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Perhaps the list would be more representative if it included at least a few victims of sexual exploitation, or teenagers who previously had trouble getting nake

Perhaps the list would be more representative if it included at least a few victims of sexual exploitation, or teenagers who previously had trouble getting naked images of themselves removed from servers hosted outside the EU. Ideally it would also include a link to every child porn web site on the IWF's blacklist, as used by at least the UK. The problem with simply listing known cases where the "censorship" mechanism has some inefficiencies is that it hides the many cases where it can have a very real benefit to peoples' lives. The current implementation of the EU ruling leaves a lot to be desired, but let's not challenge its intent - restoring an element of privacy and security that search engines have been strip mining for their own benefit for over a decade.

EpicEng 12y ago
I agree that most reporting on this are completely ignoring the upside. My mother was wrongfully accused of a crime nearly ten years ago. It took eight years of fighting the charges (going bankrupt in the process) before they were finally dropped. However, you can still find the charges as soon as you type her name into Google, and that's all it takes. She was a lawyer; now she can't get anything but the most menial work. I wish she could exercise her "right to be forgotten".
- ars 12y ago
  The target is wrong. Your mother (and the other people in the EU) should be targeting the newspapers and other places that actually have the information. Not the search engine. A newspaper would probably refuse to remove the story altogether, but they might be willing to add a note saying the charges were dropped. There's a difference between removing false or misleading information (like in your case) and trying to hide your true history (like most of the EU cases I'm hearing about).
  - tspike 12y ago
    Unfortunately, if I'm trying to get an idea of the trustworthiness of a person, I'm probably just going to skim the search results and reject them as soon as I see something related to a crime. It's an imperfect filter, but dismissing someone who has done nothing wrong is less costly than trusting someone you shouldn't.
  - EpicEng 12y ago
    I don't disagree with you in principle but, in reality, it wouldn't matter. You can already find that the entire case was dismissed, but the newspapers won't print anything about that, and I doubt it would make much difference if they did. Many people associate charges with guilt, and I can't say I wouldn't be biased against an applicant who was charged with a felony. I don't know what the right answer is. For me this is admittedly an emotional subject.
ps4fanboy 12y ago
Wont someone think of the children
X4 12y ago
“Right to be forgotten” – the creative word for censorship. Newspeak written by the Ministry of Truth. http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/
maximumoverload 12y ago
I very much doubt there is any child porn website, available on clearweb, indexed by google. (I am not talking about eepsites/tor hidden services here. But those are not indexed by Google.)
- hosay123 12y ago
  Hmm.. why not? Isn't that a form of censorship?
  - Cyphus 12y ago
    These sites are hiding in the deep web on purpose. Google doesn't index sites that don't want to be indexed. It respects a site's robots.txt, for example.
Karunamon 12y ago
Let's definitely challenge its intent. We're talking about public figures in some cases, here. I'd say the right of the public to know and freedom of speech (the concept, not the law) trumps "privacy" (aka a weak attempt to suppress publicly known facts via legislative diktat) on the open internet. Look at what's being taken down here... I hope: * That this site gets mirrored en masse, * That the EU regulators get a taste of the Streisand effect and how that applies to censorship * That anyone who filed a censorship request (that's all this is, just dressed up in more flowery language) learns how the internet works.
- nemetroid 12y ago
  > Let's definitely challenge its intent. We're talking about public figures in some cases That's hardly challenging its intent.
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    The point being that, much like the cookie law, this law is simultaneously misaimed, ineffective, and backwards.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- _delirium 12y ago
  > We're talking about public figures in some cases The decision explicitly lists that as a legitimate exemption: search engines may reject removal requests for information concerning someone who has a "public role". If Google took down information pertaining to a public figure, it is probably their error. Now you can argue that this decision will in practice lead to many such errors, but that's a slightly different attack on the decision (arguing that it's impractical to implement accurately vs. arguing that it's in principle wrong, even when implemented accurately, are at least conceptually different criticisms).
  - fpgeek 12y ago
    If Google is the one making the call about whether or not someone is a public figure, where exactly do you expect them to draw the line? Do you honestly expect them to draw a line in the public interest? Personally, I'd expect them to do everything they can to minimize the cost of compliance (where that cost primarily includes the cost of processing requests and the risk of being hauled into court again). In principle, they also care about search quality, but, as long as they deal with the most blatant cases, I think the impact on perceived (not actual) search quality will be small and the impact on relative search quality might even be positive (in other words that the best-case scenario for Bing is matching the precision of Google's blocks and they might do worse). In practice, I think that means wild overblocking of results that should be public because the cost of refusing a request is larger and more immediate. And so far as I can tell that's what we're seeing so far.
chton 12y ago
I agree. Since it would also be unethical for them to include cases of abuse or the naked images, the premise of the site is flawed. They want to show us the good and bad sides of the ruling, but can only show the bad side without doing bad themselves.
ChrisPebble 12y ago
I think the site can still be useful without being balanced. Highlighting collateral damage/silly consequences of a law is a useful service as the public (in my experience) tends to have a low tolerance for too much collateral damage regardless of the intent or positive outcomes of a law. In this case the EU's ruling "leaves a lot to be desired" is nice way of saying it's unworkable given the complexities of the real world. I don't know what the proper solution would be but I do appreciate someone highlighting silly or potentially harmful consequences of an existing law.
- nmrm 12y ago
