Pedophile Asks To Be Deleted From Google Search After European Court Ruling

Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Jane Wakefield reports at BBC that a man convicted of possessing child abuse images is among the first to request Google remove links links to pages about his conviction after a European court ruled that an individual could force it to remove 'irrelevant and outdated' search results. Other takedown requests since the ruling include an ex-politician seeking re-election who has asked to have links to an article about his behaviour in office removed and a doctor who wants negative reviews from patients removed from google search results. Google itself has not commented on the so-called right-to-be-forgotten ruling since it described the European Court of Justice judgement as being 'disappointing'. Marc Dautlich, a lawyer at Pinsent Masons, says that search engines might find the new rules hard to implement. 'If they get an appreciable volume of requests what are they going to do? Set up an entire industry sifting through the paperwork?' says Dautlich. 'I can't say what they will do but if I was them I would say no and tell the individual to contact the Information Commissioner's Office.' The court said in its ruling that people could request the removal of data related to them that seem to be 'inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed.'"

Comments

I beg to differ.

[gijoel]

I don't see how a conviction for possessing child porn is irrelevant or outdated. So I don't like his chances.

Re:I beg to differ.

[bradley13]

The problem is: Google has to review it. The court provided no guidelines other than the specific case they based the decision on.

And have you read that? It was a businessman who didn't like Google linking to articles about his previous bankruptcy. Now, I would think the bankruptcy of a business type might just be relevant to my decision whether or not to contract with him. Apparently many of his potential customers thought the same way. But the court disagreed, and used this case as justification for the general decision.

If Google refuses, you can cite this decision and take them to court. Now, one guy is no problem - but we are already seeing the beginning of the flood. When it becomes thousands, then millions of cases - just how are they supposed to deal with this?

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how a conviction for possessing cocaine is irrelevant or outdated. So I don't like his chances.

Child pornography is so controversial that talking about it in any way that is not clearly and violently negative is met with vicious personal attacks. Nonetheless, these are ad hominem and therefore illogical. The above sentence illustrates how child porn and drugs are no different for the purposes of evaluating possession. An argument could even be made that possession of child pornography is less harmful than possession of drugs; not only does child porn not harm the person's body as drugs can, but if a pedophile is fapping to kiddie porn, they're a lot less likely to go rape a child.

Notably, Japan does not criminalize possession of child pornography, but does criminalize the abuse of children and creation/distribution of said pornography.

Posting as AC to avoid potential of said ad hominem. (That alone is a sad statement about how shitty people are when this subject comes up. I shouldn't have to "protect myself" for being logical and level-headed.)

Re: I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats their own problem. If they want to do business in europe, they have to respect european laws. They are free to close services there.

Re:I beg to differ.

[beh]

I don't think they have much of a chance - a politician can't argue that his former record is irrelevant to his current re-election campaign -- similarly a doctor asking for bad reviews to be removed; unless maybe they are very old bad reviews and new reviews are better.

I would think these cases are on par with some stupid court cases, we've seen elsewhere - like McDonalds being forced to not make their coffee quite as hot as it used to, because someone might scald themselves. There are always people that will try and immediately get an advantage out of a situation. Whether they'll get through with it is a wholly different matter - but I think just from the headlines, that these people will have a tough time arguing that this is a "irrelevant" old news.

Re:I beg to differ.

[c]

I don't see how a conviction for possessing child porn is irrelevant or outdated.

Well, if he was a minor with pictures of his girlfriend, it's technically child porn, but somewhat excusable. If he'd received a pardon for the crime (dunno if that's available in his jurisdiction) there might be a case.

The problem, fundamentally, isn't the crime that he's trying to have erased, but that the standard of "irrelevant or outdated" is so subjective; it's insane to suggest that Google just take the word of some random person, and it's insane to actually make Google try to evaluate the merit of each claim.

The Spanish case that generated the ruling is a particularly good example. If the information was irrelevant or outdated, then why was is still on the net? If it was an individual trash talking someone, that's one thing (and maybe better actioned under a libel or harassment claim), but if it's a news archive or public documents like auction records then *someone* obviously thinks it's still relevant enough to continue publishing.

Simply put, Google's in the business of indexing stuff that *other* people consider relevant or important enough to publish on the Internet. It's a low bar, admittedly, but asking Google (or Bing, or any other third party) to evaluate the motivations of publishers isn't fair or particularly viable.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Get out of the search industry and focus on ads

Re:I beg to differ.

[plover]

I think Google can't deal with this, nor should they. When Mr. Childpr0n requests removal, Google should provide a helpful link to the EU's Supreme court, and say "we don't make these decisions, they come from your courts, who have accepted responsibility for deciding. Please file a lawsuit with them, and come back when you have a judgement in your favor."

You may have a "right" to be forgotten under certain circumstances, but it shouldn't be up to Google to interpret those circumstances.

Re:I beg to differ.

[TubeSteak]

If he'd received a pardon for the crime (dunno if that's available in his jurisdiction) there might be a case.

Isn't the general principle that once you've done the time, you've paid for your crime?
Why would a pardon be any more relevant of a criteria than the successful completion of a prison sentence?

Maybe search engines should consider a response similar to google's chillingeffects.org DMCA posts.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Politicians are public figures by choice. "Normal people" are not public figures. Also, the hot coffee case had a lot of merit; I'd recommend you read up on it, because I heard it ridiculed constantly while I was in school and was surprised when I learned the facts of the case and how INSANE the coffee temperature really was. As for "people will try to get an advantage out of a situation," in this instance it is someone exercising a legal remedy granted to them by law, so that characterization might be misleading.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sucker! This is just one of many cases, but you've fallen for the Google defense side because the first card they used was "children". The fact it's pure click bait too makes you a double sucker.

Re:I beg to differ.

[L4t3r4lu5]

Convicted, imprisoned, released, and now a free man (still on List 99, most likely, so can never work with children or vulnerable adults). Or do you think that a person should continue to pay for past transgressions indefinitely? If so, I hope you're nowhere near the law making institutions of the UK.

You know nothing of the situation; Maybe he created images, maybe he just posessed images, maybe they were thumbnails in his webcache from visiting 4chan on a bad day, maybe he was sent them anonymously in an email and reported them to the police who then said "Posession, in fact just viewing, these images is a crime. You're nicked mate."

Oh, you say that things are almost never black and white? Say it ain't so, gov!

Re:I beg to differ.

[StripedCow]

This guy should simply trademark his name, then sue everybody using it in the wrong way/wrong places.

Re:I beg to differ.

[rmdingler]

...but if a pedophile is fapping to kiddie porn, they're a lot less likely to go rape a child.

Even if I stipulate that your premise is correct and a citation to support your claim exists, there is the argument that allowing kiddie porn to be viewed makes it lucrative... so it continues to get made.

Encouraging the exploitation of more children.

Re:I beg to differ.

[BilI_the_Engineer]

The "for the children" crowd is made up of irrational losers.

Oh, no. He had images. Let's waste resources convicting people who possess certain kinds of images, rather than going after the actual rapists. In this case, you shouldn't focus on both at once, because possession of images shouldn't be a crime to begin with.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Nidi62]

Convicted, imprisoned, released, and now a free man (still on List 99, most likely, so can never work with children or vulnerable adults). Or do you think that a person should continue to pay for past transgressions indefinitely?

I would say being on a list limiting where you can work/live/visit/etc for the rest of your life pretty much is indefinitely paying for past transgressions. And if he is on such a list, then I would say news articles relating to why he is on that list are still relevant. If he is ever removed from the list, then I think he can argue that the information is irrelevant and outdated.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Jason Levine]

There problem then becomes the flood of lawsuits. Google can handle one lawsuit, no problem. Two or three? Sure. But what happens when a thousand people are suing them over a thousand different links appears throughout their search results? Can they defend against a thousand cases at once? What about ten thousand? A hundred thousand? Can the courts handle this flood as well? Google will either have to wind up settling each case, caving in to each request, or fighting a war on a thousand fronts. And if they do the first two then people will learn that they can file a lawsuit and get what they want from Google. This will open the floodgates even more.

Re:I beg to differ.

[BilI_the_Engineer]

The ones at fault here are the ones making it. If someone makes more, then it's their problem. If we don't like kids being raped, then go after the ones making it to begin with, and stop wasting resources going after people who possess images.

Also, I would say "Not all child porn costs money.", but the 'for the children' crowd is so irrational that they'd probably say even someone looking at child porn encourages them to make more, as if that's a valid reason to forbid images.

Re:I beg to differ.

[jabuzz]

I drink tea *EVERY* single day of my life that is hotter than that coffee was served. If you gave me a cup of tea at the temperature the coffee was served I would return it as not hot enough. Clearly the coffee was not served at an insane temperature.

Re:I beg to differ.

[nctritech]

During the case, Liebeck's attorneys discovered that McDonald's required franchisees to hold coffee at 180–190 F (82–88 C). At 190 F (88 C), the coffee would cause a third-degree burn in two to seven seconds.

You drink tea while it's 180F? If so, how do you still have a throat?

Re:I beg to differ.

[FireFury03]

I don't see how a conviction for possessing child porn is irrelevant or outdated. So I don't like his chances.

If the sentence has been served then is it really in anyone's interest to keep persecuting someone for an crime that they once committed?

If someone is still a danger to the public, they shouldn't be allowed out in public unsupervised. If they aren't a danger to the public then the public doesn't need to know.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Megol]

You must be a superhuman then as normal people would get severe burns if trying to drink something like that.

Or a liar.

What's most likely?

Re:I beg to differ.

[rmdingler]

Hmmm. There are a couple of things I would like to wipe from the collective memory of the earth's people, like that day in the third grade when I stepped on a nail and cried in front of the whole class... I still blame that incident for Jenny Lou not accompanying me to the 5th grade social, rather than my own childish cowardice.

These folks don't want forgiveness so much as they desire redemption. Just remember this: There are orders of magnitude more societies in history that would've stoned a pedophile to death rather than let him serve his time and live again as a free man with some restrictions.

In the US, sex offenders pretty much have to register their address for the rest of their lives, so deleting irrelevant in the eye of the beholder search results will still not get your dot off that map.

Re:I beg to differ.

[erikkemperman]

This guy should simply trademark his name, then sue everybody using it in the wrong way/wrong places.

Worked wonders for Scientology, that.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Ioldanach]

The vast majority of kiddie porn is swapped freely among people on P2P networks/darknets. The people who would exploit children will do it anyway. Tell me again how it is that this encourages "more" exploitation of children? You clearly don't know what you are talking about.

Find a community of like minded people in which to share your interest fosters and normalizes your interest, whether that interest is antique cars, steam engines, British fine cuisine, or kiddie porn. There are some interests we do not want to foster and normalize.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll just leave this here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:I beg to differ.

