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EU Court of Justice Paves Way For "Right To Be Forgotten" Online
Mark.JUK (1222360) writes "The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has today ruled that Google, Bing and others, acting as internet search engine operators, are responsible for the processing that they carry out of personal data which appears on web pages published by third parties. As a result any searches made on the basis of a person's name that returns links/descriptions for web pages containing information on the person in question can, upon request by the related individual, be removed. The decision supports calls for a so-called 'right to be forgotten' by Internet privacy advocates, which ironically the European Commission are already working to implement via new legislation. Google failed to argue that such a decision would be unfair because the information was already legally in the public domain."
Paris may forget you cheri, but marketers never will.
May the Maths Be with you!
Safe to say that corporations now have the same inalienable rights to removing incriminating evidence?
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Because some censorship is good, and some is bad? I say just refuse to return any results on the guy, and say it's because of the court order.
I can't help wonder what happens is a person who wants to be forgotten is referred to by someone else. Removing search results regarding some particular person may mean unintentional removal of content that someone else created and want visible.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Courts are based on both sides arguing their case: Google needs to gain standing and appeal.
davecb@spamcop.net
so by the wave of legislator's arms, all information about us online is simply going to disappear?
i call shenanigans.
i mean really...do these people surf the same web as i do?
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Donald Sterling's going to love this.
The origin of this trial is, among others, the story of a person that had debts, paid them finally, but google displayed results of the period he had still not paid them (forums, webpages, blacklists...). This guy even changed his name, because employers would not hire him after they had made a small search on google. He decided to confront the big google in court, and after many years, he has won. This is the main reason, the "right to be forgotten".
Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
As it turns there are others at the trough. Pay 'em, Teh G, pay 'em NOW!
We forgive, but we never forget.
The article mentions Mario Costeja González, but doesn't mention a whole lot. Something about an auction and "repossessed" due to "taxes".
Being interested in government foreclosures against it's own citizens, and hoping we can better our laws (I'm an American in the U.S. actually), I'd like to read up on this. So, I'll search: Mario Costeja González repossessed taxes
No luck, too much about this story comes up. I'm actually mildly interested in the tax story. Does the EU not want us to learn about the situation? What about freedom of speech, or is that simply something the EU doesn't cherish?
Will fix all this! :)
Sounds like a slippery slope to people and corporations being able to selectively remove negative (sorry, irrelevant) information about them.
Not to mention numerous cases of old, bad information, such as bankruptcy, actual arrest records, etc.
Worst of all there are several companies who exist solely to blackmail individuals into paying to remove negative information. All totally legal in some jurisdictions.
This is a good law we need it.
P.S. Someone mentioned companies and/or other large organizations using it. They already get the same thing done by paying large amounts of money to lawyers to sue people for 'copyright' infringement over videos of them committing crimes.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
In practice, that would require legislation in each jurisdiction to recognize former debtors as a protected class under equal employment opportunity law.
Wonder how this will be enforced when a page might consider a first and last name only, and there are many people with the same combination. Now Google will have to be the arbiter of whether a request is legitimate, and not being made by someone unconnected, but simply having the same name.
is the Right to be Tracked.
If I want to call up $company and tell them "delete everything you know about me from your index." This implies that without asking them, I've granted them the ability to track me.
This also puts quite a burden on me to call them up and say, "Hey, I just joined BowlingLeague.com as user StrikesAPlenty, please delete me from your index.
Also, how do you prove that a given user really is you? Your name probably isn't that unique. Which "Bob Smith" are you?
...it's about remembering to not serve out this piece of information.
Anything attached to you as a person should forever belong to you, regardless of where or when you make any such information available, publicly or privately. You also should not legally be able to sign-away your information in any permanent way. You should, at any time and for any reason, reserve the right to remove any information pertaining to you regardless of where it is stored anywhere in the world. I don't want to hear people whine, "It's too difficult," or, "It'll be too expensive." All I want to hear is, "What do we need to do to get it done." No if's, and's or but's.
Hurray for Europe and it's newly inaugurated right to revise history! I'm sure the Hitlers, Mussolinis, and Francos are going to take great advantage of this ruling now that those situations have been resolved. No more embarrassment!
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
It seems to me as if Google and other search companies can simply treat this right of privacy as simply being another type of take down request. An alternative way of looking at this is that an individual has a sort of "copyright" privilege over certain aspects of their private history.
If someone wants to escape their past, they need to get a retraction of the DATA itself, not all links to the data.
In the case oif the spaniard who wanted his bankruptcy to go unnoticed, he needs to get the owner of that factoid to remove it. If the fact remains online, then it's most certainly *not* someone else's responsibility to route others around the minefield you've laid.
This ruling is censorship, pure and ugly.
Just use Baidu or Yandex or another search engine..., it's a multipartite world, choose your poison :)
The decision is effectively unenforcable globally. For example, baidu is great for searching google-MPAA-censored content, etc.
You cannot proceed from the informal to formal by formal means
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
Next!
What purpose does all this have, other than allowing people with shit in their past to hide it. I can only see one kind of person genuinely benefiting from this, and it's people in positions of power, hiding bad publicity. So yes, eu, go ahead and allow your corrupt officials and scum bag citizens delete their crimes from public eye. Great plan.
I don't post as an anonymous coward to hide my identity. I've posted when I was clearly in the minority, but I still post, and I've taken some crazy karma hits for it too. My karma is pretty good, so I don't mind the occasional hit because I'm not in the majority opinion, but I don't write inflammatory or troll posts either.
I'm pretty sure a lot of the commentary would be better off without AC posts as well.
Your description sounds nice, but if you RTA that is not what happened here. The guy went bankrupt. Lost his house. Newspaper reported the forced sale of said house (online). Google indexed the newspaper article. Judge says newspaper (online) can stay. Link must be remove from google.
What a slippery slope this is. If the newspaper has a search engine, does that link have to be removed? Many newspapers are part of a chain/umbrella organization. Does their search list have to change? What if it is a static index on the media site? What if he wants to keep the links to his daughters wedding, and only drop the links to the foreclosure? Can he pick and choose which articles are indexable and which aren't? How?
There is no balance here, just a hopeless attempt to change the past that isn't feasible to implement technically anyway.
I don't think that word means what you think it does.
Oh, it's timothy...
Never mind. At least this one's readable and has complete sentences.
Didn't read the law itself, but the articles on the subject I did read mentioned nothing about internal corporate data.
In short, while you may have the right to demand certain publicly available links to be removed, this does nothing to curtail what the "dossier" on you that the company is likely to use as main profit generator will contain.
Doesn't really sound like a "right to privacy" as a "pay-wall" ruling to me.
any searches made on the basis of a person's name that returns links/descriptions for web pages containing information on the person in question can, upon request by the related individual, be removed.
SEO.
Companies are persons. This gives them more control of their name.
They certainly won't want any competitors' links to be listed in search results, or ads, when their name is searched.
Now they just need to exercise their "right" of removal.