  Did you read the articles on the site (tone o fcuriosity, not indignation)? * The Daniels-Dwyer article serves no obvious public good. * The post-it thing is a huge wtf. No idea why anyone would even care. * The train thing is embarrassing; again, reporting on this amounts to gossip mongering for cash and serves no public good. * The Osborne thing seems like a politically-motivated intrusion into the private life of a politician's brother. Again, trash reporting. So unless you disagree that these all amount to unhelpful gossip mongering (well, except to the wallet of a lazy reporter/news agency), a little less than half of the unbalanced results demonstrate no harm to the public good. edit: tone clarification. Also, I agree with your last paragraph.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    Also, the Merrill Lynch one is wrong. The first link currently on the site is about the BBC Merril Lynch article. While the site says the censored name is unknown it links to an article that {edit} starts off {/edit} clearly says that O'Neal is being protected. Yet the article is searchable using O'Neal as a search term. The actual censored name is one of the people who left a comment. The only way you don't find the article using Google is if you include that person's name in your search terms. http://www.businessinsider.com/google-merrill-lynch-and-the-right-to-be-forgotten-2014-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/google-merrill-lynch-and-the-...
givan 12y ago
Censorship is bad no matter what it tries to hide, all the elements in the sentimental list you compiled falls in the category of either illegal or something for which is easy to get a court order to remove.
- aragot 12y ago
  The HN population is usually very skeptical about matters related to censorship. What I see here is a 50-50 proportion of agreement. It's startingly enormous for a law about the internet.
nmrm 12y ago
Even many of the sites currently on the list seem like "not a big deal". E.g. petty theft by private citizens, gossip, etc. The only reason some of the currently listed sites even exist is that some reporter figured they could make a few bucks of ad revenue and didn't care about other's privacy. Removing them does absolutely no harm to society; I have no problem with starving sleazy reporters out of their jobs. edit: the law is clearly unworkable, but I'm a huge fan of its intent.
ElliotH 12y ago
Not entirely clear why you're conflating the IWF list with the EU Right to be Forgotten. They're different systems run in different ways by different groups.
- hosay123 12y ago
  > This list is a way of archiving the actions of censorship on the Internet. It is up to the reader to decide whether our liberties are being upheld or violated by the recent rulings by the EU. It cannot present a balanced view of "censorship" to the reader without exhaustively examining examples of the kinds of "censorship" that it's complaining about that are already in use - be it the EU ruling, the IWF watchlist, or the search engines' long documented, voluntary self-censorship of child pornography. So far, the only examples presented are those where the system is shown to be "inefficient" – if it really wants to be honest and balanced, it needs to find and include all the cases where the "censorship" is functioning as intended.
  - benjiweber 12y ago
    http://iwfchecker.lightning-bolt.net/ http://iwfchecker.lightning-bolt.net/ has a crowd sourced list of stuff that is being filtered by cleanfeed. Some of it from IWF list and some from court orders (e.g. Pirate Bay)
    - DanBC 12y ago
      It's a bit of an odd list. It mentions Imgur, but not which bits of Imgur are being filtered. I'm not going to try to visit some of those sites but I have no idea if the entire site is filtered, or if very narrow parts are being filtered.
      - benjiweber 12y ago
        Cleanfeed has two filters. Thr first is IP/domain based and if the site is on the list then all the traffic will go through a proxy or deep packet inspection to check each URL accessed against the blocklist. Detecting/Sourcing the second level is much harder.
cliveowen 12y ago
You're way off track, and I guess it's because you're not European and thus not privy on the laws dictated by the European Parliament. The right to be forgotten is one of those rights that put the power of having factually incorrect information changed or retracted in the hands of citizens. A news site reporting about a teenage girl having her naked pictures all over the Internet isn't covered by the right as long as the information reported is true and verifiable. The same holds for your other examples.
- icebraining 12y ago
  The Spanish Costeja case shows that's not true [1]. The information ordered to be unlisted was true. [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v_Gonz%C3%A1lez http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v_Gonz%C3%A1lez
- nmrm 12y ago
  Doesn't this magnify grandparent's point? Each of his examples is doubly important if it's actually factually incorrect.
- graeme 12y ago
  Do you have a source? My impression from news stories is that the right to be forgotten applies to events no longer pertinent. "Factually incorrect" doesn't seem to be part of the standard. Actually, "factually incorrect" tends to already be covered by libel laws. You can sue a newspaper that maligns you with false facts. Whereas, the right to be forgotten would seem to cover things such as nude photos, which in most cases are no longer pertinent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten#Current_legal_frameworks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten#Current_l... I'm open to being wrong about this.
  - cliveowen 12y ago
    Here it is, amendment 27: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+TA+P7-TA-2014-0212+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//... "(53) Any person should have the right to have personal data concerning them rectified and a 'right to be forgotten ' where the retention of such data is not in compliance with this Regulation. In particular, data subjects should have the right that their personal data are erased and no longer processed, where the data are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which the data are collected or otherwise processed, where data subjects have withdrawn their consent for processing or where they object to the processing of personal data concerning them or where the processing of their personal data otherwise does not comply with this Regulation. This right is particularly relevant, when the data subject has given their consent as a child, when not being fully aware of the risks involved by the processing, and later wants to remove such personal data especially on the Internet. However, the further retention of the data should be allowed where it is necessary for historical, statistical and scientific research purposes, for reasons of public interest in the area of public health, for exercising the right of freedom of expression, when required by law or where there is a reason to restrict the processing of the data instead of erasing them." The new directive updates the previous 1995 directive that states the same right in relation to traditional media: http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/information_society/data_protection/l14012_en.htm http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/information_society/d... It's really nothing more than an update of a directive that has been in effect for almost 20 years, it's just that media like to spin every news to find something to talk about.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