[stjobe]

I drink tea *EVERY* single day of my life that is hotter than that coffee was served. If you gave me a cup of tea at the temperature the coffee was served I would return it as not hot enough. Clearly the coffee was not served at an insane temperature.

It was served at 88 degC (190 degF), I sincerely doubt that you drink tea that hot. Perhaps you want it served that way, but you do NOT pour 88 degC liquids down your throat.

From the wikipedia page about the case:

Liebeck was taken to the hospital, where it was determined that she had suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent.

Reading further, she originally sued for $20,000 (hospital costs + lost wages), to which McD offered her $800.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Xest]

"You may have a "right" to be forgotten under certain circumstances, but it shouldn't be up to Google to interpret those circumstances."

The problem arises because the following are true:

1) All companies in Europe are bound by existing data protection law

2) This ruling was based on existing data protection law, NOT the EU's proposed right to be forgotten law

3) The existing data protection law has been around for over a decade, just that until this case no one with an operation as big, complex, and so blatantly public facing as Google has had it applied to them so there's been no fuss made of it

4) The EU's proposed right to be forgotten law is actually a general update to data protection laws intended to clarify things for the mobile/social age. Again, it's a separate thing to that which was applied in this case.

So what we have is everyone getting caught with their pants down, existing law being applied to a major internet player, but just a bit too soon for the provisions of the new law that would be easier on them to be available. The actual directive that contains the right to be forgotten will actually make things better than the existing law because it actually provides clarity and answers to pretty much all of the concerns people have raised here.

It's worth reading the following if you're interested:

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-r...

A choice quote, that will probably shock those who think the EU is out to re-write history because the only information they've had to date is from scaremongering sensationalists:

"The right to be forgotten is of course not an absolute right. There are cases where there is a legitimate reason to keep data in a data base. The archives of a newspaper are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right to re-write or erase history. Neither must the right to be forgotten take precedence over freedom of expression or freedom of the media. The right to be forgotten includes an explicit provision that ensures it does not encroach on the freedom of expression and information."

Hopefully this clears things up - long story short, the existing law is actually WORSE than the directive containing the right to be forgotten law. The directive also includes explicit provisions to ensure the law does not encroach on freedom of expression and that it's entirely about protecting personal data in the face of fairly legitimate concerns.

It's easy to forget in the face of summaries that cherry pick stuff like paedophiles, and dodgy doctors that this law was as much influenced by the NSA's mass surveillance that we were all upset about what feels like only 5 minutes ago. It's as much to ensure that the US (and UK et. al.) understands that there will be consequences to using corporations to harvest personal data and build a global surveillance network based upon that. It gives companies like Google the ammunition they need to take to the US government and say look, we can't just hand you this data because that then puts us in breach of European data law. It gives them ammunition in their arguments against the US government's excessive over reach and abuse of secret courts and so forth.

Ideally people would read the link above before commenting further, but I wont count on it. Some people are too interested in feigning outrage to give a shit about the facts of the ruling and the law in question.

Re:I beg to differ.

[c]

Isn't the general principle that once you've done the time, you've paid for your crime?

That's a lovely general principle. That's why we, as a society, are perfectly okay with hiring convicted pedophiles to teach kids, or having convicted armed robbers manage the cash in our ATMs?

I'm generally against using a "one-off" crime to punish someone in perpetuity and deny them a decent quality of life, particularly if it was of the "I was young, stupid and desperate" sort of thing. Shit happens. But a criminal history with high recidivism rates or for particularly heinous crimes can arguably have some predictive aspects.

Why would a pardon be any more relevant of a criteria than the successful completion of a prison sentence?

Because a pardon is, getting back on topic, a formal analysis of whether a criminal conviction is still relevant and/or outdated.

In a magical world where completion of a prison sentence implied rehabilitation, then yes, it would be roughly equivalent to a pardon. In the world where we live, successful completion of a prison sentence just means someone hasn't fucked up so badly that they're still in prison.

Of course, even pardons aren't perfect. Depending on jurisdiction, they may be nothing more than a receipt for a large bribe. But that's still a step up from "got out of prison".

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

and again for the sake of the children etc all the noise and saliva spitting - I can imagine that the rulling was a bit vague on what qualifies as what but I would also imagine that court rulings also have some validity. Back in old good times in ol' country the crimes register which was contacted if one wanted specific jobs e.g. in banking etc removed records of some crimes after a while, other after some other time and some not at all. This is just a start but morons and good but ignorant souls here and there shout 'outrage'. You have to start somewhere. I would like much more to have a control about info that is presented to the public about me at least if that is not coming from a court of justice etc We may ease up on this at some point or maybe not. I do not think storing all shit forever is really needed nor I think it is desirable. We are not all fucktards like the guy who stored his clicks forever - most of us even if having such desires at some point realize their silliness and forget them when they grow up. The problem with current technology is that most of the geeks having highly skilled brains have stayed on the level of a small child when it comes to emotions and social life. Looking at it from another angle - if authorities have released an individual with dark past into the open they should be sure that the chances of committing some ugly crimes is small. Releasing said perverts but ensuring that they cannot find place to live does not serve any purpose - better shoot them directly and worry about courts doling out judgments on real criminals for real crimes (I guess there is a lot to watch for there too in any even civilized country)

Re:I beg to differ.

[nctritech]

A lot of crimes exist which (by statutory restriction or omission) cannot be pardoned by anyone, so while a pardon might be a formal analysis of whether a conviction is still relevant, it is also largely unavailable to most convicted persons.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's going to ruin his chances is this new request.

The old conviction will be purged, and this news about his request to be removed from Google listings linking him to pedophilia will live on.

Re:I beg to differ.

[gstoddart]

There are orders of magnitude more societies in history that would've stoned a pedophile to death rather than let him serve his time and live again as a free man with some restrictions.

Hmmm ... is that actually true?

Given the historical practices of marrying girls off quite young, I sort of get the impression that a lot of things which would have been considered "normal" throughout history are now classified as being a pedophile.

I've always thought that marrying off what we would consider pre-teens was pretty common up until comparatively recently.

I think historically where people had much shorter lifespans, this was actually pretty common practice.

I'm not defending it or advocating it, but I just don't buy the notion that more societies in history would have stoned someone who married what we would now consider a child.

History is full of what we'd call aberrant behavior, which was considered perfectly normal at the time. And your assertion seems like projecting backwards something that wasn't true.

Re: I beg to differ.

[Vinegar Joe]

Thats their own problem. If they want to do business in europe, they have to respect european laws. They are free to close services there.

If Google were a European company the European court would have thrown the case out.

Re:I beg to differ.

[drinkypoo]

Isn't the general principle that once you've done the time, you've paid for your crime?

Only if you believe in punishment. Some of us only believe in rehabilitation. Our principle is that if you've been rehabilitated, we can trust you. Prison isn't about that, except in a few nations full of rich white people.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Charliemopps]

I'd argue that your interest in having the data be removed would be evidence enough that it's relevant. If it were irrelevant, why would you care?

There are plenty of things I've done in my life that I'd like to forget. Sadly, we must all live with our own choices. Penitence sucks.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Ravaldy]

I agree. It's almost as if all this privacy is to protect crooks and people with bad intentions. Everybody deserves a level of privacy but I think some information should remain available.

On the flip side a news article claiming one is a pedophile for which the individual is trialed and found not guilty can be very damaging as the original article is often no linked to the final outcome. Maybe news providers need to maintain the news article and make the outcome obvious.

Re:I beg to differ.

[kbg]

If Google can handle millions of DMCA requests, then they can handle these request. Of course the bigger questions is why should Google have to handle DMCA or these request at all?

Re: I beg to differ.

[mjtaylor24601]

Thats their own problem. If they want to do business in europe, they have to respect european laws. They are free to close services there.

The phrase "be careful what you wish for" comes to mind.

Remember that this ruling will apply to every search engine or other public index. Does anyone in Europe really want them all to just pull out of Europe because the European legal system makes it impractical to do business there?

Re:I beg to differ.

[cdrudge]

Isn't the general principle that once you've done the time, you've paid for your crime?

No, you've only paid for your crime to the state. You haven't necessarily paid for your crime to society which is still free to judge, shame, and exclude you if they so feel.

Re:I beg to differ.

[L4t3r4lu5]

News articles stating why he's on the list are certainly not relavent. Information on List 99 is only for the purposes of Enhanced checks with the Disclosure and Barring Service, only performed when you apply for a job where you will be in frequent, unsupervised contact with minors. I have such a check performed because of where I work.

There's no reason for the lay public to know who's on the list, though, because there are other regulations for public interactions, e.g. restraining orders, other impositions on living / frequenting places within X yards of a school etc. The only, only reason you would have to disagree with the details of someone, who has paid for their crime via the criminal justice system, to not having their details removed is because you believe they haven't suffered enough. Well, tough; The courts decided they've done their time, and now they're free to do as they please. They may be on List 99, they may not; If they are, they will fail to get employment anywhere near children, and that IMHO is enough. If this guy was really such a menace to society, he'd still be segragated from it.

There. I stuck up for the rights of a deviant. Let the hate commence.

Re:I beg to differ.

[drinkypoo]

Let-go temp is only around 160. You can reasonably sip tea at 180, you just can't slug it.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm fairly certain the courts will back up well before Google does, though eventually Google will have to deal with it. Ideally though if the courts get log jammed then it may get people higher up to overturn this nonsense.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Ioldanach]

Your argument would also apply to the consumption of alcoholic beverages, which results in far more harm than kiddie porn. Also note that if distribution of it is illegal but possession is not, such "fostering" is also generally illegal the second it involves transferring said porn to someone else.

How does consumption of alcohol, which occasionally produces a negative outcome, compare with the production of kiddie porn, which always produces a negative outcome, an exploited child?

Distribution charges are generally filed against the person providing something, not the person receiving something.

Re:I beg to differ.

[AmiMoJo]

Simply put, Google's in the business of indexing stuff that *other* people consider relevant or important enough to publish on the Internet. It's a low bar, admittedly, but asking Google (or Bing, or any other third party) to evaluate the motivations of publishers isn't fair or particularly viable.

Why not? Credit reference agencies have millions of people on their files and a legal obligation to make sure that the information is accurate, and to purge it when it is no longer legally relevant. IIRC it is 6 years for bankruptcy. If someone asks for something to be changed or removed they have to evaluate the claim on an individual basis.

It is a lot of work for them, but that is the price for being the supplier of that kind of knowledge.

Re:I beg to differ.

[alphatel]

It gives companies like Google the ammunition they need to take to the US government and say look, we can't just hand you this data because that then puts us in breach of European data law. It gives them ammunition in their arguments against the US government's excessive over reach and abuse of secret courts and so forth.

It's one of those cases where the simple nature that everyone points to belies the trove of wealth that can be leveraged behind it.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

And get Soulkill in there to petition all of his calls to get Chinese take out that the NSA puts up on their site are deleted.

