4 ms·

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 t

by 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.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    Sorry, I just accidentally down voted you. I was trying to upvote.
    - buro9 12y ago
      No worries, it seems such a divisive topic it's almost entertaining watching the upvotes and downvotes aggressively cancel out each other. I didn't realise just how extreme the opinion on this is. Shame HN doesn't show this in how the votes are displayed... I get that they're not displayed... but black text vs shaded implies only positive or negative, and hovering around 1 vote with lots of up and down votes is interesting in itself.
  - alandarev 12y ago
    > The newspapers aren't wrong to report things. Is there such an EU country, where newspaper is permitted to disclose identity protected victims by officials? > Now ask yourself, is that the world you want to live in? I want to live in a world, where search engines do what they are supposed to do - search the internet. For the hamrful information available, authors shall be accounted responsible. Shall we pass any law by giving colourful examples? Yes, censorship can be positive, if it protects the girl you knew, I agree, but it does not stop being censorship.
- tragic 12y ago
  And think about it in the longer term (talking from a Brit perspective here). In ye olden times, when everything was made of wood, people could still go down to their library and look through newspaper archives and find out stuff about what you'd done, however 'spent' the conviction. (OK, the UI wasn't great, but those were the days when local papers would reliably have loads of reports of magistrates courts, so the content was probably better. My brother and his friends, who often made an appearance, called it "Stars In Their Eyes".) It is not illegal for newspapers to report past, spent convictions if you should make your way back into the public eye. There has never been a right to 'privacy' in this way. There still isn't, except for Google's search index. In general, privacy laws of this kind - which we know all too much about in this country - help the powerful. (I don't notice any blacklisted trade unionists taking out superinjunctions - just Trafigura[0] covering up an ecological atrocity and rich men concealing their infidelity[1][2].) [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafigura#Super-injunction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafigura#Super-injunction [1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1389841/Ryan-Giggs-named-Parliament-cheating-super-injunction-star.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1389841/Ryan-Giggs-n... [2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13190424 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13190424
icebraining 12y ago
Is tying up sometime, stabbing him on the stomach and beating his head with a hammer past of those mistakes that young people make? Because an European Court has already decided that the murderer also has a right to be forgotten under this law. You mustn't judge a law only by its best results, but by all of them, and particularly by its unintended consequences.
- buro9 12y ago
  A murder or felony is never spent under rehabilitation acts and thus the status of it never changes or expires. The judgement addressed the relevancy of information according to time, and time doesn't make murder less relevant. Of course Google would be fine to continue to return this in their results. Did you read the judgement?
thrownaway2424 12y ago
You do not get to decide whether your past acts are relevant to me, or aren't. It's that simple.
- wombosi 12y ago
  I do not get to decide the boundaries of my own privacy? Is that right? So who decides that for me? You?
  - HenryMc 12y ago
    As long as the content is allowed by law to be published, you have to right to expect privacy.
    - wombosi 12y ago
      The EU ruling is not about publishing, so your comment is a non sequitur. The EU ruling concerns Google's search index. That's something completely different.
- buro9 12y ago
  Nothing about the judgement denies you this (did you read it?). If you are a European citizen then you have whatever are the rights granted you by your country and wider EU law to request information about other citizens at the moment in time that you make the enquiry. It might be that this grants you access to past acts, and it might be that this does not grant you access to past acts. And in the vast majority of cases the person you are requesting info about doesn't determine what you can access, the law does. The law already does dictate whether past acts are relevant to you or not. It's the timeliness that is important here, not who says what. Time allows people to move on with their lives and put some aspects of their past behind them (where it's the right thing to do for the rest of society). Google failed here, because they accessed information at the time they were able to do so, but then permanently stored it and made it available. The judgement tells Google not to do this (the make available step), so that the enquirer needs to go to the source of the data and ask "at that moment in time", and thus whatever laws apply to deny or grant you this access is applied. That is all... your rights are unaffected and all the person being enquired about did is say "you should go back to the source to ask this".
alandarev 12y ago
Some asshole might be screwing lots of businesses, suing them, being a patent troll, etc. Let's call him - made a fortune on loopholes and f other businesses, dodgy/illegal deals, and so on. And you will never know whom you face, because apparantly that he has a right to prohibit others learning about his wrong-doings.
- Angostura 12y ago
  I'm not a fan of the ruling, but Given the nature of the ruling, I think it's unlikely that information like this would be removed from Google's index.
- laumars 12y ago
  That's the same "think of the children" kind of logic that governments use to justify PRISM et al. So the real question is, do we want our private lives permanently documented for all to see; or do we deserve some level of privacy knowing there's a legitimate risk that a very small number of people will abuse those rights? Personally I have the opinion that bad people will always find ways to do bad things; so I'd rather not punish the majority of good people out there just on the off chance that we can catch a couple of extra bad people.
  - seren 12y ago
    I agree mostly for the same reasons. I also think it is a pretty pessimistic view on humanity that this ruling will overwhelmingly used for "evil" and not for "good". I'd rather let a few people go undetected, than punish the majority. It sometimes sounds like in pre-Google time we were living in a dark age of lawlessness where we were not able to scrutinized everyone thanks to the magic panopticon.
    - laumars 12y ago
      I'm fairly sure before the web, everyone lived in squalor while the war lords governing their provinces enjoyed luxury at their subjects expense. Actually thinking about it, little has changed....

