7 ms·

Lords: right to be forgotten is wrong, unworkable, unreasonable

128 points by nthitz 12y ago

ape4 12y ago
She has a couple good songs but I don't see what Lorde has to do with this. (joke)
Afforess 12y ago
Here is a direct quote from the conclusions of the findings: Our concern is that the practical aspects work for individuals, so we do not want to set expectations which cannot be met. Going beyond the idea of a search engine, if information is so proliferated on the internet, how would it be practical to remove all that information? As a regulator, we only want to enforce things in a way where we can achieve the end results… We rather doubt whether the Government believe there are "ways to make this practical and workable". Nice to see some common sense.
- pjc50 12y ago
  The Lords are a repository for common sense more often than you'd think, partly because they don't have to be accountable to the newspapers.
  - waqf 12y ago
    Right, I don't understand why so many legislatures go to the trouble of having a bicameral system, and then make both houses elected which means that both are subject to the same pressures.
    - Terr_ 12y ago
      Often one house still has additional isolation. For example, in the US the Senate was designed to be isolated through the use of longer terms, higher age limits, and some other procedural differences. While it has been eroded by increased life-expectancy and modern media, I'd still consider heredity-based membership an unacceptably-extreme solution. (Also unconstitutional, but you'd need an amendment to rework the Senate anyway.)
      - matthewowen 12y ago
        The House of Lords isn't generally hereditary. A small portion of its members are hereditary peers, but (and I forget the details) this will ultimately end. The majority of members are life peers, appointed for contributions to public life/politics/etc.
        waqf 12y ago
        Right, the US's real House of Lords is the Supreme Court, which likewise is a panel of life appointees with the power to strike down laws written by the elected legislature. (Indeed, until 2009 the House of Lords was also the UK's highest court of appeal.)
        tormeh 12y ago
        Nah, the House of Lords are made up of extraordinary citizens, not just extraordinary judges. Very important difference.
        tormeh 12y ago
        It looks like an enviable system, at least from the outside.
    - joeclark77 12y ago
      In the US, the Senate used to be elected by state legislatures, and therefore represented the interests of the state governments in checking the federal government's power. The Constitutional amendment that began the direct election of Senators has had really catastrophic consequences.
      - msabalau 12y ago
        Really? Life in the United States has gotten catastrophically worse since 1913 because citizens vote for senators as opposed to the stirling types of people who are politicians at the state level?
      - Sanddancer 12y ago
        The senate before 1913 was a hotbed of cronyism, and corruption, with seats going vacant for years at a time due to there being no requirement for the states to actually put people in the senate. The seventeenth amendment was not catastrophic by any means.
- x0x0 12y ago
  that's the opposite of common sense. There is a gulf between making information instantly and trivially accessible -- google's search business -- and it existing at all. For a long time, the relative anonymity afforded by the difficulty and cost of finding information about people worked reasonably well. Google has now upset that apple card (and we well know their attitudes, but in case you don't: their sociopathic ex-ceo wants privacy for himself but not for you.) Effective anonymity (for most, but not all) doesn't require information to be vanished; it just requires it to be expensive or difficult to discover. edit: and ignoring the recent changes (ie pretending that it's somehow inherently right that everything linked to your name from even 20+ years ago should be instantly and freely discoverable) makes you, well, Google's tool.
  - waqf 12y ago
    "Google has now […]?" Search engines were doing that 20 years ago, before Google even existed. The only thing that has changed is the amount of information that is posted on the web to be indexed — and the amount of time per week the average person spends using the web.
    - x0x0 12y ago
      No, there has simultaneously been a huge increase in quality of the search engines (driven by google, to their credit), plus how much of available documents they can search.
      - waqf 12y ago
        Sure, technological advances have allowed search engines to keep pace with the expanding web. But it seems an odd leap to get from there to suddenly blaming them for discoverability* of content. Besides, I don't think advances like PageRank (the founding technology of Google) are relevant to making old content about a named individual more discoverable.* This kind of quality improvement helps with ranking when you have 100,000 hits. But when you have a unique firstname-lastname combination with 3 hits, all that matters is the number of pages you were able to index. *Edit: replaced "available" with "discoverable" throughout, per x0x0's critique below, since that was what I meant.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  If only that common sense arrived with the "porn" filter. Perhaps this insight comes from the whole porn filter thing, because they learned that, too, is unworkable.
