5 ms·

Jimmy Wales: Europe’s "Right To Be Forgotten" A "Terrible Danger"

30 points by reinhardt 12y ago

dzhiurgis 12y ago
Wonder if he complies with DMCA requests, because that is censorship too.
x0x0 12y ago
Jimmy Wales and all these other people decrying the decision are incredibly stupid. The central question, which they never address, is whether a massive change of ease of discovery of information is a quantitative or a qualitative change. Much of this information was always available -- eg for minor criminal history, if you had the resources to go county by county and check. Pretending that it's somehow inherently true or obvious that when a 2 second effort on google unearths the same information that the same rules should apply is simply stupid. There's a real debate we should have about what information should be available, about whom, for how long, with what expirations, etc, and Jimmy and Eric Schmidt and the founders of google aren't obviously right. Also, we should just in general be wary of rich assholes; all those people won't suffer consequences whereas plenty of non rich people do suffer consequences. Also, saying that a very powerful privacy tool that forces google to forget certain information makes it hard to make "real progress on privacy issues" makes one wonder what exactly he thinks privacy is. And you can see below that he deliberately conflates freedom of speech -- which individuals will continue to enjoy -- with the instant and easy availability of all information (as commercially selected by Google, etc). And again, fta, we see that Jimmy is another rich asshole -- just like Eric Schmidt -- that thinks he should have privacy, but you shouldn't: Back in 2005, Wales admitted to editing his own Wikipedia bio — a practice frowned upon by the site. And, it must be said, a little eyebrow-raising given his outspoken views on the imperative of free speech online. *Wales passed up on the opportunity to explain how his own views about personal revisionist history might have evolved since 2005*. But he did agree to answer our other questions about the committee’s role and his personal views on the ECJ ruling. [bolding added] just like eric Schmidt, who tried to get google to delete information and has used his lawyers and billions of dollars of wealth to force at least one former mistress' blog offline. [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7820978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7820978
- chr1 12y ago
  > if you had the resources to go county by county and check do you say that keeping this ability for rich people and governments only, is a good thing? Generally it's fair, that if some false information about you comes at the top of the google search, you should be able to somehow promote it's rebuttal to the top as well, without having to spend money on it. But the concept of "Right To Be Forgotten" is totally wrong. My memories belong to me, and no one should have a right to force me to forget something, or not to talk about something I know.
cpa 12y ago
Here we go. > I don’t think the view that this decision is correct is in any way consistent with any serious person’s understanding of freedom of expression. > Wales: A part of the outcome should be the very strong implementation of a right to free speech in Europe — essentially the language of the First Amendment in the U.S. As a european, a find this downright insulting and imperialist.
- panarky 12y ago
  Reasonable people can argue about what information should be available to the public in a free society. Should court records about individuals and corporations be public information? What about government and police actions? Political contributions? Photographs of personal residences? Realtime lat and long of your smartphone? But once we decide what can be public, it seems that only a luddite would try to control where that public information can appear. The very nature of truthful public information is that it is very difficult to control, direct or contain. It requires authoritarian power and repression to manipulate public opinion by controlling public information. Is that really what we want in an open society?
  - gdewilde 12y ago
    These are reasonable people, they decided it will not be available in our society. You are worried comcast goes bankrupt?
    - RichardFord 12y ago
      Yeah, you people that think this censorship is a good idea think they are reasonable people.
      - gdewilde 12y ago
        Hello Richard. These Europian law makers have this most ambitious idea for all personal information on the corporate websites to be editable by yours truly. Wikipedians go as far as to claim that one can not validate authorship over the Internet. If you cant offer the user the right to vanish it follows that you shouldn't be data mining the person let alone distribute it.
RichardFord 12y ago
Obviously this is a censorship move by the EU, but they had to sell it somehow. So they framed as a "we're protecting your privacy from evil corporations". Not surprising though, considering a pretty horrible track record for free speech in most of Western Europe.
brownbat 12y ago
One of the interesting things about the ECJ case was that Google Spain was forced to remove links to the information, but the Spanish Newspaper was allowed to keep the information. A cynic might see it as territorial favoritism. Google's the foreign group, so it has to watch itself. The Spanish paper was local, so the man can't exercise any right to be forgotten against it. http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014-05/cp140070en.pdf http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014...

