Slashdot Mirror
Spanish Company Tests 'Right To Be Forgotten' Against Google
suraj.sun writes with an excerpt from an article over at Ars Technica: "Los Alfaques, a bucolic campground near the Spanish town of Tarragona, isn't happy with Google. That's because searches for 'camping Alfaques' bring up horrific images of charred human flesh — not good for business when you're trying to sell people on the idea of relaxation. The campground believes it has the right to demand that Google stop showing 'negative' links, even though the links aren't mistakes at all. Are such lawsuits an aberration, or the future of Europe's Internet experience in the wake of its new 'right to be forgotten' proposals? Legal scholars like Jeffrey Rosen remain skeptical that such a right won't lead to all sorts of problems for free expression. But in Spain, the debate continues. Last week, Los Alfaques lost its case — but only because it needed to sue (U.S.-based) Google directly. Mario Gianni, the owner of Los Alfaques, is currently deciding whether such a suit is worth pursuing."
Next up: Germany uses the "right to be forgotten" on all events between 1939 and 1945.
Wouldn't it be cheaper, easier, and more effective to simply rename the campground?
Hasn't this lawsuit already been dismissed by said courts?
The disaster had absolutely nothing to do with the camp, and its location was completely coincidental. While censorship is bad, it's also rather unfair for such a disaster to needlessly hurt tourism for years after. There really isn't a "right" choice here, just different levels of wrongness.
I'll bet Santorum wishes Google would forget him.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sounds like a job for search engine optimization services. Bury all those old news stories.
They should contact/sue the hosts hosting the content, and not Google
If the campground sues and wins, then we forget about the campground, but that won't affect the disaster. The campground does not own the disaster. To forget the disaster, then the disaster must sue.
What about MY right to remember history the way it truly happened?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
There's no way in hell your "right" to be forgotten is more important than our right to remember.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
It was only dismissed because they sued the wrong entity (a Spanish Google subsidiary rather than Google itself). The dismissal says nothing about the merits of the case, and it can be refiled against Google.
There is a big difference between the right to be forgotten and the right to decide what is remembered and what is forgotten.This picking and choosing seems to be a completely untenable situation.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
You are going to have to come up with a better argument in favor of Google, a commercial entitity, in reminding people about a tragedy of which another commercial entity was an innocent victim. Your snarky post has me siding with the folks in Spain.
And to paraphrase Santayana, those who are forbidden to learn from history will learn nothing from history.
The 'right to be forgotten' sounds fine-- if the campground wishes to remove all mentions of itself, then by all means, they can. But they can't pick and choose what gets eliminated based on their own criteria of 'good' and 'bad'.
It rather reminds me of that Belgian newspaper who brought suit against Google to stop linking to any of their pages... and complained when Google did that and their traffic dropped through the floor. (Though they referred to it as some kind of hostile retaliation...)
We are caught in a dilemma. While most people trust Google search indexes / algorithms and, thus, its results, Google is, nevertheless, a private company. As such, it will be regularly (probably more and more) attacked by some people for the same - apparently legitimate - reasons as the ones mentioned in this story ; Google being unable to prove the relevancy of such results without revealing the secret algorithms. The dilemma is, can we let/trust Google as an honest company that does the best it can to produce the fairest results? Or do we tend to have to rely, in the future, on a public/independent association/organization that will certify the results/algorithms are not rigged?
As surprising as it can be, I think we tend to the latter.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I'm sure Rick has his fingers crossed on this one...
Or at least it seems so in this (apparently Dutch) re-enaction
I don't have a sig.
Yes.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
> posted something (e.g. a newbie question) to a forum, or participated in some public event
> invasion of people's privacy
You've got your "public" and "private" all messed up, but why let that get in the way of Google bashing, right?
We the people, who are not ceo's or board members, who are not politicians or relatives of politicians, who were not born rich and have no lust for power and derive no pleasure from domination of others are at a crossroads. One path is control by "institutions", government, finance, religion, corporations and another is unfettered, uninhibited communication and freedom of expression.
The powerful hate anonymity because that is the only weapon the weak truly have. They hate uncontrolled communication because it makes them feel powerless, as they can't exercise their resources against it.