- bsder 12y ago
  > Nice to see some common sense. Common sense would propose something workable. Instead, this is proposing straw men in order to try to win the PR battle. The "right to be forgotten" goes hand-in-hand with "paid his debt to society". It also goes hand-in-hand with "innocent until proven guilty". The powers that caused this privacy apocalypse in order to profit don't get any support from me until they propose a solution that allows people who are accused of a crime but later exonerated to expunge that information without having to pay for armies of lawyers.
  - saidajigumi 12y ago
    > The powers that caused this privacy apocalypse in order to profit Wow, such loaded terminology. Those "powers" are literally nothing more than the logical and direct evolution of digital information technology. You can point fingers at some company or technologist or other, but those are incidental actors amongst a much larger sea change in how information is stored, copied, and transmitted. Just a very few years ago, the potential ramifications of these changes weren't really apparent to anyone. We're only just now coming to grips with it and like all periods of social change, it's not really clear how to proceed. There are significant and valid questions to be grappled with: if someone has a "right to be forgotten", what other rights and concerns must be balanced against that? Who holds responsibility for this "forgetting"? Google argues that it's unjust for it to shoulder this burden. They may be right -- this problem has so far been tackled by one branch of government in one world jurisdiction. Historically speaking, I think it unlikely this one case will be a full and fair treatment of the issue. > without having to pay for armies of lawyers. It may be that we've built infrastructure that makes other alternatives, all factors considered (including, but not just the rights of those who've "paid their debts"), not merely inconvenient but impossible in practice. This doesn't even mean that there may not be solutions, but that this approach to modern issues of privacy is a dead end.
- Terr_ 12y ago
  It's counterbalanced by this one: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140729/10593428044/uk-government-report-recommends-ending-online-anonymity.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140729/10593428044/uk-go...
droopyEyelids 12y ago
I'd like to bring up the idea of a Jubilee, an ancient idea that might be a guide for how to approach this problem again. Basically, in the old days, people were able to fuck up their circumstances permanently because they lived in a small village where everyone ended up knowing everything. Because that's obviously not conducive to a well-functioning society, everyone agreed to forgive and forget (debts at that time) every so many years. This might be a reasonable way to handle our current data congestion problems. What if companies agreed to flush their user data every ? years? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical) edit: this isn't an explicit plan, just something to chew on. Also it doesn't address Google's issue, so it's kind of a distraction to the thread i admit.
- xchaotic 12y ago
  7 years is too short a period in modern times, as even digital projects tend to benefit a lot from the old data and it's even more true for ambitious projects like rail or space. Even an average mortgage in western societies is 20+ years so you have to remember for that long at least. And 'forgetting' after 20 or 30 years isn't going to help, like it didn't in the case of the original Spaniard who caused the ruling.
- pjc50 12y ago
  And delete everyone's wikipedia article? And all the blogs and pictures?
- seanflyon 12y ago
  Interesting idea. How would you define "user data"? For example would it include a Wikipedia article you wrote, a news article mentioning you, an email you received... If you define user data in a more limited sense, I don't think it would satisfy the proponents of the right to be forgotten.
- kjksf 12y ago
  I'm not sure you understand the issue here because on the face of it you suggest that we burn our historical record (newspapers and obliterate website) every 7 years. The issue here isn't that Google has some information on you that leaks and if Google doesn't have this information then it won't leak. The issue is that there is a web page, Google indexes that web page (because that's the purpose of a web search engine), someone doesn't like what that page says about him and now they have a way to ask Google to remove that page from Google's index. It's basically decentralized censorship with frighteningly low standards for removal of information, nonexistent oversight and apparently no penalty for trying to abuse the system. There is no solution to the "problem" that doesn't involve heavy-handed censorship.
phkahler 12y ago
Any future solution to this should still not be Googles problem. If people are going to be able to have history removed from the net, they should have to have it removed from the net and not just from an index. To cover a lot of this, make some restrictions on distribution of criminal, tax, employment, birth/death records. We already have it in the US for medical records. Some of that information is public records, but why do those have to be free and/or indexed by search engines?