Thank God Snowden is in Putint-town, a symbol of Rand Paulian pride. Stop the drones! Increase the guns!

Save us from America's horrors Snowden, Euro-courts, Putin, and The Paul family!

Re: I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

The rest of the world does not need America or American software developers. They have their own.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Art Challenor]

Yet, when the MPAA/RIAA come to the door, they figure out a whole scheme that goes beyond the DCMA to block, or put ads on, material that their secret algorithm finds to be infringing on copyright.

So, they've already demonstrated that they CAN filter content. I see lots of repercussions to this ruling, but I'm not at all sympathetic to Google's plight - they already demonstrated that they have the technology and have used it for evil purposes.

Re:I beg to differ.

[c]

Credit reference agencies have millions of people on their files and a legal obligation to make sure that the information is accurate, and to purge it when it is no longer legally relevant.

Credit reference agencies have meta-data about when they were given the information, who they got it from, and specific dollar amounts, and there's a whole legal framework about how reports are made.

And they *still* routinely screw it up.

Google has an indexing date, a URL, and a blob of content. There's a lot of other stuff they can extract/infer from the content and response headers and they can perform an estimate of relevance (PageRank), but accuracy is obviously inconsistent even without things like SEO's messing with results, and the correctness of any content is governed by stuff like libel and copyright laws in balance with civil rights like freedom of speech.

There's a reason Google's search results have been, in court of law, identified as "opinion" rather than "fact".

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

The State represents the society. You are dead wrong, and the opinion you express is responsible for forcing criminals to stay repeat offenders. YOU are the problem with society.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are correct, but facts like these are unpopular among armchair moral crusaders.

Re:I beg to differ.

[rtb61]

The reality is, if a court can not take down the website providing the information, they have no right to take down a search result pointing to that legal web site, that is a straight up freedom of speech challenge and attempt by courts to purposefully illegal silence people, the intent is criminal as they are not targeting the website providing the actual information as being false or untruthful.

The only legal and fair challenge with regard web site searches is does it reflect the intent of the end user and providing the sites they are searching for and is not fraudulently misdirecting the user away from the sites they are searching for and ensuring it is what is claims to be.

To claim that the truth should be forgotten is to absurdly claim ignorance is to be valued over the truth.

Re: I beg to differ.

[N1AK]

The ruling applies to all companies. There's absolutely no reason to expect that this would have been treated differently based on the company. Europe actually cares about its citizens privacy, sadly it's just doing something misguided in this case.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Rinikusu]

:: shrug :: What if he served his time and was "rehabilitated" and no longer wishes to be reminded of his past life so he can move forward as a productive member of society?

Re: I beg to differ.

[H0p313ss]

The rest of the world does not need America or American software developers. They have their own.

And what has that given us? KDE?

(Mostly joking...)

Re:I beg to differ.

[Nidi62]

Actually, I think lists like these are over-used. Got drunk, took a piss in a dark alleyway and someone saw you? Cite them for public intoxication sure, but that doesn't qualify for sex offender status. An 18-year old is dating a 16 year old and the 16 year old's parents don't like him and report him? Shouldn't be a sex offender. A 15 year old gets caught with naked pictures of herself on her phone and gets charged as an adult with child porn(this one is always my favorite-if they are an adult then it can't be child porn, if it is child porn then they can't be an adult), shouldn't be on a list. Drawings of naked kids? Disgusting, but not really a sexual offense to me (possession of actual photographs or video should be as that involves harm to an actual person when it is created). Serial offenders, those whose actions have been shown to actually harm a living victim, those I have no problem being on a list, and their crimes should remain a matter of public record and be searchable by the public.

And in a perfect world, if someone is bad enough that they should be on a list and can't be around kids because they might reoffend, should they really be back in society to begin with? It seems they would be better off in a mental institution where they can receive treatment and remain segregated from society until such time as they are fit to reenter.

Re:I beg to differ.

[NoImNotNineVolt]

How do we know that production of kiddie porn is motivated by financial concerns? How do we know that eliminating the "market" for kiddie porn will eliminate or decrease the production of kiddie porn and the resulting exploitation of children? Is it not possible that pedophiles, hebephiles, and ephebophiles would continue to violate children and adolescents and retain photographic evidence of their crimes even without financial motivation to do so?

Conversations on this subject come across as a whole bunch of unfounded assumptions. It does not follow that legalization of kiddie porn necessarily encourages exploitation of more children. I'm fine with acknowledging my own personal assumption that most child abuse is not a result of it being "lucrative" but instead stems from family members (or close family friends) taking advantage of children to satisfy their own personal desires. Are you suggesting creepy uncles only molest little kids because it's "lucrative"?

Re:I beg to differ.

[Ioldanach]

We are not talking about production or distribution. We are talking about simple possession. Your argument is invalid, and furthermore, please do feel free to tell me how drunk driving deaths and beatings from drunk mommies and daddies are less harmful than masturbating to a photograph of child sex acts. I'm all ears.

They're not, and if every single drop of alcohol you drank was distilled from a drunk driver beating a drunk mommy and daddy, you'd have a valid comparison.

Re:I beg to differ.

[BattleApple]

You can't comfortably pour it on your crotch either

Re:I beg to differ.

[Solandri]

Actually, I think there's a simple solution to this for Google. I think this is a terrible decision, but if the only thing Google has to do is comply, well... Next time you do a search on Google, try clicking on the little button that says "Search Tools". That drops down an additional set of options, one of which is to limit your search by date. Mind you this isn't 100% accurate (I'm not sure how they figure out the date, whether it's based on what the page reports, or whether Google is recording when the page changes.

It seems to me all Google has to do is restrict EU searches so everything older than 10 years or whatever period the EU data retention laws specify is simply unsearchable there. You will never get a document older than the law allows as a search result. No need to respond to individual requests, simply remove everything which could be challenged under this decision. Google gets a quick and cheap way to comply with the ruling. The EU gets to deal with the consequences of this court-induced historical amnesia (e.g. I suspect the Internet Wayback Machine is just outright illegal in the EU now).

Re:I beg to differ.

[BattleApple]

It's surprising how much less sensitive your mouth is to temperature than the rest of your body. I'm not saying that's not ridiculously hot, but some people sip it annoyingly loud, cooling it in the the process.
If you're taking a shower, I'm not sure what the tolerable limit is for most people.. I guess around 120F, but make the water as hot as you can stand, then open your mouth.. it just feels warm

Re:I beg to differ.

[currently_awake]

Simplest answer: Anyone who demands to be forgotten gets put on a "no reply" list. Any time anyone in that specific country searches for that name they get a summary of the court case instead (no links at all).

Re:I beg to differ.

[AmiMoJo]

Can you imagine if there was a law where someone could send a take-down notice on copyright grounds, and if you didn't comply the had the option of suing you? Sites like YouTube would get thousands every day, and have to come up with some way of dealing with the quickly in order to avoid massive numbers of lawsuits.

Re:I beg to differ.

[3.5 stripes]

In theory, possession of child porn somehow implicates you in the abuse of children, possession of cocaine implicates you in the abuse (death even) of coca plants.

Re: I beg to differ.

[currently_awake]

They won't pull out, there is far too much money to be made. From their point of view this is just a cost of doing business.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing kiddie porn doesn't cause child abuse ...

Are you kidding??

Seeing kiddie porn means that kiddie porn was made, otherwise it wouldn't exist for the viewing.
If it was made, that means that somewhere, a child was abused for the production of said porn.

Perhaps the viewer would not personally go out and abuse a child, but the fact is that a child was (or many were) abused for their pleasure.

Re:I beg to differ.

[AmiMoJo]

That's a lovely general principle. That's why we, as a society, are perfectly okay with hiring convicted pedophiles to teach kids, or having convicted armed robbers manage the cash in our ATMs?

It depends on the crime. Child abuse and armed robbery never expires. Convictions for exceeding the speed limit or petty theft as a child do. After some time, prescribed in law, they are considered "spent" and you no longer have to report them to employers.

Unfortunately now anyone can just google your name and discover these spent convictions with little effort. I doubt there is an adult alive who hasn't broken some law, but that doesn't mean their lives should be ruined simply for some relatively minor past mistakes.

Re: I beg to differ.

[mjtaylor24601]

The rest of the world does not need America or American software developers. They have their own...

...who would also be subject to European laws and thus likewise potentially unable to run a successful search engine business without being sued into oblivion.

Re: I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep and they have some good ones. But this isn't some magic Anti-American ruling that developers from elsewhere will have a magic pass to make the business process easy.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't see how convictions become irrelevant or outdated, but most people do. Just pretend that you were able to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant stuff. Then from the premise that irrelevant things exist, you should be able to work on the problems anyway. HTH.

BTW, don't feel bad that you don't "get it." That is predicted and normal. It would be weird if you did have the ability to see everything.

Re:I beg to differ.

[AthanasiusKircher]

If someone is still a danger to the public, they shouldn't be allowed out in public unsupervised. If they aren't a danger to the public then the public doesn't need to know.

Indeed -- mod this up.

The "scarlet letter" approach to crime was only effective centuries ago in small towns where everyone knew each other already and thus would already be likely to know who should be avoided and why.

Either somebody is dangerous enough to be locked up or supervised, or they are not. Putting them in this strange limbo where they are free, but subject to ridicule or avoidance only if other people bother to use some sort of search engine or database is stupid.

(Of course, the sad reality is that most of these abuser registries and laws against abuse often end up casting the net way too wide, so these lists end up ensnaring everyone from serial baby rapists to some teen who was caught with a picture of his girlfriend who was only a year or two younger on his phone. But if we were forced to make a decision on whether to incarcerate all of these people for eternity, that would force the state to deal with these laws and issues in detail... instead, inflicting a life-long stain on a person's reputation seems to have a lower legal threshold to stick, so we go with that instead....)

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the coffee case was total bullshit. SHE SPILLED COFFEE ON HERSELF. It is not unreasonable to assume an individual will exercise caution when handling a hot beverage. Plus, the temperature wasn't unreasonably hot; it is well within the normal range of temperatures served to this day. Similar cases have been decided in favor of the defendants. McDonolads was unlucky and got sucker punched because no reasonable person would believe she could have actually won.

Re: I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes please, they can fuck right off. Cheers mate.

Re: I beg to differ.

[houghi]

As a European: Yes. I think my privacy is more important then the wellbeing of companies.
Google and major seach engines will find a way. The market is too big to ignore and if they don't, I am sure that somebody else will step in and replace them in Europe.

And it is not only what I wished for, it is what I voted for.

So again: if companies can not apply the rules, they should leave. It is wrong if governements would change the rules to please companies. The government isn't there for companies. It is there for the people.

Re:I beg to differ.

[c]

... but that doesn't mean their lives should be ruined simply for some relatively minor past mistakes.