30 points by reinhardt 12y ago

Wonder if he complies with DMCA requests, because that is censorship too.

x0x0 12y ago

Jimmy Wales and all these other people decrying the decision are incredibly stupid. The central question, which they never address, is whether a massive change of ease of discovery of information is a quantitative or a qualitative change. Much of this information was always available -- eg for minor criminal history, if you had the resources to go county by county and check. Pretending that it's somehow inherently true or obvious that when a 2 second effort on google unearths the same information that the same rules should apply is simply stupid. There's a real debate we should have about what information should be available, about whom, for how long, with what expirations, etc, and Jimmy and Eric Schmidt and the founders of google aren't obviously right. Also, we should just in general be wary of rich assholes; all those people won't suffer consequences whereas plenty of non rich people do suffer consequences. Also, saying that a very powerful privacy tool that forces google to forget certain information makes it hard to make "real progress on privacy issues" makes one wonder what exactly he thinks privacy is. And you can see below that he deliberately conflates freedom of speech -- which individuals will continue to enjoy -- with the instant and easy availability of all information (as commercially selected by Google, etc). And again, fta, we see that Jimmy is another rich asshole -- just like Eric Schmidt -- that thinks he should have privacy, but you shouldn't: Back in 2005, Wales admitted to editing his own Wikipedia bio — a practice frowned upon by the site. And, it must be said, a little eyebrow-raising given his outspoken views on the imperative of free speech online. *Wales passed up on the opportunity to explain how his own views about personal revisionist history might have evolved since 2005*. But he did agree to answer our other questions about the committee’s role and his personal views on the ECJ ruling. [bolding added] just like eric Schmidt, who tried to get google to delete information and has used his lawyers and billions of dollars of wealth to force at least one former mistress' blog offline. [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7820978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7820978

chr1 12y ago
> if you had the resources to go county by county and check do you say that keeping this ability for rich people and governments only, is a good thing? Generally it's fair, that if some false information about you comes at the top of the google search, you should be able to somehow promote it's rebuttal to the top as well, without having to spend money on it. But the concept of "Right To Be Forgotten" is totally wrong. My memories belong to me, and no one should have a right to force me to forget something, or not to talk about something I know.

cpa 12y ago

Here we go. > I don’t think the view that this decision is correct is in any way consistent with any serious person’s understanding of freedom of expression. > Wales: A part of the outcome should be the very strong implementation of a right to free speech in Europe — essentially the language of the First Amendment in the U.S. As a european, a find this downright insulting and imperialist.

panarky 12y ago
Reasonable people can argue about what information should be available to the public in a free society. Should court records about individuals and corporations be public information? What about government and police actions? Political contributions? Photographs of personal residences? Realtime lat and long of your smartphone? But once we decide what can be public, it seems that only a luddite would try to control where that public information can appear. The very nature of truthful public information is that it is very difficult to control, direct or contain. It requires authoritarian power and repression to manipulate public opinion by controlling public information. Is that really what we want in an open society?
- gdewilde 12y ago
  These are reasonable people, they decided it will not be available in our society. You are worried comcast goes bankrupt?
  - RichardFord 12y ago
    Yeah, you people that think this censorship is a good idea think they are reasonable people.
    - gdewilde 12y ago
      Hello Richard. These Europian law makers have this most ambitious idea for all personal information on the corporate websites to be editable by yours truly. Wikipedians go as far as to claim that one can not validate authorship over the Internet. If you cant offer the user the right to vanish it follows that you shouldn't be data mining the person let alone distribute it.

RichardFord 12y ago

Obviously this is a censorship move by the EU, but they had to sell it somehow. So they framed as a "we're protecting your privacy from evil corporations". Not surprising though, considering a pretty horrible track record for free speech in most of Western Europe.

brownbat 12y ago

One of the interesting things about the ECJ case was that Google Spain was forced to remove links to the information, but the Spanish Newspaper was allowed to keep the information. A cynic might see it as territorial favoritism. Google's the foreign group, so it has to watch itself. The Spanish paper was local, so the man can't exercise any right to be forgotten against it. http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014-05/cp140070en.pdf http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014...