7 ms·

Google's "Right to be Forgotten" Disclaimer

22 points by fpgeek 12y ago

comex 12y ago
The key point: unlike the old Chinese censorship warning, this notice appears on all name queries, not just queries which have actually had data removed. Thus, for better or worse, it isn't able to subvert the purpose of the law by encouraging people to search elsewhere...
WildUtah 12y ago
This is very bad. Google should be telling Europeans the truth about what their governments are doing. "Some results may have been removed due to EU censorship policy" would be a truthful and informative disclaimer. Including the message only on pages that have actually been censored would be much better because then you'd know when the government has required Google to lie to you.
- mantraxD 12y ago
  The government isn't censoring information here, citizens are. Any explicit mention of "there is censored information" would mean Google are back in court. I honestly doubt any big scandal can be hidden by removing it from Google. Scandals spread virally, ear to ear (i.e. social networks, digital or not). This is more useful so embarrassing or false information can't prevent normal folks from getting a job and so on.
  - cheald 12y ago
    The government is absolutely the force of censorship here. These requests to be forgotten only have any teeth because the government backs them with its ability to punish Google if they fail to comply with them.
    - seren 12y ago
      Yes, and the government has teeth because it is backed by its citizens. You could probably argue that the main force from governments comes from police and other armed force, but this is not what found their legitimacy. And most people in Europe, for historical and deep-rooted cultural reasons, seem to be in favor of the ruling. So all is well!
      - cheald 12y ago
        The government has teeth because it ultimately has the threat of violence over the governed. That's what "law enforcement" is. A government's legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed, but its power comes from the threat of force. If that wasn't true, then there would be no need for government, since people could just ask nicely for what they want and receive it without any need to coerce others into doing it under threat of forced deprivation of assets or liberty.
- wmt 12y ago
  "Google should be telling Europeans the truth about what their governments are doing." What does private persons being able to censor searches of their own name have to do with the different censorship policies of European countries? These censorship policies, e.g. Piratebay blockades or secret child porn lists which when uncovered often also contain porn of young-looking adults, are also widely discussed in mainstream news of the countries in question, so saying that people are not informed about it is, well, misinformed. Or are you referring to something else, some secret censorship, of which proof is difficult to obtain so it must be true?
- buro9 12y ago
  Why? I'm a European and I like this policy. I like that individuals have the ability to have things that are no longer relevant forgotten about them so that their ability to have social mobility isn't compromised. I like that young people who make mistakes are now given the chance to move on, mature and change. The opposite to this law is a view that a person can never change, and must always be held accountable for their past in their future. No, I'm really happy this exists. "To err is human", otherwise translated as "everyone make mistakes". Life and potential shouldn't halt when it happens.
  - bprieto 12y ago
    Except this only makes information disappear from Google, not from the web. If a news site has an articule about that time you were arrested for drug dealing, it will be there and you have no right to make it disappear.
    - derefr 12y ago
      Which is how things are in the non-digital world: you have, say, a police record, but it doesn't follow you wherever you go, attached in big flashing letters to your picture for anyone who asks "who is that?" If someone does a record check, they'll still find out--but it doesn't haunt you as "the most relevant detail to know about X."
    - tzmudzin 12y ago
      Doesn't this match the real life societies have learned to deal with over the centuries? Your stupid mistake 20 years ago will probably be remembered by someone. Someone might even have a picture of it. But it will not be the first thing a stranger will learn about you.
    - buro9 12y ago
      This is true for very many things, the act of making it searchable is to make it follow you into the future. The example I used in the other conversation about this when it first emerged is a real one, I know a girl who was the victim of an attack and chose to contact the police. The attacker was young and the court scrubbed his name from public record, but the local newspaper reported the victim's name and profession. Now you have a victim with a permanent smear against her created by an easily accessible record of fact (the newspaper, not the court record). The problem with the patriarchy and an unequal society being that woman who are victims of attacks are frequently met with doubt and victim blaming, "Was it something she wore?", "Did she act in any way as to provoke it?"... and so a victim is punished by the availability of information. Her peers have remarked how they've seen it on Google, because in her profession researching your peers is what you do. The courts aren't wrong to record things. The newspapers aren't wrong to report things. But neither action was intended to be a permanent cross for the person to carry. The girl in question? Her view is that if she knew it would end up on the front page of Google for her name, she would never have gone to the police. Now ask yourself, is that the world you want to live in? I'm very glad the EU legal system agrees that it isn't, and that the EU politicians enshrined that it isn't. It makes me glad to be European.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Google should be telling Europeans the truth about what their governments are doing. How is the current notice not telling the truth about what the EU is doing? You mean you think they should make a value judgment, which is a different thing. Personally, I don't mind calling it censorship - I'm wary about this law too - but it would be hypocrisy after allowing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pages to be censored by just sending a DMCA takedown, without calling it the same.
- amirmc 12y ago
  > "... when the government has required Google to lie to you." Google already decides what to show you and we have little visibility as to how that decision is made (there's even an entire industry that tries to game it). To imply that that those search results are somehow 'pure' or better represent 'the truth', is completely ridiculous.
  - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    No one is making the claims you're refuting. If you don't like Google's results then you can use a different search engine. The issue is that the government is censoring information. You can't fix that by using a different search engine because the other search engine is presumably subject to the same law.
    - wombosi 12y ago
      The government is not censoring information. The information is still available at the source. The government is preventing Google and other search engines from permanently indexing personal irrelevant or no longer relevant information. I am beginning to get the impression, most commenters who are against the ruling barely bothered to even read it properly before forming an opinion.
      - Oletros 12y ago
        The information is indexed because the source allows to be indexed. And yes, the information is being censored. Deciding what Google, Microsoft or any other search engine can index or not is censoring. And please, stop saying that people that it is against has not read the ruling because you're wrong.
        wombosi 12y ago
        Information is not being censored. An expiration date is being put on private, irrelevant/no longer relevant information. Your failure to recognize this simple fact, does indicate two things: you either didn't read the EU ruling, or you read and fail to grasp its meaning.
- tspiteri 12y ago
  You are only considering the censorship aspect, and seem to be ignoring the privacy aspect. When people call this EU policy censorship, I can't help thinking that they consider all forms of privacy protection as censorship. And I see including the message only on affected pages as a kind of circumvention of the court ruling, because then the privacy of the individual is not really protected. Seeing such a warning only on an affected individual's search page would prompt searchers who are not already aware of any issue to look deeper, and probably find the information. (Which is why you want this I guess, since you seem to dislike the court ruling, and this would effectively circumvent it.)
evolve2k 12y ago
So can people request globally or just in Europe?
- Jekyll 12y ago
  Only Europe - since the court ruling was by the EU and applicable only to EU residents I believe.
zmmmmm 12y ago
So it should only be a very short time before someone makes a "diffing" search engine that queries both the european versions and other versions and shows you the difference, thus revealing all the most controversial content about any individual you happen to be interested in, not least, the very fact they have tried to suppress the information. (I suggest it be called streisand.com). I am curious what the next step will be after that - ever more draconian laws? Canada style laws that try for world wide censorship? How far will it go?
- thrownaway2424 12y ago
  Something along the lines of http://www.monzy.org/unsafesearch/ http://www.monzy.org/unsafesearch/, but for "forgotten" Euro-junk would be just the thing to send up these crazy "rights".
Jekyll 12y ago
On the whim of national governments and rich individuals, Google has already been censoring the search results that appear to everyone. The only thing this law does is give the little man a chance - which is good.
gdewilde 12y ago
The idea is that we don't want businesses distributing your personal life and we don't want a defamation industry. Imagine the 2 of those combined, it would be powerful propaganda, we would all have to invest in the negative review industry just to compensate. We already have copyrights on everything else, ownership laws that apply to everything except humans. It seems fair for your life belongs to you. It would be something if I couldn't have mickey mouse on my website but could use your face for everything?
wombosi 12y ago
I find it fascinating to see the division of this topic being along seemingly national lines, i.e. European commenters seem in favor, while American commenters seem vehemently against the EU court ruling. This is somewhat of a generalization, but it does highlight an interesting phenomenon. It appears the overwhelming (?) majority of young American internet users, who have come of age in the post 9/11 USA are disturbingly willing to relinquish as many freedoms and rights, as is demanded of them. In fact, they take it one step further, in a form of self-perpetuating pseudo-cultural hegemony, they try to impose this "If you're innocent you have nothing to hide!" mentality on Americans and non-Americans alike. The fact that global search engines often can have extremely negative implications vis-a-vis personal data retention, is one that more easily escapes those who were born naturally into the Internet age, as opposed to those who "merely adopted it". The "adopters" are usually more sensitive to the before-and-after effects, than the "naturals", usually because the naturals often lack the firsthand context with which to make informed comparisons of said effects. A contributing, and perhaps aggravating, factor is the tendency of many (possibly younger) HNers to fall into knee-jerk behavioral patterns of vociferously defending all that is Google, from the somewhat irrational perspective of Google being All That Is Good And Holy, simply because of the corporation's trite slogan of "Do No Evil". At the very latest, the Snowden revelations and ensuing NSA scandals have shown us Google and co. are as far from sainthood as any other multibillion dollar multinational corporation. In summary, the European little guy has scored an important victory that gives them the tools to improve their quality of life, or at the very least avoid a degradation thereof. How this is twisted into censorship of a search giant is fascinating and very revealing of other deeper and far more worrisome underlying tendencies within the very defenders of the "Mega Corp".
- HenryMc 12y ago
  > It appears the overwhelming (?) majority of young American internet users, who have come of age in the post 9/11 USA are disturbingly willing to relinquish as many freedoms and rights, as is demanded of them. I see Google's censorship as an attack on "freedoms and rights". > HNers to fall into knee-jerk behavioral patterns of vociferously defending all that is Google I personally hate Google, and avoid their products whenever possible. I've used Bing for a number of years, and recently switched most of my searching to DuckDuckGo. > European little guy has scored an important victory that gives them the tools to improve their quality of life I don't think this is an "important victory", but rather an attack on the freedom of information. P.S. I live in Australia and New Zealand.