EpicEng 12y ago

I agree that most reporting on this are completely ignoring the upside. My mother was wrongfully accused of a crime nearly ten years ago. It took eight years of fighting the charges (going bankrupt in the process) before they were finally dropped. However, you can still find the charges as soon as you type her name into Google, and that's all it takes. She was a lawyer; now she can't get anything but the most menial work. I wish she could exercise her "right to be forgotten".

ars 12y ago
The target is wrong. Your mother (and the other people in the EU) should be targeting the newspapers and other places that actually have the information. Not the search engine. A newspaper would probably refuse to remove the story altogether, but they might be willing to add a note saying the charges were dropped. There's a difference between removing false or misleading information (like in your case) and trying to hide your true history (like most of the EU cases I'm hearing about).
- tspike 12y ago
  Unfortunately, if I'm trying to get an idea of the trustworthiness of a person, I'm probably just going to skim the search results and reject them as soon as I see something related to a crime. It's an imperfect filter, but dismissing someone who has done nothing wrong is less costly than trusting someone you shouldn't.
- EpicEng 12y ago
  I don't disagree with you in principle but, in reality, it wouldn't matter. You can already find that the entire case was dismissed, but the newspapers won't print anything about that, and I doubt it would make much difference if they did. Many people associate charges with guilt, and I can't say I wouldn't be biased against an applicant who was charged with a felony. I don't know what the right answer is. For me this is admittedly an emotional subject.

ps4fanboy 12y ago

Wont someone think of the children

X4 12y ago

“Right to be forgotten” – the creative word for censorship. Newspeak written by the Ministry of Truth. http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/

maximumoverload 12y ago

I very much doubt there is any child porn website, available on clearweb, indexed by google. (I am not talking about eepsites/tor hidden services here. But those are not indexed by Google.)

hosay123 12y ago
Hmm.. why not? Isn't that a form of censorship?
- Cyphus 12y ago
  These sites are hiding in the deep web on purpose. Google doesn't index sites that don't want to be indexed. It respects a site's robots.txt, for example.