miguelrochefort 12y ago
The fact that we're starting to see people oppose the idea that "privacy is necessary at all cost" is comforting. I'm really worried about the "solutions" that are starting to emerge to "fix" privacy. It's starting to look eerily like SOPA/PIPA.
- mkal_tsr 12y ago
  So how do you feel about internet privacy as a whole? I see a post like this and my reaction is, "I don't want everything I do to be public, intended or not" and in that case, I do want privacy. I know if I post a comment on a site, it doesn't go away. But at the same time, I don't want every single page, time, location, and overall history of my life accessible to large corporations. How do you remedy that with the current technical entrenchment in the economy and how it relates to eroding the choice of privacy from individuals? Pure anonymity and pure open-data for all will never work, so where is the balance?
  - twobits 12y ago
    You don't want to, but if someone strong enough gets interested in you, they can. You want privacy. I want privacy. But we don't and won't have any. Only very few and strong can afford that. "Protect privacy" has come to actually mean, protect the strong. We should abolish privacy for all. Not just the de facto, for us.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      If you know you can't protect privacy, what makes you think you can abolish it for all?
      - mkal_tsr 12y ago
        Not only that, but why is it reasonable to remove the choice of privacy? That's the part that concerns me the most about these discussions, is the way "the internet" should either be all one way, or the complete opposite. That will never be realistic and I feel we should be focusing on the balancing act that works the best for the majority of use-cases.
cortesoft 12y ago
Anyone else interested in making a site that just links to all the pages Google has been forced to remove from their search engine?
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  I don't have the link but it already exists and has been posted on HN a few times.
- icebraining 12y ago
  http://hiddenfromgoogle.com/ http://hiddenfromgoogle.com/
  - cortesoft 12y ago
    So the answer was yes, someone else was interested in making this site.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
Most policies and laws regarding regulation of the internet are wrong, unworkable, and unreasonable. What's one more?
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  It's because they are made by people who don't fully understand the internet. On the other hand most of the people who do understand it are against any regulation of it and would not help in the creation of sane laws.
  - InclinedPlane 12y ago
    That's a part of it. Unfortunately, many people who understand the internet still persist in imagining that what happens on the internet is somehow less real or less consequential than what happens in "real life". In reality the internet is a part of real life, just like movies, or literature, or the telephone, it's not a separate or different place.
dclowd9901 12y ago
For me to have the right to be forgotten would mean for you to not have the right to remember me. I think that pretty clearly illustrates the problem.
- byerley 12y ago
  I think you misunderstand the intent. It's not about making people forget, but rather protecting second chances. At some point, a red mark on your internet accessible past may become akin to ethnicity/gender/ect. It doesn't necessarily reflect the person you are, but it's still statistically prudent for someone else to discriminate based on that information. This is part of why we have such strict regulations on credit reporting.
  - wyager 12y ago
    >but rather protecting second chances. And third, and fourth, and fifth, and as many times as you can afford to make a legal hassle for someone, chances. The world isn't always super convenient, and extremely onerous legislation like this definitely won't help.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - yuhong 12y ago
    I don't think things like this is the right solution to the problem, at best it is a workaround. I don't like anti-discrimination laws either BTW, but that is a different matter.
  - dclowd9901 12y ago
    I misunderstand nothing: You don't have a right to second chances either. The world either decides to forgive you or it doesn't. It's not up to you, it's up to them. To impose such a right would be to try to force forgiveness in the minds of others, which, again, pretty clearly illustrates the problem.
    - byerley 12y ago
oh_sigh 12y ago
I think "Right to be forgotten" should be forced upon the media, not search engines. If the media didn't have the information on their website, then major search engines wouldn't index it.
- wyager 12y ago
  >I think "Right to be forgotten" should be forced upon the media Awesome idea. "Well, Mr. news agency guy, the president wants this whole 'tax misappropriation scandal' thing to be forgotten. Otherwise, you may run into some legal trouble. After all, it's his right."
  - oh_sigh 12y ago
    How is that any different from what the EU is forcing google to do?
genericacct 12y ago
"unworkable"? Yes I am totally ready to accept IT advice by a bunch of people who wear wigs to talk.