22 points by fpgeek 12y ago

comex 12y ago

The key point: unlike the old Chinese censorship warning, this notice appears on all name queries, not just queries which have actually had data removed. Thus, for better or worse, it isn't able to subvert the purpose of the law by encouraging people to search elsewhere...

WildUtah 12y ago

This is very bad. Google should be telling Europeans the truth about what their governments are doing. "Some results may have been removed due to EU censorship policy" would be a truthful and informative disclaimer. Including the message only on pages that have actually been censored would be much better because then you'd know when the government has required Google to lie to you.

mantraxD 12y ago
The government isn't censoring information here, citizens are. Any explicit mention of "there is censored information" would mean Google are back in court. I honestly doubt any big scandal can be hidden by removing it from Google. Scandals spread virally, ear to ear (i.e. social networks, digital or not). This is more useful so embarrassing or false information can't prevent normal folks from getting a job and so on.
- cheald 12y ago
  The government is absolutely the force of censorship here. These requests to be forgotten only have any teeth because the government backs them with its ability to punish Google if they fail to comply with them.
  - seren 12y ago
    Yes, and the government has teeth because it is backed by its citizens. You could probably argue that the main force from governments comes from police and other armed force, but this is not what found their legitimacy. And most people in Europe, for historical and deep-rooted cultural reasons, seem to be in favor of the ruling. So all is well!
    - cheald 12y ago
      The government has teeth because it ultimately has the threat of violence over the governed. That's what "law enforcement" is. A government's legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed, but its power comes from the threat of force. If that wasn't true, then there would be no need for government, since people could just ask nicely for what they want and receive it without any need to coerce others into doing it under threat of forced deprivation of assets or liberty.
wmt 12y ago
"Google should be telling Europeans the truth about what their governments are doing." What does private persons being able to censor searches of their own name have to do with the different censorship policies of European countries? These censorship policies, e.g. Piratebay blockades or secret child porn lists which when uncovered often also contain porn of young-looking adults, are also widely discussed in mainstream news of the countries in question, so saying that people are not informed about it is, well, misinformed. Or are you referring to something else, some secret censorship, of which proof is difficult to obtain so it must be true?
buro9 12y ago
Why? I'm a European and I like this policy. I like that individuals have the ability to have things that are no longer relevant forgotten about them so that their ability to have social mobility isn't compromised. I like that young people who make mistakes are now given the chance to move on, mature and change. The opposite to this law is a view that a person can never change, and must always be held accountable for their past in their future. No, I'm really happy this exists. "To err is human", otherwise translated as "everyone make mistakes". Life and potential shouldn't halt when it happens.
- bprieto 12y ago
  Except this only makes information disappear from Google, not from the web. If a news site has an articule about that time you were arrested for drug dealing, it will be there and you have no right to make it disappear.
  - derefr 12y ago
    Which is how things are in the non-digital world: you have, say, a police record, but it doesn't follow you wherever you go, attached in big flashing letters to your picture for anyone who asks "who is that?" If someone does a record check, they'll still find out--but it doesn't haunt you as "the most relevant detail to know about X."
  - tzmudzin 12y ago
    Doesn't this match the real life societies have learned to deal with over the centuries? Your stupid mistake 20 years ago will probably be remembered by someone. Someone might even have a picture of it. But it will not be the first thing a stranger will learn about you.
  - buro9 12y ago