Karunamon 12y ago

Let's definitely challenge its intent. We're talking about public figures in some cases, here. I'd say the right of the public to know and freedom of speech (the concept, not the law) trumps "privacy" (aka a weak attempt to suppress publicly known facts via legislative diktat) on the open internet. Look at what's being taken down here... I hope: * That this site gets mirrored en masse, * That the EU regulators get a taste of the Streisand effect and how that applies to censorship * That anyone who filed a censorship request (that's all this is, just dressed up in more flowery language) learns how the internet works.

nemetroid 12y ago
> Let's definitely challenge its intent. We're talking about public figures in some cases That's hardly challenging its intent.
- Karunamon 12y ago
  The point being that, much like the cookie law, this law is simultaneously misaimed, ineffective, and backwards.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
_delirium 12y ago
> We're talking about public figures in some cases The decision explicitly lists that as a legitimate exemption: search engines may reject removal requests for information concerning someone who has a "public role". If Google took down information pertaining to a public figure, it is probably their error. Now you can argue that this decision will in practice lead to many such errors, but that's a slightly different attack on the decision (arguing that it's impractical to implement accurately vs. arguing that it's in principle wrong, even when implemented accurately, are at least conceptually different criticisms).
- fpgeek 12y ago
  If Google is the one making the call about whether or not someone is a public figure, where exactly do you expect them to draw the line? Do you honestly expect them to draw a line in the public interest? Personally, I'd expect them to do everything they can to minimize the cost of compliance (where that cost primarily includes the cost of processing requests and the risk of being hauled into court again). In principle, they also care about search quality, but, as long as they deal with the most blatant cases, I think the impact on perceived (not actual) search quality will be small and the impact on relative search quality might even be positive (in other words that the best-case scenario for Bing is matching the precision of Google's blocks and they might do worse). In practice, I think that means wild overblocking of results that should be public because the cost of refusing a request is larger and more immediate. And so far as I can tell that's what we're seeing so far.

chton 12y ago

I agree. Since it would also be unethical for them to include cases of abuse or the naked images, the premise of the site is flawed. They want to show us the good and bad sides of the ruling, but can only show the bad side without doing bad themselves.

ChrisPebble 12y ago

I think the site can still be useful without being balanced. Highlighting collateral damage/silly consequences of a law is a useful service as the public (in my experience) tends to have a low tolerance for too much collateral damage regardless of the intent or positive outcomes of a law. In this case the EU's ruling "leaves a lot to be desired" is nice way of saying it's unworkable given the complexities of the real world. I don't know what the proper solution would be but I do appreciate someone highlighting silly or potentially harmful consequences of an existing law.

nmrm 12y ago
Did you read the articles on the site (tone o fcuriosity, not indignation)? * The Daniels-Dwyer article serves no obvious public good. * The post-it thing is a huge wtf. No idea why anyone would even care. * The train thing is embarrassing; again, reporting on this amounts to gossip mongering for cash and serves no public good. * The Osborne thing seems like a politically-motivated intrusion into the private life of a politician's brother. Again, trash reporting. So unless you disagree that these all amount to unhelpful gossip mongering (well, except to the wallet of a lazy reporter/news agency), a little less than half of the unbalanced results demonstrate no harm to the public good. edit: tone clarification. Also, I agree with your last paragraph.
- DanBC 12y ago
  Also, the Merrill Lynch one is wrong. The first link currently on the site is about the BBC Merril Lynch article. While the site says the censored name is unknown it links to an article that {edit} starts off {/edit} clearly says that O'Neal is being protected. Yet the article is searchable using O'Neal as a search term. The actual censored name is one of the people who left a comment. The only way you don't find the article using Google is if you include that person's name in your search terms. http://www.businessinsider.com/google-merrill-lynch-and-the-right-to-be-forgotten-2014-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/google-merrill-lynch-and-the-...

givan 12y ago

Censorship is bad no matter what it tries to hide, all the elements in the sentimental list you compiled falls in the category of either illegal or something for which is easy to get a court order to remove.

aragot 12y ago
The HN population is usually very skeptical about matters related to censorship. What I see here is a 50-50 proportion of agreement. It's startingly enormous for a law about the internet.

nmrm 12y ago

Even many of the sites currently on the list seem like "not a big deal". E.g. petty theft by private citizens, gossip, etc. The only reason some of the currently listed sites even exist is that some reporter figured they could make a few bucks of ad revenue and didn't care about other's privacy. Removing them does absolutely no harm to society; I have no problem with starving sleazy reporters out of their jobs. edit: the law is clearly unworkable, but I'm a huge fan of its intent.