128 points by nthitz 12y ago

ape4 12y ago

She has a couple good songs but I don't see what Lorde has to do with this. (joke)

Here is a direct quote from the conclusions of the findings: Our concern is that the practical aspects work for individuals, so we do not want to set expectations which cannot be met. Going beyond the idea of a search engine, if information is so proliferated on the internet, how would it be practical to remove all that information? As a regulator, we only want to enforce things in a way where we can achieve the end results… We rather doubt whether the Government believe there are "ways to make this practical and workable". Nice to see some common sense.

pjc50 12y ago
The Lords are a repository for common sense more often than you'd think, partly because they don't have to be accountable to the newspapers.
- waqf 12y ago
  Right, I don't understand why so many legislatures go to the trouble of having a bicameral system, and then make both houses elected which means that both are subject to the same pressures.
  - Terr_ 12y ago
    Often one house still has additional isolation. For example, in the US the Senate was designed to be isolated through the use of longer terms, higher age limits, and some other procedural differences. While it has been eroded by increased life-expectancy and modern media, I'd still consider heredity-based membership an unacceptably-extreme solution. (Also unconstitutional, but you'd need an amendment to rework the Senate anyway.)
    - matthewowen 12y ago
      The House of Lords isn't generally hereditary. A small portion of its members are hereditary peers, but (and I forget the details) this will ultimately end. The majority of members are life peers, appointed for contributions to public life/politics/etc.
      - waqf 12y ago
        Right, the US's real House of Lords is the Supreme Court, which likewise is a panel of life appointees with the power to strike down laws written by the elected legislature. (Indeed, until 2009 the House of Lords was also the UK's highest court of appeal.)
        tormeh 12y ago
        Nah, the House of Lords are made up of extraordinary citizens, not just extraordinary judges. Very important difference.
      - tormeh 12y ago
        It looks like an enviable system, at least from the outside.
  - joeclark77 12y ago
    In the US, the Senate used to be elected by state legislatures, and therefore represented the interests of the state governments in checking the federal government's power. The Constitutional amendment that began the direct election of Senators has had really catastrophic consequences.
    - msabalau 12y ago
      Really? Life in the United States has gotten catastrophically worse since 1913 because citizens vote for senators as opposed to the stirling types of people who are politicians at the state level?
    - Sanddancer 12y ago
      The senate before 1913 was a hotbed of cronyism, and corruption, with seats going vacant for years at a time due to there being no requirement for the states to actually put people in the senate. The seventeenth amendment was not catastrophic by any means.
x0x0 12y ago
that's the opposite of common sense. There is a gulf between making information instantly and trivially accessible -- google's search business -- and it existing at all. For a long time, the relative anonymity afforded by the difficulty and cost of finding information about people worked reasonably well. Google has now upset that apple card (and we well know their attitudes, but in case you don't: their sociopathic ex-ceo wants privacy for himself but not for you.) Effective anonymity (for most, but not all) doesn't require information to be vanished; it just requires it to be expensive or difficult to discover. edit: and ignoring the recent changes (ie pretending that it's somehow inherently right that everything linked to your name from even 20+ years ago should be instantly and freely discoverable) makes you, well, Google's tool.
- waqf 12y ago
  "Google has now […]?" Search engines were doing that 20 years ago, before Google even existed. The only thing that has changed is the amount of information that is posted on the web to be indexed — and the amount of time per week the average person spends using the web.
  - x0x0 12y ago
    No, there has simultaneously been a huge increase in quality of the search engines (driven by google, to their credit), plus how much of available documents they can search.
    - waqf 12y ago
      Sure, technological advances have allowed search engines to keep pace with the expanding web. But it seems an odd leap to get from there to suddenly blaming them for discoverability* of content. Besides, I don't think advances like PageRank (the founding technology of Google) are relevant to making old content about a named individual more discoverable.* This kind of quality improvement helps with ranking when you have 100,000 hits. But when you have a unique firstname-lastname combination with 3 hits, all that matters is the number of pages you were able to index. *Edit: replaced "available" with "discoverable" throughout, per x0x0's critique below, since that was what I meant.
higherpurpose 12y ago
If only that common sense arrived with the "porn" filter. Perhaps this insight comes from the whole porn filter thing, because they learned that, too, is unworkable.
bsder 12y ago
> Nice to see some common sense. Common sense would propose something workable. Instead, this is proposing straw men in order to try to win the PR battle. The "right to be forgotten" goes hand-in-hand with "paid his debt to society". It also goes hand-in-hand with "innocent until proven guilty". The powers that caused this privacy apocalypse in order to profit don't get any support from me until they propose a solution that allows people who are accused of a crime but later exonerated to expunge that information without having to pay for armies of lawyers.
- saidajigumi 12y ago
  > The powers that caused this privacy apocalypse in order to profit Wow, such loaded terminology. Those "powers" are literally nothing more than the logical and direct evolution of digital information technology. You can point fingers at some company or technologist or other, but those are incidental actors amongst a much larger sea change in how information is stored, copied, and transmitted. Just a very few years ago, the potential ramifications of these changes weren't really apparent to anyone. We're only just now coming to grips with it and like all periods of social change, it's not really clear how to proceed. There are significant and valid questions to be grappled with: if someone has a "right to be forgotten", what other rights and concerns must be balanced against that? Who holds responsibility for this "forgetting"? Google argues that it's unjust for it to shoulder this burden. They may be right -- this problem has so far been tackled by one branch of government in one world jurisdiction. Historically speaking, I think it unlikely this one case will be a full and fair treatment of the issue. > without having to pay for armies of lawyers. It may be that we've built infrastructure that makes other alternatives, all factors considered (including, but not just the rights of those who've "paid their debts"), not merely inconvenient but impossible in practice. This doesn't even mean that there may not be solutions, but that this approach to modern issues of privacy is a dead end.
Terr_ 12y ago
It's counterbalanced by this one: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140729/10593428044/uk-government-report-recommends-ending-online-anonymity.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140729/10593428044/uk-go...