I agree, and that's essentially part of my point, but is this really the fault of the search engines, or is it the "no forgiveness" attitude of employers (and a whole host of others that are in a position to make major decisions that massively affect someone's life) that's the fundamental problem?

It's not just a criminal background problem, either. People are looking at stuff like Facebook photos of someone partying, or political affiliations, etc, and making decisions about employability.

This isn't anything really new, it's just easier to dig up dirt on someone, it's possible to do it on a wider scale, and the results tend to be more authoritative. But there's always been the concept of a "permanent record". That's where expressions like "reference checks", "background checks", "not burning your bridges", "skeletons in the closet", etc came from.

Having Google take down information isn't going to make that information go away; if anything it's creating a business case for a "reputation search engine" to set up shop in a jurisdiction which wouldn't allow this sort of thing.

It's a huge can of worms.

Re: I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's your right to know about non discharged bankruptcies and any extant bans on him being a company director. If he has been discharged then it is outdated. I'm not saying the law is perfect but it is the law, even online.

Re:I beg to differ.

[cdrudge]

I guess I'll revise your statement to say state represents the interest of society as a collective. However it doesn't represent the members of society individually.

I look at it similar to freedom of speech. The government generally can't limit the expression of your beliefs with a few exceptions. However just because they can't limit your speech doesn't mean that I have to listen to it, I can't limit it within my own property, or that I have to accept what you're saying.

Similarly, if a criminal has done their time, then they have paid for their crime to the state/society as a collective. The state can't force them to repay another penalty (reincarnation) for the same crime. However if I was a employer at a bank, someone who robbed a bank or embezzled money probably is going to get scratched off the applicant list even if they otherwise would have been the perfect candidate. Someone who was caught shoplifting can be banned forever from a store even after they paid for their crime.

the opinion you express is responsible for forcing criminals to stay repeat offenders. YOU are the problem with society.

So where is the criminals responsibility for their actions? I disagree that I am the problem in society. I'm not the one that did the original crime. I'm not the one that chose to repeat committing a crime. If I didn't hire someone because of their record, I'm not causing them to go out and rob a bank. If I don't rent a house to a convicted felon, how does that make me responsible for them being drunk in public?

I as well as society in general can do much more to help reintegrate criminals back into society. But that doesn't me once their time has been served and we forgive them for what they've done that we also have to forget what they did too.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

If allowing something to be viewed makes it lucrative, the demand increases. That's what you're saying?
By that logic, murder videos, whether they be made by cartels or jihadists or ukranian teens, would also follow that trend. Where is the uproar over that?
How about accidents? Surely, with all this demand for new material, there is an upswing in people sabotaging stuff so more accidents, and thus video footage, can occur.
Certainly CP is not some magic item that varies so differently from the rest.

Re:I beg to differ.

[MrDoh!]

So I google a name of someone I'm about to do business with, nothing comes up now. I enter into a business relationship with this person, who then rips me off again. Can I sue the government for hiding this information away from me? I'd not have entered into this if I'd have known. Caveat Emptor is one thing, as long as you CAN do your due diligence, but for it to be hidden away on purpose here, and as shown, people with crimes are going to hide it, who's responsibility to find this out is it when they do these acts again? Sure as heck ain't Google,

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where does it stop? When is a person permitted to have a normal life after doing something wrong? When did any specific individual in society become the arbiter for who should and shouldn't be allowed to build a stable life?

Re:I beg to differ.

[LWATCDR]

Ahhh No.
It is on your record and it is up to the individual or organization to decide. For example a convicted felon can not own a gun in the US or vote unless they go to court and have their rights restored. The record is part of your punishment. You can often not get a job as a teacher or work at a bank if you have a felony record.
As to a job it will depend but if you have candidates and if everything else is equal then the one without a record will usually get the job.
It is as simple as that. If you are criminal it will have an impact on the rest of your life.

Re: I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you French? just asking

Re:I beg to differ.

[LWATCDR]

Minor mistake == misdemeanor and it does not have an impact.
Major mistake == felony and does have a major impact.
" I doubt there is an adult alive who hasn't broken some law,"
I would say you would be wrong. Things like speeding tickets are not even considered a crime. They are called infractions. I would bet that a very large number of adults have never committed a felony and a very good number have never committed a misdemeanor.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Jason Levine]

Yes, the DMCA was good in that it exempted the site owners from being liable for user-generated content. Where is went wrong (in this specific area), though, was that there were effectively no penalties for false DMCA requests. If I don't like something online, I can file a DMCA request and threaten legal action if it isn't taken down. If I have enough legal muscle, I can essentially get whatever I want taken offline.

This "right to be forgotten" is doing the same thing. What if I tells Google to take down all links to an article because I want it forgotten? If it is a frivolous request (for example, if I'm trying to get Google to "forget" about a competitor of mine to improve my search rank), what legal penalties will I suffer? If there are none, then this is going to be abused like the DMCA is.

Re: I beg to differ.

[pitonyak]

Where I live, I am forced to pay more money to a library than I would spend if I purchased every book I want to read. On average, the people where I live are happy with this or they would not approve the taxes to support it. An area (county, city, country, what ever) is free to pass (almost) any law that they desire and then they can live with the consequences. If the people that pass the law prefer the consequences of the law than the consequences of not having the law, then it will likely stay. I am aware of a couple of companies that opted to get out of certain geographic areas because they did not care for some of the laws and the effect on the cost of doing business (for example, it might take years to shut down a branch because the government does not allow you to close based on labor laws). Some people lost jobs in those areas, some services are no longer offered by those companies. Other companies likely came in and charged more money to cover their overhead or chose to just collect less profit. A typical (but not always) result is increased cost of something. As for the government being there for the people and not the companies, that feels more like a happy wish. I chose to remove my ramblings on people looking out for themselves rather than the good of someone else since you are likely able to as easily build that argument as I; especially if you have ever worked with or in the government.

Re: I beg to differ.

[machineghost]

No one here is crying about "boo hoo Google has to obey some law and spend some money". We all know Google has more than enough money to cover the costs of this decision, and we understand corporations should follow the law.

The issue is that by making up a new "right", and creating a new legal standard without any legislation to smooth the rough edges, the European court effectively just took away rights from others, like the right of parents to find out their neighbor is a child molester. Because they made a ruling, and not a well thought out law, Google will just blindly respond and deny the rest of us important information.

Re:I beg to differ.

[icebike]

The court provided no guidelines other than the specific case they based the decision on.

In that case, Google doesn't have to review it. No standards for review was provided.

They shouldn't review any of these, they should simply reject all of them.

(Or at best have a computerized review, that is programmed to deny in the overwhelmingly vast majority of cases. After all, if a computer algorithm was what got these links into the search engine, another algorithm can be used to reject claims that don't meet an excruciatingly tight set of criteria.)

Until the complainant comes back with a ruling from a court of competent jurisdiction, THEN and ONLY THEN, should Google review them, and they should still err on the side of rejection to force an even higher court to review.

The court made this bed - the courts can sleep in it.

Re:I beg to differ.

[AmiMoJo]

It's about keeping the bar high. Sure, even without Google you can find all this stuff, and I'm sure some company would happily take your money to find it for you, but at the moment it is a few key presses away.

It would be nice to think we could fix the problem with employers and bank staff, but in practice it isn't possible which is why credit reference agencies are so strictly regulated. Banks are a good example actually. Often when you apply for a loan the initial check isn't even by a human, just a machine that employs fixed logic like "if (bankruptcy) return(false);", so the law needs to make sure the record isn't there after seven years.

Re: I beg to differ.

[metrix007]

Luckily it's on the internet, and they can skirt around it.

Nothing stopping from Europeans paying money in SUD to Google USA, and Google's services will reach Europeans just fine from outside of Europe.

Re: I beg to differ.

[swillden]

They won't pull out, there is far too much money to be made. From their point of view this is just a cost of doing business.

No, they won't pull out. However, if it becomes impractical to really review every removal request, they'll just remove everything that gets requested. All other search engines and indexes will have to do the same.

The result will be that any information that anyone wants quashed will disappear from all indexes. Unless something happens to limit the obvious logical progression here, Europeans are going to find that they need to use proxies based elsewhere to make the web useful.

Re:I beg to differ.

[phorm]

Do those things actually happen in Europe? I'm fairly sure the "pissing in public = sex offender" is more a twisted thing in US law.
Similarly 18/16 and "self pics" aren't something I've heard of being an issue in European courts. (for the pics, teens sharing underage photos has come up in both the US and Canada though).

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly!

May I offer a compromise ?

You USAians get together and (completely and irrevocably) repeal the DMCA, and then we europeans will deal with this crap.

Fair enough ?

Re:I beg to differ.

[plover]

The law is fine. The law says "if you don't need the data, delete it." Great.

Google doesn't have the data in question. Google has links to the data in question. Other people have links to the data in question. Google has links to the other people's links to the data in question. The aggregation of these links yields search rankings.

If you want to enforce the right to be forgotten, the only rational approach is to go to the organization storing your faulty data and say "remove this", or "render this data unsearchable." Once it's gone, Google will have links to nothing, and they will fall in search ranking order to the point where they are not your problem.

The interpretation of the law was poor, and the faulty findings of the court are going to completely screw over the EU's ability to have effective or honest search engines. Good thing my country is trying a completely different way of screwing us all over, because your country's way is stupid.

Re: I beg to differ.

[icebike]

Bullshit.
Draconian rules from the EU are only trotted out against american companies.

The EU does not care about its citizens privacy at all, until there is a foreign company involved.
Half the EU countries have pernicious government spying even more deeply than the NSA.

This privacy a fiction trotted out only against off shore interests.

Re:I beg to differ.

[plover]

A million lawsuits aren't Google's problem. The courts would not be able to handle a flood like that, so they would enter the courts slowly, and Google could drag their feet until they actually receive a subpoena (or whatever the EU's equivalent is.) Figure that their courts could handle only hundreds per day, that limits the flood that comes into Google.

If their court system can't scale up to the impact of a million lawsuits a day, then that's still not Google's problem. It's their stupid decision, they need to live with the consequences they created. That shouldn't be Google's to deal with.

Re:I beg to differ.

[ultranova]

I don't see how a conviction for possessing child porn is irrelevant or outdated.

Who is it relevant for? Vigilantes? Schools and other institutions with legimitate need for this data don't rely on Google to get it, or if they do someone else should also be facing charges.

I really don't see why Joe Average should be able to access anyone's criminal record, which is what this is really about. If you think some crime deserves a punishment lasting for a lifetime, push for it in the legislature. Don't try to circumvent the law by abusing modern technology.

Re: I beg to differ.

[ColdSam]

Which would be far more successful without competition from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, ...

Re: I beg to differ.

[ultranova]

The issue is that by making up a new "right", and creating a new legal standard without any legislation to smooth the rough edges, the European court effectively just took away rights from others, like the right of parents to find out their neighbor is a child molester.

