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?
I'll bet Santorum wishes Google would forget him.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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...)
Let's look at this another way. Why should this campground in its present day form be considered more relevant/important than the historical facts surrounding the 1978 disaster that happened to occur at the site? Search engines are in the business of providing results weighted by relevancy and importance.
Nobody is being slandered here. History is simply being reported.
Write failed: Broken pipe
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
Why should they sue the hosts? Historical fact is neither libel nor slander, nor is it hosted with malice.
Removing history we don't like is called censorship and is Orwellian in the extreme.
--
BMO - doubleplusungood.
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."
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.
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.
Unless you are claiming that someone at Google is deliberately going out of his/her way to explicitly manipulate the results that turn up when someone googles the name of the this campsite, then I think it is fair to call what happens "a natural result of searching". What general ranking algorithm Google uses isn't relevant; its results are (by definition) the natural results for that algorithm.
then it is reasonable for someone to request that Google not do this in a manner which causes them financial damage
Sure. You can request anything you like, and it is then up to Google to decide whether or not they want to comply with your request. But it's Google's web page, and Google's server, and Google's search algorithm, so unless/until Google becomes a regulated public utility, Google gets the final say about what content they put on their site. People who don't like Google's service can apply for a refund.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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
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.
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