5 ms·

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 expectati

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...

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...