ElliotH 12y ago

Not entirely clear why you're conflating the IWF list with the EU Right to be Forgotten. They're different systems run in different ways by different groups.

hosay123 12y ago
> This list is a way of archiving the actions of censorship on the Internet. It is up to the reader to decide whether our liberties are being upheld or violated by the recent rulings by the EU. It cannot present a balanced view of "censorship" to the reader without exhaustively examining examples of the kinds of "censorship" that it's complaining about that are already in use - be it the EU ruling, the IWF watchlist, or the search engines' long documented, voluntary self-censorship of child pornography. So far, the only examples presented are those where the system is shown to be "inefficient" – if it really wants to be honest and balanced, it needs to find and include all the cases where the "censorship" is functioning as intended.
- benjiweber 12y ago
  http://iwfchecker.lightning-bolt.net/ http://iwfchecker.lightning-bolt.net/ has a crowd sourced list of stuff that is being filtered by cleanfeed. Some of it from IWF list and some from court orders (e.g. Pirate Bay)
  - DanBC 12y ago
    It's a bit of an odd list. It mentions Imgur, but not which bits of Imgur are being filtered. I'm not going to try to visit some of those sites but I have no idea if the entire site is filtered, or if very narrow parts are being filtered.
    - benjiweber 12y ago
      Cleanfeed has two filters. Thr first is IP/domain based and if the site is on the list then all the traffic will go through a proxy or deep packet inspection to check each URL accessed against the blocklist. Detecting/Sourcing the second level is much harder.

cliveowen 12y ago

You're way off track, and I guess it's because you're not European and thus not privy on the laws dictated by the European Parliament. The right to be forgotten is one of those rights that put the power of having factually incorrect information changed or retracted in the hands of citizens. A news site reporting about a teenage girl having her naked pictures all over the Internet isn't covered by the right as long as the information reported is true and verifiable. The same holds for your other examples.

icebraining 12y ago
The Spanish Costeja case shows that's not true [1]. The information ordered to be unlisted was true. [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v_Gonz%C3%A1lez http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v_Gonz%C3%A1lez
nmrm 12y ago
Doesn't this magnify grandparent's point? Each of his examples is doubly important if it's actually factually incorrect.
graeme 12y ago
Do you have a source? My impression from news stories is that the right to be forgotten applies to events no longer pertinent. "Factually incorrect" doesn't seem to be part of the standard. Actually, "factually incorrect" tends to already be covered by libel laws. You can sue a newspaper that maligns you with false facts. Whereas, the right to be forgotten would seem to cover things such as nude photos, which in most cases are no longer pertinent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten#Current_legal_frameworks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten#Current_l... I'm open to being wrong about this.
- cliveowen 12y ago
  Here it is, amendment 27: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+TA+P7-TA-2014-0212+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//... "(53) Any person should have the right to have personal data concerning them rectified and a 'right to be forgotten ' where the retention of such data is not in compliance with this Regulation. In particular, data subjects should have the right that their personal data are erased and no longer processed, where the data are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which the data are collected or otherwise processed, where data subjects have withdrawn their consent for processing or where they object to the processing of personal data concerning them or where the processing of their personal data otherwise does not comply with this Regulation. This right is particularly relevant, when the data subject has given their consent as a child, when not being fully aware of the risks involved by the processing, and later wants to remove such personal data especially on the Internet. However, the further retention of the data should be allowed where it is necessary for historical, statistical and scientific research purposes, for reasons of public interest in the area of public health, for exercising the right of freedom of expression, when required by law or where there is a reason to restrict the processing of the data instead of erasing them." The new directive updates the previous 1995 directive that states the same right in relation to traditional media: http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/information_society/data_protection/l14012_en.htm http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/information_society/d... It's really nothing more than an update of a directive that has been in effect for almost 20 years, it's just that media like to spin every news to find something to talk about.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]