You are influenced by the Americans. So they now can only report on 'so and so said something about politics'
- zajio1am 3y ago'Right to be forgotten' is kind of absurd law. If you did something notable that is mentioned by press, then by press webpages, then indexed by search engines, you could ask search engine to hide that information, despite the original information is still publicly available (at least in libraries archiving paper press).
- Barrin92 3y agoIf you do something notable that is in the public interest the Right to be Forgotten does not apply. In any jurisdiction I'm aware of where comparable laws are implemented, they cover only personal information.
- mediumsmart 3y agoAbsolutely, and they should have the right to be reinvented for public occasions to cheer and honor them the way it is meant to be.