The authoritarian institutionalists will of course claim that anonymity and freedom are terrible things. They will trot out the usual bogeymen of the times in attempts to exert more control and gather more power for themselves.
We the people need truly unstoppable means of communication that can't be shut down. The current internet is a good first step but in the name of efficiency too much of the physical layer is consolidated, traceable, and under someone's jurisdiction.
Freenet was another good try but it is not nearly usable enough for the normals.
We need a mesh network where anyone who wants to can add nodes or listen in. It needs to have multiple protocols so that even under the direst circumstances of pure sneakernet or station wagon full of vhs tapes so the message will still go through and can't be stopped.
We need a way to distribute nodes without anyone's permission. For example solar powered wifi grenades that we can throw on a roof, autonomous mobile transmitters that re-arrange themselves to keep the network stable even if under attack, induction powered flexible credit card sized transmitters that can be surreptitiously slipped behind an electrical faceplate.
We need a way to add nodes faster than the "authorities" can take them down. We need a means of communication that is so common and simple to deploy that no government can try to take it down without giving up any pretext of legitimacy.
And we need all of this soon. Because the government and corporations and institutions are trying as hard as they can to lock down the current internet. And if we don't have our new, invulnerable network up and running before the internet is lost the chance to ensure the freedom of future generations will be lost with it.
What is... is. Any decent tourbook that includes this campsite will of course mention the disaster. It is feckless to ask any supposedly objective information source to skip over a significant element of a place's history.
Or a person's history. "Here are my transcripts... Oh wait! We have a right to forget that C- in calculus."
"Really? Somehow I think not Mr. Woolman."
As I said, What is simply...is. So the place in infamous. So what? Why not capitalize? Build a shrine. Pay some monks to consecrate it. Build a museum filled with grisly photos. Put up a flower wall. These Europeans simply need to take a page from the How To Be An American Handbook. Seems to me these people are sitting on a goldmine. Picture this: Next to the grisly search results a Google text ad that reads. "See the Alfaques Museum and Shrine." Some people just don't realize when they have it good. Sheesh!
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Next up, China sues Google to stop showing 'negative' links for Tiananmen Square. Ad infinitum.
The disaster happened in 1978. That's a long time before Google existed! If they worry about association with it so badly, why not just change the name of the bloody campsite! Job done. Idiots.
Well, I sure won't.
These guys will learn the hard way about the Streisand Effect ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect ).
Heck I would just rename the campground and associated website. It would cost less than the lawsuit and would be a lot easier than trying to rewrite history.
With the money I'd save, I'd even set up a camp ground sponsored road side shrine (To make sure that no one would accuse you of changing the name to hide the history). The only thing this camp ground is guilty of is bad luck. If the truck had been 2-3 km down the road they would have never been a news story, except for maybe bad sun burn.
Oh well some people always seem to learn the hard way.
----- "Profanity is the one language that all programmers understand."
Google doesn't just go into its database, do a count of what web pages contain a term, and return those web pages ordered by number of references. Google uses a complex, hand-tuned algorithm that is strictly proprietary. A search for the town shows pictures of the accident because Google chooses to have an algorithm that does so, not because having that happen is a natural result of searching.
If Google tweaks their algorithm to make pages more or less prominent based on what people at Google personally think of them--and there is no question that Google does exactly that--then it is reasonable for someone to request that Google not do this in a manner which causes them financial damage.
Everyone on Slashdot seems to be responding as if Google's search results for this camp are based on happenstance, which isn't really right.
How about thinking before asking questions and researching before asking questions?
There are also these things called handles, aliases, nicknames, etc, that one can use when subscribing to many different forums. They offer a bit of a veil of anonymity.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Block the portions of the internet you don't like. Forbid them access to your country.
really... you might as well just disable internet altogether.
Happy now? People have a right to express themselves. If people want to show horrible images of your beach and give it poor reviews that is their right. You don't counter that by suing them. You counter it by flooding the search engine with a different set of links. Talk to an SEO company and just pay them. Or hand out a set of instructions and have everyone in the town click on different links or submit different information. I should think even a small town should be able to collectively force an algorithm to show different content.
Man up and join the 21st century.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Both the Los Alfaques disaster and Nazi Germany are events that occurred several decades ago, so interested parties should have a right to complain about the ranking of search results based upon a simple search like "Los Alfaques" or "Germany". And Google should take the initiative to improve the ranking of the results.