droopyEyelids 12y ago

I'd like to bring up the idea of a Jubilee, an ancient idea that might be a guide for how to approach this problem again. Basically, in the old days, people were able to fuck up their circumstances permanently because they lived in a small village where everyone ended up knowing everything. Because that's obviously not conducive to a well-functioning society, everyone agreed to forgive and forget (debts at that time) every so many years. This might be a reasonable way to handle our current data congestion problems. What if companies agreed to flush their user data every ? years? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical) edit: this isn't an explicit plan, just something to chew on. Also it doesn't address Google's issue, so it's kind of a distraction to the thread i admit.

xchaotic 12y ago
7 years is too short a period in modern times, as even digital projects tend to benefit a lot from the old data and it's even more true for ambitious projects like rail or space. Even an average mortgage in western societies is 20+ years so you have to remember for that long at least. And 'forgetting' after 20 or 30 years isn't going to help, like it didn't in the case of the original Spaniard who caused the ruling.
pjc50 12y ago
And delete everyone's wikipedia article? And all the blogs and pictures?
seanflyon 12y ago
Interesting idea. How would you define "user data"? For example would it include a Wikipedia article you wrote, a news article mentioning you, an email you received... If you define user data in a more limited sense, I don't think it would satisfy the proponents of the right to be forgotten.
kjksf 12y ago
I'm not sure you understand the issue here because on the face of it you suggest that we burn our historical record (newspapers and obliterate website) every 7 years. The issue here isn't that Google has some information on you that leaks and if Google doesn't have this information then it won't leak. The issue is that there is a web page, Google indexes that web page (because that's the purpose of a web search engine), someone doesn't like what that page says about him and now they have a way to ask Google to remove that page from Google's index. It's basically decentralized censorship with frighteningly low standards for removal of information, nonexistent oversight and apparently no penalty for trying to abuse the system. There is no solution to the "problem" that doesn't involve heavy-handed censorship.

phkahler 12y ago

Any future solution to this should still not be Googles problem. If people are going to be able to have history removed from the net, they should have to have it removed from the net and not just from an index. To cover a lot of this, make some restrictions on distribution of criminal, tax, employment, birth/death records. We already have it in the US for medical records. Some of that information is public records, but why do those have to be free and/or indexed by search engines?