    This is true for very many things, the act of making it searchable is to make it follow you into the future. The example I used in the other conversation about this when it first emerged is a real one, I know a girl who was the victim of an attack and chose to contact the police. The attacker was young and the court scrubbed his name from public record, but the local newspaper reported the victim's name and profession. Now you have a victim with a permanent smear against her created by an easily accessible record of fact (the newspaper, not the court record). The problem with the patriarchy and an unequal society being that woman who are victims of attacks are frequently met with doubt and victim blaming, "Was it something she wore?", "Did she act in any way as to provoke it?"... and so a victim is punished by the availability of information. Her peers have remarked how they've seen it on Google, because in her profession researching your peers is what you do. The courts aren't wrong to record things. The newspapers aren't wrong to report things. But neither action was intended to be a permanent cross for the person to carry. The girl in question? Her view is that if she knew it would end up on the front page of Google for her name, she would never have gone to the police. Now ask yourself, is that the world you want to live in? I'm very glad the EU legal system agrees that it isn't, and that the EU politicians enshrined that it isn't. It makes me glad to be European.
icebraining 12y ago
Google should be telling Europeans the truth about what their governments are doing. How is the current notice not telling the truth about what the EU is doing? You mean you think they should make a value judgment, which is a different thing. Personally, I don't mind calling it censorship - I'm wary about this law too - but it would be hypocrisy after allowing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pages to be censored by just sending a DMCA takedown, without calling it the same.
amirmc 12y ago
> "... when the government has required Google to lie to you." Google already decides what to show you and we have little visibility as to how that decision is made (there's even an entire industry that tries to game it). To imply that that those search results are somehow 'pure' or better represent 'the truth', is completely ridiculous.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  No one is making the claims you're refuting. If you don't like Google's results then you can use a different search engine. The issue is that the government is censoring information. You can't fix that by using a different search engine because the other search engine is presumably subject to the same law.
  - wombosi 12y ago
    The government is not censoring information. The information is still available at the source. The government is preventing Google and other search engines from permanently indexing personal irrelevant or no longer relevant information. I am beginning to get the impression, most commenters who are against the ruling barely bothered to even read it properly before forming an opinion.
    - Oletros 12y ago
      The information is indexed because the source allows to be indexed. And yes, the information is being censored. Deciding what Google, Microsoft or any other search engine can index or not is censoring. And please, stop saying that people that it is against has not read the ruling because you're wrong.
      - wombosi 12y ago
        Information is not being censored. An expiration date is being put on private, irrelevant/no longer relevant information. Your failure to recognize this simple fact, does indicate two things: you either didn't read the EU ruling, or you read and fail to grasp its meaning.
tspiteri 12y ago
You are only considering the censorship aspect, and seem to be ignoring the privacy aspect. When people call this EU policy censorship, I can't help thinking that they consider all forms of privacy protection as censorship. And I see including the message only on affected pages as a kind of circumvention of the court ruling, because then the privacy of the individual is not really protected. Seeing such a warning only on an affected individual's search page would prompt searchers who are not already aware of any issue to look deeper, and probably find the information. (Which is why you want this I guess, since you seem to dislike the court ruling, and this would effectively circumvent it.)

evolve2k 12y ago

So can people request globally or just in Europe?