Note, I am not saying that Google should sanitize the results. Searches for "Los Alfaques disaster" and "Nazi Germany" (or anything of that ilk) should definitely present the relevant results first. The generic searches should also present information about the disaster and the war, and even do so on the first page. Google should also work to present independent information as the top results, rather than marketing information from a tourism bureau. It is simply insanely morbid place the disaster/war results at the very top because, let's face it, it affects living people in a detrimental way because of something that happened well over a generation ago.
change the name?
...
Want's that law intended for protecting individuals? Or is this the old 'businesses are people too' shtick? Where's the damn Wikipedia article.
They really need to start suing all the people that clicked on the links for the horrific images, as they are the reason that they spring to the top.
The campground wants the bad results removed. These images and pages belong to other people/sites/etc. They have a "right to be forgotten", but that won't extend to other peoples property. If it was pages/results on their site, it'd be fine, but they are not, and what they are really trying to do is remove competion from the search results for their own commercial benefit.
I've always had a hard time sympathizing with this sort of attitude toward reality. What a case!
She blinded me with science, she tricked me with technology. ~ Thomas Dolby
It was only dismissed because they sued the wrong entity (a Spanish Google subsidiary rather than Google itself). The dismissal says nothing about the merits of the case, and it can be refiled against Google.
IAAL, not one who understands European, but issues of jurisdictional standing etc are very much part of what I would consider the merits of the case.
That Google's Spanish subsidiary could not be sued (apparently because it did not run the search engine, but only engaged in marketing) may turn out to be significant. Assuming Google has no other corporate presence in Spain, would the court enforce the judgment, nonetheless, against this subsidiary?! If not, and assuming a US court would not enforce such a judgment, that would rather limit the effect of this law as regards extra-national search engines, even where they have a Spanish corporate presence.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
So basically you want to force search engines to only list nice, clean un-objectional results that don't offend anyone... all so you won't see anything that might upset you. Nice. That is how all censorship and oppression starts. Anything from censoring nudity to homo-sexuals being banned from kissing in public. Someone might be offended so it must be hidden.
You are the enemy of any person who desires freedom. If we left things up to your kind we would life in a sanitized world were those who object to Telly Tubbies because one might be gay control all speech. And I will see you dead before that happens.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is not about the right to be forgotten,this is about the commercial sanitized web, where no search result may interfere with business and the business of marketing. Related to it are the religious nutters who want to censor the world of anything that might offend. The water-shed but also "Don't ask, don't tell" are symptoms of this. They might seem harmless but once you start giving into these extremists, freedom goes out the window.
It after all never ends. Take this case, at what page of image search ARE the charred corpses allowed to start appearing? Bottom of the first page? 2nd page? For what search results? There is always more sanitizing to be done.
Telly tubbies anyone? Lot of fuss because one of the characters supposedly was gay. Can't have that. Not because being gay is bad of course... it just needs to be hidden. From toddlers, from small children, from teens, from young adults, from adults... go into your ghetto and don't come out and upset right thinking people!
Search engines and the internet have allowed us to do something unheard of in previous era's, to consume any information we want regardless of other human beings. If you were to ask in a christian town in the library for a book on homo's, you might not get what you want, information is easily censored on a local level. With the internet, you can get ANY opinion on the subject, good and bad and make up your own mind. Doesn't mean everyone will, but you can. And that is a great power to have.
Censoring search results because someone doesn't like them might seem harmless in individual cases but cases set precedent and precedent is abused by those who know their individual case gets no symphaty.
I am fairly certain a certain cruise company would like NOT to have a certain accident be linked to it constantly especially now it is again in the news with another ship. How far, how soon would you censor search results? The answer? Always to far and to soon.
Freedom of speech dies fastest when you are free to speak but nobody is allowed to hear you.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
And by the way, why don't they just buy a sponsored link if they want to catch more searchers?
or else we would have to burn down all the newspaper collecting libraries or lock them up so no one can access them any more.
If it's really the right to be forgotten, they want, give them that. But I don't think that's what they really want, they want the right to censor *someone else*.
I have no problem with them being forgotten. Then searching for the camp site will show only those horrifying pictures, and not anything interesting for tourists.