miguelrochefort 12y ago

The fact that we're starting to see people oppose the idea that "privacy is necessary at all cost" is comforting. I'm really worried about the "solutions" that are starting to emerge to "fix" privacy. It's starting to look eerily like SOPA/PIPA.

mkal_tsr 12y ago
So how do you feel about internet privacy as a whole? I see a post like this and my reaction is, "I don't want everything I do to be public, intended or not" and in that case, I do want privacy. I know if I post a comment on a site, it doesn't go away. But at the same time, I don't want every single page, time, location, and overall history of my life accessible to large corporations. How do you remedy that with the current technical entrenchment in the economy and how it relates to eroding the choice of privacy from individuals? Pure anonymity and pure open-data for all will never work, so where is the balance?
- twobits 12y ago
  You don't want to, but if someone strong enough gets interested in you, they can. You want privacy. I want privacy. But we don't and won't have any. Only very few and strong can afford that. "Protect privacy" has come to actually mean, protect the strong. We should abolish privacy for all. Not just the de facto, for us.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    If you know you can't protect privacy, what makes you think you can abolish it for all?
    - mkal_tsr 12y ago
      Not only that, but why is it reasonable to remove the choice of privacy? That's the part that concerns me the most about these discussions, is the way "the internet" should either be all one way, or the complete opposite. That will never be realistic and I feel we should be focusing on the balancing act that works the best for the majority of use-cases.

cortesoft 12y ago

Anyone else interested in making a site that just links to all the pages Google has been forced to remove from their search engine?

k-mcgrady 12y ago
I don't have the link but it already exists and has been posted on HN a few times.
icebraining 12y ago
http://hiddenfromgoogle.com/ http://hiddenfromgoogle.com/
- cortesoft 12y ago
  So the answer was yes, someone else was interested in making this site.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

Most policies and laws regarding regulation of the internet are wrong, unworkable, and unreasonable. What's one more?

k-mcgrady 12y ago
It's because they are made by people who don't fully understand the internet. On the other hand most of the people who do understand it are against any regulation of it and would not help in the creation of sane laws.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  That's a part of it. Unfortunately, many people who understand the internet still persist in imagining that what happens on the internet is somehow less real or less consequential than what happens in "real life". In reality the internet is a part of real life, just like movies, or literature, or the telephone, it's not a separate or different place.

dclowd9901 12y ago

For me to have the right to be forgotten would mean for you to not have the right to remember me. I think that pretty clearly illustrates the problem.

byerley 12y ago
I think you misunderstand the intent. It's not about making people forget, but rather protecting second chances. At some point, a red mark on your internet accessible past may become akin to ethnicity/gender/ect. It doesn't necessarily reflect the person you are, but it's still statistically prudent for someone else to discriminate based on that information. This is part of why we have such strict regulations on credit reporting.
- wyager 12y ago
  >but rather protecting second chances. And third, and fourth, and fifth, and as many times as you can afford to make a legal hassle for someone, chances. The world isn't always super convenient, and extremely onerous legislation like this definitely won't help.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- yuhong 12y ago
  I don't think things like this is the right solution to the problem, at best it is a workaround. I don't like anti-discrimination laws either BTW, but that is a different matter.
- dclowd9901 12y ago
  I misunderstand nothing: You don't have a right to second chances either. The world either decides to forgive you or it doesn't. It's not up to you, it's up to them. To impose such a right would be to try to force forgiveness in the minds of others, which, again, pretty clearly illustrates the problem.
  - byerley 12y ago

oh_sigh 12y ago

I think "Right to be forgotten" should be forced upon the media, not search engines. If the media didn't have the information on their website, then major search engines wouldn't index it.

wyager 12y ago
>I think "Right to be forgotten" should be forced upon the media Awesome idea. "Well, Mr. news agency guy, the president wants this whole 'tax misappropriation scandal' thing to be forgotten. Otherwise, you may run into some legal trouble. After all, it's his right."
- oh_sigh 12y ago
  How is that any different from what the EU is forcing google to do?

genericacct 12y ago

"unworkable"? Yes I am totally ready to accept IT advice by a bunch of people who wear wigs to talk.