Actually, the right to privacy has long traditions while I've never heard of this supposed right to know about your neighbour's possible criminal history. No rights have been made up or taken away, an existing one was simply adapted to a new environment.

Re: I beg to differ.

[khellendros1984]

There is a number of requests that they could have to process that would make continued business in Europe unprofitable. If the costs of business go above the income generated by the business, they'll pull out (or significantly change operations to make it profitable to stay in that market, again). Will Google/other search engines receive that number of requests? That remains to be seen.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or hiring for childcare?
Or as a (regular, not school) bus driver, which just happens to be used by kids to get to school?
Or at a hospital?
Or at a field?/sports areana?

In order for restraining orders, etc. to have effect, the parties to those orders must be KNOWN. .. so, I don't know what you're saying.

Re:I beg to differ.

[drinkypoo]

You can't comfortably pour it on your crotch either

But I can comfortably pour it on yours. Especially if it leads to you being unable to breed. I don't see how that would happen, it's not that hot, but I can dream.

Re: I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

The market is too big to ignore, but that doesn't mean that Google has to keep people who do this as customers. I won't be surprised to see these people wiped from search results entirely (not just the requested info), and their Google accounts and IP addresses banned.

Re:I beg to differ.

[yuhong]

Yea, read the end of https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/... and weep. And as it happens Google recently fired Vic Gundotra.

Re:I beg to differ.

[nctritech]

Such a poorly worded article could (and probably would) legally constitute libel. Usually newspapers that insinuate such things use careful wording to effectively say that it is so yet not outright say that. Just enough semantic looseness to be "up to interpretation."

Re:I beg to differ.

[vemene]

Furthermore, I do not see how "irrelevant" has any sort of legally-precise meaning; it is a simple matter for Google to form-letter reply to each and every request stating that after careful consideration and due diligence, Google (and the NSA, obviously) has deemed any and all Internet-posted information referenced in the complaint to be "relevant" to its business model (and various multi-national security interests) and thereby shove the burden of proof right back onto the complainant. Let the various EU courts get clogged with several hundred million of these frivolous actions, as they so richly deserve.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Once the porn is made, the actions taken upon the child are done and over with. There is no further injury involved in having a copy of a visual record of the actions that occurred. Sure, you can disingenuously attempt to argue that the person is "re-victimized every time it is watched" but that is a total non sequitur. By the same logic, every time a video of an armed robbery or assault is watched, the robbed or assaulted parties are "re-victimized." You can't support your opinion because you're pushing a double standard, a special exception for a particular category of photograph or motion picture that you dislike more than others.

Re:I beg to differ.

[alvinrod]

I typically drink a lot of tea as well and it's possible to sip it at that temperature, but you wouldn't take a mouthful and swallow it. Also, when someone does drink something that hot in small quantities they're typically moving it around their mouth fast enough so that it's not staying in one spot for long enough to cause damage. Spilling it yourself is going to cause some of it to puddle or soak into clothing where it will remain in one spot for long enough to start burning.

Re: I beg to differ.

[Psyborgue]

Said this the other day when I heard about the ruling. I happen to live in France and if I start noticing this happening, i'm going to pay for a decent US based VPN. I shouldn't have to do that just to fucking Google something without censorship.

Re:I beg to differ.

[david_thornley]

If it required a judge to rule that the material must not be on a search engine, this wouldn't be a problem. Allowing anybody to request removal of material, without clear guidelines for Google (or any other search engine) looks more like a disaster.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Psyborgue]

A woman actually tried to do that with a site I put up. It didn't work. I didn't even bother hiring a lawyer for the dispute her case was so weak.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can mod this info down to -1 all you want but it'll still remain true:

The vast majority of kiddie porn is swapped freely among people on P2P networks/darknets. The people who would exploit children will do it anyway.

Re: I beg to differ.

[Darinbob]

Proxies won't help. If you win a suit to have a link taken down then it needs to be taken down completely, not just from local European servers. When you use Google to search it will search its databases in the US as well if it needs to. Since the link can still be found then this will be proof that the search site did not fully remove the link and thus could be subject to penalties. So the web companies would need to remove all their assets from Europe.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Darinbob]

I never understand why this case continues to be resurrected as the poster boy of what's wrong with the legal system when in reality it shows that the legal system worked pretty well in this instance. I just guess there are some people who feel all lawsuits are an abuse of the legal systems, except for the suits they bring themselves.

Re: I beg to differ.

[machineghost]

Your kid has a right not to get molested right? The ability to enforce that right goes down significantly if you can't find out about people in your neighborhood who have molested kids in the past (especially given that child molesters have the highest recidivism rate of any major criminal group).

Just because we haven't done a great job of enforcing that right in the past doesn't mean that privacy rights magically trump it.

Re: I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely incorrect on all counts. The US Department of Justice study on sex offender recidivism shows that sex offenders have a sex crime reoffense rate of 5.3% within three years of release; the New York Department of Corrections study showed that figure increasing to a total of 6% of all offenders "did it again" after ten years.

You have no fucking clue what you are spouting off about, and while you're trying to chase the ex-con and his wife and kids out of your neighborhood, the coach or the uncle or the school friend's parent (all with no criminal record, of course, because we all know that all bad people have criminal records and criminal records only ever affect bad people) is busy banging your child in the ass. Congratulations, hope you're proud of yourself.

Re:I beg to differ.

[jabuzz]

People walk on hot coals that are an order of magnitude hotter than that without even a minor burn.

When I first heard of the case many years ago I was surprised because to my mind I was drinking tea at least as hot as that every day. So I actually did an experiment and actually made a cup of tea, warmed the pot, used tea cosy and everything, then measured the temperature. It was just north of 90 degrees and I then proceeded to drink it, without suffering any injury. If you make a hot chocolate with instant powder and a freshly boiled kettle it will be hotter still.

Sure you sip at to begin with, but you don't suffer burns because the small amount you sip has insufficient thermal mass to inflict a burn on the mucus lining of your mouth, and rapidly cools down.

I could in fact pour a cup of coffee at 88 degrees over my hand without suffering significant injury as well for the same reason. It is physics of how you can walk on red hot coals that are more like 800 degrees than 80 degrees and still not get a burn.

What did it did it for the moronic twit who sued MacDonalds is that she spilt a significant quantity on her clothes in a small aread and it remained in contact with the same area for a significant period of time. Personally had I been the defence lawyer for MacDonalds I would have done a demonstration in court of drinking a hotter cup of coffee, and killed the case right there.

As they say experimental evidence trumps *EVERYTHING*. One day when I have time I will do a video and stick it on YouTube just to demonstrate my point.

Remember the trick is to sip at.

Re: I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

It only looks that way because the american companies try to ignore the present regulations and get prominently featured in court for those things. The european companies more or less adhere th the laws or at least fix things when they are called out on their misbehaviour.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Megol]

People walk on hot coals that are an order of magnitude hotter than that without even a minor burn.

The mechanism for that is well known: the outer surface of the burning coals have a very poor heat conduction ability.

In contrast water have good conductivity.

When I first heard of the case many years ago I was surprised because to my mind I was drinking tea at least as hot as that every day. So I actually did an experiment and actually made a cup of tea, warmed the pot, used tea cosy and everything, then measured the temperature. It was just north of 90 degrees and I then proceeded to drink it, without suffering any injury. If you make a hot chocolate with instant powder and a freshly boiled kettle it will be hotter still.

Sure you sip at to begin with, but you don't suffer burns because the small amount you sip has insufficient thermal mass to inflict a burn on the mucus lining of your mouth, and rapidly cools down.

If one sip one mix air with the liquid, something that drastically decreases the temperature. Now drink the same amount of fluid that you sipped. No don't do that, I don't want to be responsible for someone getting injured.

I could in fact pour a cup of coffee at 88 degrees over my hand without suffering significant injury as well for the same reason. It is physics of how you can walk on red hot coals that are more like 800 degrees than 80 degrees and still not get a burn.

You can't - there are many documented cases with significant burns for doing just that. Also you are wrong about the hot coals (see above).

What did it did it for the moronic twit who sued MacDonalds is that she spilt a significant quantity on her clothes in a small aread and it remained in contact with the same area for a significant period of time. Personally had I been the defence lawyer for MacDonalds I would have done a demonstration in court of drinking a hotter cup of coffee, and killed the case right there.

You are aware that this wasn't the first case of someone being severely burned by the McDonald coffee?

Also you are aware that the "significant period of time" for getting severe burns (2:nd degree or worse) is less than 1 second?

As they say experimental evidence trumps *EVERYTHING*. One day when I have time I will do a video and stick it on YouTube just to demonstrate my point.

Remember the trick is to sip at.

But this have already been tested to scientific standards and you are simply wrong. The Nazi government did scientific (though extremely cruel) experiments on humans in their concentration camps on different kind of wounds with different kinds of contamination to those wounds, experiments involving cooling of different body parts and also the reverse - heating of body parts. All using controlled environments and well documented.

The physics of scalding is well know and documented, thoroughly backed up with real world cases.

So I still think that either you are super human or wrong (knowingly or otherwise). As you apparently believe what you write I'll change the liar option to clueless.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically coffee.

Re:I beg to differ.

[rmdingler]

Your argument is compelling. Much of what you say is spot on.

For the purpose of creating an accurate analogy, I will stipulate the age that society has determined to be the cut-off for too young has indeed varied throughout the ages.

Now then, has there still always been an age that was considered off limits?

Re:I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Much of the pederasty in ancient Greece started at 12-13 years of age; in many cultures (both ancient and modern) onset of puberty has generally been the "green light," so to speak, which makes perfect biological sense since this corresponds to the ability to reproduce. While it doesn't quite work that way in homosexual contexts, it is the most convenient and obvious "line in the sand" to draw. Notably, it is mainly Western cultures that strongly denounce sexual activity with teenagers (regardless of whether it is with a peer or with a fully matured adult) while the legal age of (heterosexual) consent is as low as 12 years of age or onset of puberty in some parts of the world, particularly in some areas of Mexico. Some places today simply base it upon onset of puberty.

So, my best answer for an age that was always off-limits is this: the two options are basically "prior to the onset of puberty" and "under 12 years of age."

Re: I beg to differ.

[ultranova]

Your kid has a right not to get molested right?

Yes, everyone has a right to physical security.

The ability to enforce that right goes down significantly if you can't find out about people in your neighborhood who have molested kids in the past (especially given that child molesters have the highest recidivism rate of any major criminal group).

No, it doesn't. What the heck would I do with that information? Go pre-emptively shoot people I think might be dangerous?

Just because we haven't done a great job of enforcing that right in the past doesn't mean that privacy rights magically trump it.

You're the one who seems to think your paranoia trumps actual rights people have.

Re: I beg to differ.