However, they should not be allowed to have the pictures removed. That's not the right to be forgotten, that's having some else's pictures forgotten, aka. censorship.
We're often hearing from businesses that we should trust them and consumers to make the right choices when it comes to buying their products, irrespective of how unheathy, privacy invading or otherwise insidious, so now that some business is complaining that some images of a distaster appear alongside their business in a search, well they can fuck off. Suddenly consumers CAN'T make the right choices now? You bizniz types can stop opposing reasonable legislation that doesn't require everyone to be an expert in everything to avoid being ripped off then I'll have some sympathy.
Another misleading /. article.
Can you guys please hire a few european editors, who might have half a clue on things this side of the pond?
The "right to be forgotten" doesn't even get touched by this nonsense lawsuit. First, it's not yet a law, so how could it? Second, it is about your own data and information. Think FaceBook no longer being allowed to ignore that you deleted your account and keeping your data anyways.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
What about the victims? Would they want the memory of it erased?
What about the lessons we can learn from it? Those who cannot remember, yada yada.
I'm sure more people search for the accident than for the current camping site. Should Google become a memory hole?
Camp santorum would be an excellent name for the new camp.
Hilarious, however what Facebook, Google etc are doing now is a bait and switch. You give them the data for one purpose and you wake up to find it's used for another purpose you didn't intend.
So the right to withdraw your personal data in that case is not unreasonable.
Look at Carrier IQ, we wake up, find it can grab a whole load of personal data, they keep saying they only will ever use it for technical support purposes, but their own documents show it's used to track usage stats and other data. They claim its not personally identifiable, yet grabs URLs, and an ID that uniquely identifies the phone.
Is it unreasonable when someone has lied to you to withdraw the data you gave them?
Facebook app sends all your private contact data to Facebook. Is it unreasonable for those people to want their data removed? They didn't agree to have that data handed to Facebook, FB took it from a third party!
This is a good law, not a Goodwin law.
Looks like a good spot for a vacation that shouldn't have as many ugly american tourists DUE TO THE DISASTER.
Google already forgets and censorships something called porn.
I search "fuck" and results are images of fingers...
So, tell me, why with porn and not with disasters, massacres, etc?
History seems to have a lot of impact on current German laws etc. While much of the rest of the world seems willing to flush privacy down the toilet, Europe and Germany in particular are pretty damn vocal about respecting privacy etc. I'd put a lot of this to them realizing the dangers of collecting massive amounts of data on private citizens movements/likes/dislikes/religion/political-views/etc, and how such data could be abused.
In the US people do not have right to privacy, but in Europe and some Asian countries they do. Instead, we prefer to have our children's personal information to be accessible by sexual predators with minor effort. Thanks Google, thanks Facebook
The victims want to be remembered!
What happened in Shanksville?
Is having the search results censored/forgotten appropriate? No.
Are images of charred human flesh appropriate results for searching 'camping Alfaques?' Probably not (anymore, at least).
IMHO, i see this as a problem with inaccurate google search results. When I search for 'New York City,' I don't want photos of 9/11. I want those photos when I search for 'September 11,' 'World Trade Center,' 'New York City 9/11,' etc.
If Google cares to, they should just update so that if you want the photos of the Los Alfaques Disaster, you need to make your query more specific towards that genre of results.
I mean, what if you actually wanted to see photos related to camping in Alfaques? What are you supposed to do, search 'camping Alfaques -bbq' ?
camping Alfaques -bbq
'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'
As soon as all the web pages on the internet stop linking to sites that want to be forgotten, they'll stop showing up in a Google search.
Can I sue TV guide because they keep telling me Opera is on at 1pm on weekdays, when I want to forget Opera has her own TV show?
This is an exciting new step for us all!
Want to visit Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya? Don't worry! Nothing bad has ever happened there! Just think of the tourist dollars coming in (but not a lot of tourists making it out, but we'll be suppressing that.)
Want to finally put that nasty 9/11 behind us? Fantastic! We wiped the twin towers from history just like a church in the Soviet Union! Never happened!
It's been a long time.
It's history. They have moved. Why not rename?
Take a tip from Google and call it BETAques.
--
On the Internet, everyone's an expert. Right?