by buro9 12y ago

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.
- DanBC 12y ago
  Sorry, I just accidentally down voted you. I was trying to upvote.
  - buro9 12y ago
    No worries, it seems such a divisive topic it's almost entertaining watching the upvotes and downvotes aggressively cancel out each other. I didn't realise just how extreme the opinion on this is. Shame HN doesn't show this in how the votes are displayed... I get that they're not displayed... but black text vs shaded implies only positive or negative, and hovering around 1 vote with lots of up and down votes is interesting in itself.
- alandarev 12y ago
  > The newspapers aren't wrong to report things. Is there such an EU country, where newspaper is permitted to disclose identity protected victims by officials? > Now ask yourself, is that the world you want to live in? I want to live in a world, where search engines do what they are supposed to do - search the internet. For the hamrful information available, authors shall be accounted responsible. Shall we pass any law by giving colourful examples? Yes, censorship can be positive, if it protects the girl you knew, I agree, but it does not stop being censorship.
tragic 12y ago
And think about it in the longer term (talking from a Brit perspective here). In ye olden times, when everything was made of wood, people could still go down to their library and look through newspaper archives and find out stuff about what you'd done, however 'spent' the conviction. (OK, the UI wasn't great, but those were the days when local papers would reliably have loads of reports of magistrates courts, so the content was probably better. My brother and his friends, who often made an appearance, called it "Stars In Their Eyes".) It is not illegal for newspapers to report past, spent convictions if you should make your way back into the public eye. There has never been a right to 'privacy' in this way. There still isn't, except for Google's search index. In general, privacy laws of this kind - which we know all too much about in this country - help the powerful. (I don't notice any blacklisted trade unionists taking out superinjunctions - just Trafigura[0] covering up an ecological atrocity and rich men concealing their infidelity[1][2].) [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafigura#Super-injunction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafigura#Super-injunction [1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1389841/Ryan-Giggs-named-Parliament-cheating-super-injunction-star.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1389841/Ryan-Giggs-n... [2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13190424 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13190424

icebraining 12y ago

Is tying up sometime, stabbing him on the stomach and beating his head with a hammer past of those mistakes that young people make? Because an European Court has already decided that the murderer also has a right to be forgotten under this law. You mustn't judge a law only by its best results, but by all of them, and particularly by its unintended consequences.

buro9 12y ago
A murder or felony is never spent under rehabilitation acts and thus the status of it never changes or expires. The judgement addressed the relevancy of information according to time, and time doesn't make murder less relevant. Of course Google would be fine to continue to return this in their results. Did you read the judgement?

thrownaway2424 12y ago

You do not get to decide whether your past acts are relevant to me, or aren't. It's that simple.

wombosi 12y ago
I do not get to decide the boundaries of my own privacy? Is that right? So who decides that for me? You?
- HenryMc 12y ago
  As long as the content is allowed by law to be published, you have to right to expect privacy.
  - wombosi 12y ago
    The EU ruling is not about publishing, so your comment is a non sequitur. The EU ruling concerns Google's search index. That's something completely different.
buro9 12y ago
Nothing about the judgement denies you this (did you read it?). If you are a European citizen then you have whatever are the rights granted you by your country and wider EU law to request information about other citizens at the moment in time that you make the enquiry. It might be that this grants you access to past acts, and it might be that this does not grant you access to past acts. And in the vast majority of cases the person you are requesting info about doesn't determine what you can access, the law does. The law already does dictate whether past acts are relevant to you or not. It's the timeliness that is important here, not who says what. Time allows people to move on with their lives and put some aspects of their past behind them (where it's the right thing to do for the rest of society). Google failed here, because they accessed information at the time they were able to do so, but then permanently stored it and made it available. The judgement tells Google not to do this (the make available step), so that the enquirer needs to go to the source of the data and ask "at that moment in time", and thus whatever laws apply to deny or grant you this access is applied. That is all... your rights are unaffected and all the person being enquired about did is say "you should go back to the source to ask this".

alandarev 12y ago

Some asshole might be screwing lots of businesses, suing them, being a patent troll, etc. Let's call him - made a fortune on loopholes and f other businesses, dodgy/illegal deals, and so on. And you will never know whom you face, because apparantly that he has a right to prohibit others learning about his wrong-doings.

Angostura 12y ago
I'm not a fan of the ruling, but Given the nature of the ruling, I think it's unlikely that information like this would be removed from Google's index.
laumars 12y ago
That's the same "think of the children" kind of logic that governments use to justify PRISM et al. So the real question is, do we want our private lives permanently documented for all to see; or do we deserve some level of privacy knowing there's a legitimate risk that a very small number of people will abuse those rights? Personally I have the opinion that bad people will always find ways to do bad things; so I'd rather not punish the majority of good people out there just on the off chance that we can catch a couple of extra bad people.
- seren 12y ago
  I agree mostly for the same reasons. I also think it is a pretty pessimistic view on humanity that this ruling will overwhelmingly used for "evil" and not for "good". I'd rather let a few people go undetected, than punish the majority. It sometimes sounds like in pre-Google time we were living in a dark age of lawlessness where we were not able to scrutinized everyone thanks to the magic panopticon.
  - laumars 12y ago
    I'm fairly sure before the web, everyone lived in squalor while the war lords governing their provinces enjoyed luxury at their subjects expense. Actually thinking about it, little has changed....