[swillden]

Really? Wow. I hadn't realized this could affect non-European search results. That's even worse than I thought.

Re: I beg to differ.

[swillden]

Said this the other day when I heard about the ruling. I happen to live in France and if I start noticing this happening, i'm going to pay for a decent US based VPN. I shouldn't have to do that just to fucking Google something without censorship.

Another reply to my comment says that the ruling would require Google to remove links from all of their services, not just European ones. I don't know if that's true, but if so it means that (a) this European ruling could result in censorship of non-European traffic and (b) the US-based VPN wouldn't help you.

I don't know if that's true. If so, it's even worse than I thought.

Re: I beg to differ.

[Psyborgue]

I can't imagine Google complying if that's the case. My feeling is they'll restrict viewing for European IPs and that will be compliance enough.

Re: I beg to differ.

[swillden]

If the consequence to not complying is having all of their European assets seized and not being able to do any business with advertisers in Europe... choosing not to comply could be a really, really tough decision. Though I suspect they could bring enough pressure to bear through the US government to fight it off.

Re: I beg to differ.

[machineghost]

>>No, it doesn't. What the heck would I do with that information? Go pre-emptively shoot people I think might be dangerous?

Not take him up on his offer to babysit?

Re: I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Feel free to present a realistic and at least marginally likely scenario instead of this sort of nonsense. If the statistical risk to a child is lower than the risk of an automobile accident with serious injury, it's not even worth worrying about. The vast majority of people on a sex offender registry will want your little shits a mile away from them just so they don't have to worry about false and manufactured accusations or being dragged back into jail just because your kids do something stupid and get injured.

Re: I beg to differ.

[Psyborgue]

As far as I know, there is a US law that already allows companies to refuse foreign court orders that would conflict with the first amendment. I'm not sure on the specifics of how that would factor in here. Time will tell, I suppose.

Re: I beg to differ.

[swillden]

A US law can't stop an EU court from confiscating the EU-based assets of a US company.

Re: I beg to differ.

[Psyborgue]

Very true. I wonder how many fake Europeans will be taking advantage of this. I mean if all it takes is sending takedown request and there is no real penalty for false ones... We've seen what happened with the DMCA.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Xest]

Google does not simply hold just a link, it holds copies of data as well, hence why it provides snippets alongside search results and that's the problem - holding that data, which is, by law, classed as personal data, means they are themselves holding the personal data, and that makes them fall foul of the law.

Of course I'm not trying to argue the rights or wrongs of that but it's outright incorrect to say they just have links to the data, and that they don't have the data - of course they do, that's how they provide snippets in search results.

The interpretation of the law wasn't poor at all, it was the standard well tested and correct interpretation that has been applied for years. You may argue the law is poor, but there was nothing wrong with it's interpretation and Google absolutely does hold (and provide) a copy of the data.

Re:I beg to differ.

[BattleApple]

oh ho ho! you really.. burned me.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Rakarra]

And so now McDonalds is required to serve merely warm coffee, so by the time you arrive where you're driving to, it's lukewarm. Go progress.

Yes, I expect my coffee to be extremely hot. And I'm not so much of a dumbshit that I store it between my legs either.

Re:I beg to differ.

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

No, that's something I've also only heard about as a cautionary US tale. If that's happening in Europe as well, I'd also like to know.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Rakarra]

I agree, and that's essentially part of my point, but is this really the fault of the search engines, or is it the "no forgiveness" attitude of employers (and a whole host of others that are in a position to make major decisions that massively affect someone's life) that's the fundamental problem?

The problem is that for most job openings, an employer will have many equally-qualified candidates. Denying those with criminal records is an easy way of committing a first-pass culling to get a list of candidates for interviews.

Re:I beg to differ.

[Rakarra]

Where does it stop? When is a person permitted to have a normal life after doing something wrong? When did any specific individual in society become the arbiter for who should and shouldn't be allowed to build a stable life?

That's entirely up to the singular individuals involved.

Insanity

[everett1911]

What if google just pulls out of the EU completely? Force EU citizens to use either the US or another country's international version of google? Would they still need to apply to those crackpot rules?

Re:Insanity

[beh]

I think you can answer that question yourself:

What if mychildp*rn.com moved from the US to a country where child-p*rn wouldn't be illegal. Do you think the US would accept that site still serving "the US market"?

Obivously, this example is weaker, but I think without a presence in Europe, it would be (more) difficult to do business there - potentially giving rise to any competitor who WOULD be willing to go through with this and would therefore be in a better position to serve the markets here (don't think about the search itself, think about the advertising that makes their income!).

Re:Insanity

[Vermonter]

It would certainly still be serving the US market, but the site would no longer be under US jurisdiction, and getting the site taken down would then become a much more involved task.

Re:Insanity

[SuricouRaven]

It would cause a lot of problems in doing business with EU companies, many of whom would wish to purchase advertising services.

Re:Insanity

[Anonymous Coward]

What if google just pulls out of the EU completely?

..and risk losing the tax benefits and advertising revenue? Not likely.
As the rules would apply to all business operating in the EU the playing field is exactly the same.
I dont see them stepping away from the EU. Too much to lose.

Re:Insanity

[Anonymous Coward]

Leaving aside different cultural views on privacy, I can't imagine what benefit would Google gain by a pull-out.

They'd lose their brand recognition and other alternatives could spring up.

Google's aware of the laws of the countries where it operates and it should be in their interest to abide by them [precedent - Google in China].

A pull ourt wouldn't hurt the EU anywhere nears as much as it would affect Google (they dodge paying taxes - so little loss there, an opening up of competition from other players - so benefits to EU there, tarnished reputation as wanton lawbreakers ...).

Re:Insanity

[just_another_sean]

Won't someone PLEASE think of the advertisers!

Re:Insanity

[Anonymous Coward]

More involved, like, say, a drone strike?

Re:Insanity

[Anonymous Coward]

Your Government takes the view if you Do business in America the law applies to All your foreign branches too

Re:Insanity

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that the US (in)justice department and several of the courts hold that US laws apply everywhere in the world, regardless of jurisdiction.

Re:Insanity

[Agent0013]

Obivously, this example is weaker, but I think without a presence in Europe, it would be (more) difficult to do business there - potentially giving rise to any competitor who WOULD be willing to go through with this and would therefore be in a better position to serve the markets here (don't think about the search itself, think about the advertising that makes their income!).

Unless the European people would prefer to use a search engine that actually has some relevant results to give out. Then they will prefer to use the US search engine rather than the limited and useless European search engine. And spending time and effort to prune much of your database out and ensure it does not get re-indexed does not sound like something that would put a company in a "better position" as you put it. To me that sounds like a large cost and since your results are incomplete you are actually at a competitive disadvantage also.

Re:Insanity

[mod prime]

They would lose 100s of millions of users, and with it all that marketing cash. Not likely.

A right to be forgotten

[Anonymous Coward]

We do have a right to be forgotten online, imho. We do NOT have a right to have specific things we don't want other people to know about us "forgotten" while the things we agree with remains. Seems to me, all of these examples are people who want certain specific negative things removed instead of wanting all online records of their existence completely obliterated.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[B33rNinj4]

You're never truly forgotten though. There will always be a paper trail out there. In regards to the ruling from the original lawsuit, I'm sure it was embarrassing for the man's repossession to continually show up in a search. However, if he was looking for some type of loan, it would have popped up anyway. As a society, we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that privacy, and in many cases anonymity, are disappearing.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[DigiShaman]

Politicians will be among the first to leverage this law. How convenient that selected statements were to just...disappear....from the Internet. More so prior to an election season.

History?? Fuck that. Revisionism is in vogue now.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[Daemonik]

All I can say is thank < insert deity of preference here > that Aristotle, Caesar, Gengis Khan and all the other people throughout history never had a "right to be forgotten" or we'd know absolutely nothing about our past. Who's to say what a future historian may or may not find useful, and who are we to rob our descendants of the legacy of our lives? There are historians and archaeologists who'd kill for any kind of day to day minutia of just daily life in various ancient civilizations.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[organgtool]

We do have a right to be forgotten online, imho.

I consider myself to value privacy quite a bit but I really don't understand where this line of thinking comes from. Do you believe you have a right to be forgotten in real life? If so, how would you enforce it? If not, then why do you believe the online world should behave differently from the real world?

Re:A right to be forgotten

[DoofusOfDeath]

We do have a right to be forgotten online, imho.

You didn't give a principled reason or argument as to why being forgotten online is a right. Maybe you mean that, in your humble opinion, it should be a right?

I think the "is" vs. "should" distinction is very important in this case, because it affects whether or not the courts are obligated to rule a certain way.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I hope Google keeps all of it available outside Europe so people can just go there to get it anyway.

Your right to be forgotten does not exceed my right to remember you and blab about you. This isn't about inaccurate data.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[nctritech]

It used to be that you could be forgotten by moving somewhere else and starting a new life there. That is not generally possible now, thanks to the Internet and no limitations on access to public records. There is a huge difference between having to go to the local courthouse of a place to see what someone has been convicted of and being able to find the same information by banging it out on Google in your bedroom in 30 seconds.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[Jason Levine]

Exactly. All this isn't "being forgotten", it is historical revision. In my past, I was a perfect saint. Don't believe me? Google me and you won't find one single transgression. I made sure of that. We've also always been at war with Eastasia.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[organgtool]

That seems like a valid point, but I'd like to point out one important distinction: it is not a right to be forgotten, but a privilege. In your example, a suspicious member of your new town could place a phone call to a friend in your old town, have them look up the public records, and provide that information to the people of your new town, which is very similar to what Google currently does. Since that behavior is completely legal, then your "right" to be forgotten is more of a privilege that is currently being degraded by technology. But forcing someone to censor their speech, which most people consider to be an inalienable right, so that some other people may enjoy a privilege just doesn't seem fair.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[Xest]

Incorrect. Direct from the EU's pages on the upcoming law related to this case:

"The right to be forgotten is of course not an absolute right. There are cases where there is a legitimate reason to keep data in a data base. The archives of a newspaper are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right to re-write or erase history. Neither must the right to be forgotten take precedence over freedom of expression or freedom of the media. The right to be forgotten includes an explicit provision that ensures it does not encroach on the freedom of expression and information."

Re:A right to be forgotten

[Anonymous Coward]

Re-summarized: We want to let people sue for removal and win, but we're not sure exactly why.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[nctritech]

If you don't tell anyone what town you're from, they can't do what you're suggesting. Google is very different from that scenario in that it is extremely fast and costs nothing for the searcher to use; a series of phone calls and the work required to examine a body of court documents to locate anything by a specific person is worlds apart from typing stuff into Google and looking at the screen for five minutes.