Jekyll 12y ago
Only Europe - since the court ruling was by the EU and applicable only to EU residents I believe.

zmmmmm 12y ago

So it should only be a very short time before someone makes a "diffing" search engine that queries both the european versions and other versions and shows you the difference, thus revealing all the most controversial content about any individual you happen to be interested in, not least, the very fact they have tried to suppress the information. (I suggest it be called streisand.com). I am curious what the next step will be after that - ever more draconian laws? Canada style laws that try for world wide censorship? How far will it go?

thrownaway2424 12y ago
Something along the lines of http://www.monzy.org/unsafesearch/ http://www.monzy.org/unsafesearch/, but for "forgotten" Euro-junk would be just the thing to send up these crazy "rights".

Jekyll 12y ago

On the whim of national governments and rich individuals, Google has already been censoring the search results that appear to everyone. The only thing this law does is give the little man a chance - which is good.

gdewilde 12y ago

The idea is that we don't want businesses distributing your personal life and we don't want a defamation industry. Imagine the 2 of those combined, it would be powerful propaganda, we would all have to invest in the negative review industry just to compensate. We already have copyrights on everything else, ownership laws that apply to everything except humans. It seems fair for your life belongs to you. It would be something if I couldn't have mickey mouse on my website but could use your face for everything?

wombosi 12y ago

I find it fascinating to see the division of this topic being along seemingly national lines, i.e. European commenters seem in favor, while American commenters seem vehemently against the EU court ruling. This is somewhat of a generalization, but it does highlight an interesting phenomenon. It appears the overwhelming (?) majority of young American internet users, who have come of age in the post 9/11 USA are disturbingly willing to relinquish as many freedoms and rights, as is demanded of them. In fact, they take it one step further, in a form of self-perpetuating pseudo-cultural hegemony, they try to impose this "If you're innocent you have nothing to hide!" mentality on Americans and non-Americans alike. The fact that global search engines often can have extremely negative implications vis-a-vis personal data retention, is one that more easily escapes those who were born naturally into the Internet age, as opposed to those who "merely adopted it". The "adopters" are usually more sensitive to the before-and-after effects, than the "naturals", usually because the naturals often lack the firsthand context with which to make informed comparisons of said effects. A contributing, and perhaps aggravating, factor is the tendency of many (possibly younger) HNers to fall into knee-jerk behavioral patterns of vociferously defending all that is Google, from the somewhat irrational perspective of Google being All That Is Good And Holy, simply because of the corporation's trite slogan of "Do No Evil". At the very latest, the Snowden revelations and ensuing NSA scandals have shown us Google and co. are as far from sainthood as any other multibillion dollar multinational corporation. In summary, the European little guy has scored an important victory that gives them the tools to improve their quality of life, or at the very least avoid a degradation thereof. How this is twisted into censorship of a search giant is fascinating and very revealing of other deeper and far more worrisome underlying tendencies within the very defenders of the "Mega Corp".

HenryMc 12y ago
> It appears the overwhelming (?) majority of young American internet users, who have come of age in the post 9/11 USA are disturbingly willing to relinquish as many freedoms and rights, as is demanded of them. I see Google's censorship as an attack on "freedoms and rights". > HNers to fall into knee-jerk behavioral patterns of vociferously defending all that is Google I personally hate Google, and avoid their products whenever possible. I've used Bing for a number of years, and recently switched most of my searching to DuckDuckGo. > European little guy has scored an important victory that gives them the tools to improve their quality of life I don't think this is an "important victory", but rather an attack on the freedom of information. P.S. I live in Australia and New Zealand.