I'm also not making any arguments directly related to this new law, I'm simply fleshing out the reason that this sort of law has come about. People in general are ignorant of how criminal justice actually works, especially on the side of convicted persons. If people did not automatically hold a person's past transgressions against them, this would all be moot; however, there is a strong assumption in Western societies of "once a criminal, forever a criminal," particularly in the U.S. and this assumption is a large driving force of the vicious cycle of criminal reoffense.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[Xest]

Well, the BBC listed some examples (some good, some shit) the other day in answer to that very question as to who would want this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/maga...

Re:A right to be forgotten

[bigpat]

The solution is for the EU to stop making bad laws that undermine freedom of speech. What is written online and transmitted is the product of human expression it isn't just "data". But I agree that if Google's page rank algorithm isn't accounting for how old and unchanged the content of web pages are when ranking results then that is giving us a skewed view of the world and it is unfortunate if people are harmed by their own search results when they have moved on to other things. Certainly the passing of time shouldn't automatically bury web pages relevant to your search, but it should be a factor. And yes I am well aware of the ways that websites try to game their search results by updating content automatically so it would be a burden on Google to come up with some sort of way of weighting page rank using time so that really old unchanged articles are buried deeper in the relevant search results.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[organgtool]

If you don't tell anyone what town you're from, they can't do what you're suggesting.

That's not to say that the information can't be found, just that it makes it much harder. So we're in agreement that this whole thing is a matter of convenience.

I'm also not making any arguments directly related to this new law, I'm simply fleshing out the reason that this sort of law has come about. People in general are ignorant of how criminal justice actually works, especially on the side of convicted persons. If people did not automatically hold a person's past transgressions against them, this would all be moot; however, there is a strong assumption in Western societies of "once a criminal, forever a criminal," particularly in the U.S. and this assumption is a large driving force of the vicious cycle of criminal reoffense.

I agree that people tend to be too harsh on people with a criminal past, but I still do not feel that this law is justified (and I realize that you haven't commited to claiming it is justified either, although you seem to be somewhat sympathetic with its intentions). This is a matter of the consequences of people's perception of past transgressions translating to future transgressions. While I agree that those assumptions may often be unfair, I shouldn't lose my ability to search publicly available data and form my own opinion on what that person has done and whether or not they have changed their ways. Besides, I would hope that the ability to find people's wrongdoings more easily would act as a bit of a deterrent the next time a person considers morally-questionable behavior. Rather than making a law that prevents people from finding publicly available information, I believe we should address the problem by using statistics and success stories to educate the public about criminal reform rather than take away people's ability to learn about their past.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[AmiMoJo]

The current law specific blocks politicians, or anyone, from having arbitrary stuff removed:

"The right to be forgotten is of course not an absolute right. There are cases where there is a legitimate reason to keep data in a data base. The archives of a newspaper are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right to re-write or erase history. Neither must the right to be forgotten take precedence over freedom of expression or freedom of the media. The right to be forgotten includes an explicit provision that ensures it does not encroach on the freedom of expression and information."

The first guy only won because his bankruptcy was no longer relevant (legally credit agencies can't report it any more). Politicians, paedophiles and other people simply looking to hide stuff that remains relevant (a conviction for child abuse must be declared for life) won't get very far.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[nctritech]

The bottom line is that there are no "answers" to sociological issues, including this one. No matter how we try to handle any of this sort of stuff, we're going to piss a lot of people off. It will be interesting to watch this unfold.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[Anonymous Coward]

It used to be that you could be forgotten by moving somewhere else and starting a new life there.

And that's supposed to be good, how? What kind of people would want to move somewhere and start new life without others recognizing him and knowing what he has done in past? Serial murderers? Politicians?

Re:A right to be forgotten

[DigiShaman]

Right, sure, uhuh. I don't give a damn about what the law says. Amending an existing law is far easier than passing the first. You have far more faith in man than I do in that this won't be abused.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[Anonymous Coward]

In your example, a suspicious member of your new town could place a phone call to a friend in your old town, have them look up the public records, and provide that information to the people of your new town, which is very similar to what Google currently does.

No it fucking isn't, because it requires a friend in the old town.

Genius.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[david_thornley]

It may well be that, in the EU (or at least Spain), a credit reporting agency may not report bankruptcies over N years old. In that case, it would not have popped up if he asked for a loan.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[Darinbob]

I don't necessarily think we have a right to be forgotten online. There are some laws that grant this ability but that's not the same as being a right.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[mikeiver1]

Agreed, I was thinking the very same thing. Google and others should make sure that not just the negative but ALL links to the person/s is removed. In this way people like the doctor are deprived of any benefit as well from having the negative items removed. I do think that in addition there should be a notice that the person requested that negative information links be removed. There should be a stigma attached to those that try to game the system.

Re:A right to be forgotten

[Krishnoid]

Politicians will be among the first to leverage this law. How convenient that selected statements were to just...disappear....from the Internet. More so prior to an election season.

Mr/s. Politician:

We have received your request to remove links to websites disparaging your character. To properly and accurately comply with your request, all content regarding your person has been removed from our search results.

For your protection to prevent this problem from recurring, re-indexing of web sites containing references to your person will begin not earlier than six months after the date of this notice, and newly indexed content will be subject to rigorous manual review before addition to search results.

Thank you for promptly notifying us of this issue, and good luck in your reelection campaign.

The Internet

Disaster!

[bradley13]

This court decision has opened the floodgates. The ramifications threaten the entire, open Internet. Search machines can be prohibited from linking to publicly available material, and be taken to court for doing so. From there, it is a very small step to prohibiting anyone from linking to publicly available material that someone, somewhere finds distasteful or undesirable.

The court has demonstrated incredible ignorance. This decision is a disaster.

Re:Disaster!

[Threni]

Calm down. It's no different to YouTube anti piracy policies. The solution will likely be similar.

Re:Disaster!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not about finding something distasteful or undesireable. This is strictly limited to private information that is made public against the will of the person it concerns (which in the EU is automatically the owner of such data).
It's basically a DMCA for people instead of just corporations.

Re:Disaster!

[DoofusOfDeath]

If a past conviction or legal ruling is available as a matter of public record at a courthouse or in a newspaper, I don't see how it becomes "private" just because Google provides a link to said newspaper / courthouse document.

From what I know of the European court's decision, it really seems to me like they didn't think this one through.

Re:Disaster!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing there's no precedent to this, such as DMCA takedowns.

Re:Disaster!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a disaster. There's a very simple way of dealing with this.

Google tells the EU court to FOADIAF until they "decide" to see reality. What is reality? This:

Google doesn't generate content. Google (search) doesn't host that content. Google merely reports content that it sees. Google will continue providing an accurate view of the internet's content. Google will not misreport on content that it is allowed to see. Google will not report on content that it is not allowed to see.

IOW, go take it up with the content host. If that happens to be another Google service, then there's a reason for Google do actually do something about it. Until then, FOADIAF.

Foot gun!

[jbeaupre]

Those people can be rejected by pointing out the links are now newsworthy and relevant because they were the first to request take-downs.

I'm no lawyer

[njbair]

It seems to me that the real precedent will be set by Google in how they handle this. Just say no and send them on, as the lawyer suggested. If you've got negative info appearing on Google, are you going to risk further attention through a court case? No way. You'll drop it or, oh, I don't know, maybe go after the website who posted it?

Re:I'm no lawyer

[DoofusOfDeath]

That might be a workable solution, until courts start awarding damages.

Re:I'm no lawyer

[Anonymous Coward]

it will work Until someone does go to court and then sets the precedent of how the court expects the mechanics to be handled.

Google may actual want this to happen to then challenge that ruling.

right to be forgotten

[countach]

Assuming there is such a right when the data is "'inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive", who exactly gets to decide? If you've got to fight it out through 3 courts to get a final ruling on whether a particular situation conforms to these tests, then its not particularly practical for most people to take advantage of it.

Re:right to be forgotten

[boristdog]

I'm thinking there will eventually be a "statute of limitations" for data. Anything more than X years old can be requested for removal.

Re:right to be forgotten

[Jason Levine]

However, on the flip side, if thousands upon thousands of people start suing Google to "be forgotten" (but only in those instances that they don't like... keep the good ones), can Google defend against all of those cases? Would they be forced by the sheer number to settle? Would this, in turn, lead to more lawsuits as people look for their easy settlement? I can imagine a subset of the legal profession cropping up with commercials along the "hurt at work? call us" line. "Got something embarrassing listed about you on Google? Is a search engine showing the world something you'd rather they didn't see? Do past indiscretions keep coming back to haunt you? Then call 555-SUE-GOOG! We'll sue those nasty search engines and make sure that your Internet history is nothing but sunshine and roses. [cue catchy jungle]"

Re:right to be forgotten

[bigpat]

The absurd thing about this is that Google's search results are constantly updated. The search results they were ordered to censor were probably no more than a few weeks old at most, maybe even updated that day by visiting web sites and following all their links and indexing their content. The articles themselves about this guy's bankruptcy were the old "data", but apparently since they were newspaper articles the person couldn't get them taken down. I have sympathy for this person who has moved on with his life and can apparently pay his bills now and doesn't want to let a bad reputation follow him around forever. But this is fundamentally a freedom of speech issue. If the newspapers had a right to print it, then I have a right to link to it. This ruling that allows people to take down search results that link to old newspaper articles will just lead to bad people sanitizing their past and it jeopardizes our future.

Re:right to be forgotten

[3.5 stripes]

The newspaper can keep the article, the bankruptcy can no longer be included on his credit report by law, being able to dig it up on google in 30 seconds makes that law pointless.

Re:right to be forgotten

[Cederic]

Google linking to the world's media listing his name and the case he won - and why - negates the entire fucking point though.

That's "current affairs", it's clearly relevant, and.. well, it's just fucking stupidity all round.

Insanity

[Anonymous Coward]

If they want servers there, yes.

Right to be selectively remembered, rather

[Jesrad]

It's fine by me if someone wants every mention of him/herself removed from a search engine. I have an issue with selectively removing just the choice stuff which they object to, though.

So this politician wants some details of his professional conduct unreported in a Google search ? Welcome to internet-non-existence. Your reelection-platform website, twitter campaign account and commentary blog get tossed along into a black hole.

And in any case, someone who really wants the information will find it eventually.

Re:Right to be selectively remembered, rather

[mwvdlee]

Is there anything stopping Google from doing this?

Or for Google to selectively unlink other content it may now deem unfairly biassed due to forced removal of a counterview? Unlink not just the bad press about his past but all about his past? Re-election? What re-election? He's never been elected, so how can he be re-elected? Why elect him at all if he has zero political experience?

Re:Right to be selectively remembered, rather

[DoofusOfDeath]

It's fine by me if someone wants every mention of him/herself removed from a search engine.

I'm not sure that's practically feasible. What about persons who have a commonly used name? If Google strived to avoid showing results with the person in question, they'd either (a) have an insane amount of human-executed research to do for every query, or (b) omit every result with that name even if it referred to someone else.

To make it worse, suppose a newspaper ran a story on "Fred, who lives at the north end of 23'd Street in Duluth" (a contrived example). Is Google supposed to know whether or not that's the Fred they're supposed to omit? Or even worse, suppose Fred lived with his Father and son, all at the same address at the same time, and all named (for example) Fred Smith. How's Google supposed to sort out who's who?

Re:Right to be selectively remembered, rather

[drinkypoo]

So this politician wants some details of his professional conduct unreported in a Google search ? Welcome to internet-non-existence. Your reelection-platform website, twitter campaign account and commentary blog get tossed along into a black hole.

You have not thought this through even a little bit. This sort of policy would permit the Kochs to remain out of the net media. There is vastly more public interest in remembering than forgetting. Forgetting only benefits invidivuals. Never forget.

Re:Right to be selectively remembered, rather

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there anything stopping Google from doing this?

The lost ad revenue when a story goes 'viral'.

Google should up the ante

[schwit1]

They should create a web site of removal requests with people's pictures and the links to the stuff they want removed. Put a link to it on every Google home page and login page.

Streisand them.

Re:Google should up the ante

[L4t3r4lu5]

I almost modded you down, but realised I just disagree with your opinion.

What do you think your suggestion would achieve? What point are you trying to make?

Re:Google should up the ante

[Agent0013]

The link to the original article can be removed. But that does not mean that Google has to remove links to new articles that summarize the data in the original article. Each new link would have to be looked at separately by the courts.

Re:Google should up the ante

[Psyborgue]

Or just post a handy option to "Search on US servers".

in other news

[superwiz]

I, as a man, demand the right to have a baby. You already have a right to be forgotten. There is no obligation for you to be remembered. That is what gives you a right to be forgotten. Any right, by definition, comes with a counterparty's responsibility to respect the right. The fact that everyone has something they wish everyone would forget doesn't mean they have a right to demand that everyone forget it. It means that we have to come to grips with the fact that people are fallible and have faults. It doesn't mean that we to have embrace the faults. But our reduced ability to forget does put a higher pressure on society to learn when and how to forgive.. Judging people is a mandatory requirement of being reasonable. Without discerning judgement there is no intelligence. And I, for one, don't want to go down the path of embracing stupidity.

Re:in other news

[Anonymous Coward]

I, as a man, demand the right to have a baby.

You buy me dinner first, you cheeky bugger.

The right to be forgotten means what?

[Karmashock]

If we're talking about clearing someone's meta data from the system that might be reasonable. But taking down articles people have written about you or blog posts... no. You don't have a right to silence other people.

That would be the 21st century version of a book burning.

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[mwvdlee]

They're asking google to remove links to the content, but the content itself is not removed.
Is google result data meta data?

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[Karmashock]

So if I didn't burn the books... I just deleted them from the card catalog that would be okay?

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[kruach aum]

Given the size of the internet that's effectively the same thing.

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[Karmashock]

I'd agree... that's my point.

This is a bad law. If europe wants its own version of the internet where they practice broad censorship that is fine. But compliance with the law should be that the offending content is blocked from european users not that it is deleted generally.

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes... as long as they are still in the library. We're just not telling you what book, what rack and what shelf...

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[Jason Levine]

But where does the definition of Search Engine stop? I have a WordPress blog. It has a built-in site search engine. Could someone sue me because I wrote an embarrassing-to-them-but-completely-true article? Could they order me to take it off of my in-site search? And since there's no easy way to exempt individual articles in this manner, would this essentially be telling me to take the article offline entirely?

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[hey!]

You're on the right track. The right to be forgotten isn't about erasing your participation in the public sphere. It's about the abuse of routinely collected data, such as which websites you visit or which products you shop for.

A few years ago I did a lot of web based research on right wing hate groups like Aryan Nation and the KKK. That list left traces I am sure, in my search history at least. Last year after the Boston Marathon bombings I did some searches about pressure cooker bombs. I'm sure a lot of us here did; curiosity isn't a crime -- yet. I actually *purchased* a pressure cooker shortly after the bombing.

Now if someone did a search "what extremist web sites has this guy been visiting/looking for?" they'd get a highly selective and somewhat disturbing picture of my web browsing habits. Lets suppose somebody set up a particular filter, looking for people whose search, shopping and browsing history hit a set of highly specific websites. Somebody could well choose to tag me as suspicious, and cause a lot of problems for me. What's worse is that these problems mean *nothing* to the person flagging me; it makes his life easier to deal in suspicion wholesale, as it were.

The right to be forgotten isn't fundamental, it's instrumental. The fundamental right is not to be victimized by half-baked inferences based on old, ambiguous data. The only way to do that is to purge old data except where it is held for a clear and appropriate purpose. The problem is "purge old data except where held for a clear and appropriate purpose" doesn't exactly trip off the tongue. Nobody is going to stand up and advocate for something that sounds so ... technical. So we instead call it a "right to be forgotten", which in general is NOT what we're talking about.

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[Anonymous Coward]

So if a Christian school went and placed the books on evolution on the top shelf at back, behind the Door That No One Opens on an unmarked shelf it would all be good?
----
So if a Atheist school went and placed the books on Christianity on the top shelf at back, behind the Door That No One Opens on an unmarked shelf it would all be good?

I'm not sure I buy that, you are deliberately hiding information. Might as well burn the On the Origin of Species/bible as the data is all but gone.

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[Anonymous Coward]

google et al - I can imagine at least one reason why this has been directed against searching engines: I suppose there is no other way to remove the article in a server in Zamunda but google is good enough. It brings the balance back or rather it attempts to.

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[bill_mcgonigle]

If we're talking about clearing someone's meta data from the system that might be reasonable. But taking down articles people have written about you or blog posts... no. You don't have a right to silence other people.

People toss around the word "right" too casually. Narrowly constructed, a 'right' is only something that exists as a default state without outside interference. Imaging you're on a desert island -m, you have the right to say what you want, think what you want, protect yourself from threats, hold on to your belongings, stay safe, etc. It's when there's a group of people who want to shut you up, take your stuff and lock you in a cage that we have to write this stuff down and call them "rights". It gets worse if society believes that some men are justified in doing that stuff, so to settle the cognitive dissonance there requires a large structure.

But just as on that desert island there's nobody to grow food or gather food for you, if somebody declares that you have a "right to food" then they're selling you a line of goods (and watch your wallet) - what they really are saying is that they are going to grant you a privilege whereby they force somebody(ies) else to provide food to you. If there's one group of people ordering another group of people to give things to people, then it's never a right, only a privilege. They may call it a 'right' to confuse you, but you don't have to accept their newspeak.

Now then, when you do something in public/society, people notice. That creates information that just exists as objective truth - if somebody sees you walking around a park and writes down, "Tom walked across the park", that is information about you, but you don't own that information in any way. Now, maybe Tom was supposed to be at work, not walking across the park and he'd like for you to not have that information or tell anybody else about it. He could offer something to you to not tell anybody else about it, or even just ask you nicely, but you might find that gathering such information is more valuable to you than whatever Tom is offering, so you may or may not take Tom's deal. But Tom might also get a group of his buddies to gang up and threaten you with some kind of harm if you tell anybody else about it. The gang has granted Tom a privilege of having that information about him 'protected' from disclosure.

So, this is what the EU has done - said that if you have information about somebody, and they don't like that, then they can tell you to keep it to yourself, or the EU will beat you up (or some abstraction thereof). This is actually a pretty smart thing for the EU to do; governments thrive in low-information areas, imposing themselves to solve problems by dictate that could better be solved by all participants having access to more information. A company like Google has automated systems for gathering information and making it available to everybody, but to handle cases like this requires humans to discern what is going on, if the claims are legally valid, and then figuring out how to apply a heuristic to the data. This kind of EU ruling majorly affects Google's cost structure, and to the extent that Google is becoming an abstract competitor to the EU by solving the information problem, the EU benefits from hurting Google in this way. Since the EU also makes Tom happy, they win in two ways, and Tom will feel more likely to reward the EU since they've offered him this privilege.

Most people are basically honest players and they have very little incentive to ever challenge the information that Google makes available about them. But people who do bad things - they're going to take advantage of this ruling to try to cover their tracks (that a known pedophile is the first to use this law isn't surprising). This is how the lowering of information will harm EU society to the largest degree - forget about Googling whether that roofer is honest or not, you're only going to find positive results. Guess you'll need to call a government regulator instead - Tom can't get the gang to give up the information it has on Tom.

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[AmiMoJo]

No. The right to be forgotten only applies to data that the user themselves creates. Accounts, posts, photos, that kind of thing. When it comes in it will NOT allow someone to silence someone else who wrote about them, or posted a picture of them doing something stupid in public.

Things have become a bit confused here because the phrase "right to be forgotten" was used, but it is actually something completely different. The original litigant used long standing data protection laws, nothing to do with the new right to be forgotten, which hasn't even been implemented yet.

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[Karmashock]

The further foolishness is that you're only hiding the information from people that don't have resources.

If you do have resources... such as the resources of a nation or a major corporation then you'll know exactly where that information is and will never forget it.

All you're doing is taking the information away from the average person which means you're further separating the haves and the have nots.

The internet is free. Leave it alone.

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[Karmashock]

I didn't say you have a right to food. I said you have a right to free speech. I understand you're making your own point... but your point is not constructive or relevant to my point.

I understand natural rights. I agree. However your point has no relevance to the discussion since all the rights being discussed are natural rights. We are not talking about entitlements.

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[Anonymous Coward]

If we're talking about clearing someone's meta data from the system that might be reasonable. But taking down articles people have written about you or blog posts... no. You don't have a right to silence other people.

That would be the 21st century version of a book burning.

No one is talking about taking down articles; even if they were, Google would not be the one to talk to as they're not the ones hosting the content.

However, one could argue that internet content might as well cease to exist once Google no longer displays it as a result.

These people don't want to burn your books, they want to have them banned from the library.

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[Karmashock]

I think the right to be forgotten could best be applied to things like getting facebook to ACTUALLY delete you account and associated metadata. That's reasonable. But google search results? No.

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[Karmashock]

I have no problem with facebook being forced to delete your account on request. That was something they always should have allowed.

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[Anubis IV]

Precisely. It's one thing to ask, say, Facebook to delete the data I gave them if I want to delete my account. It's something else entirely to ask Google to delete references to data regarding me that others have collected and published. If the information is stuff that I gave them, I have an expectation that I can take it back when I no longer make use of their service, but if it's stuff that someone else posted, I have no such expectation.

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[Darinbob]

Not the same thing, except that apparently people have forgotten how to search for information without using a search engine.

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[kruach aum]

Please enlighten me. How do you search for information on the internet without a search engine? Make sure not to include any search engines in your answer.

Re:The right to be forgotten means what?

[Darinbob]

Depends upon what you're looking for. If you want to know credit history then go straight to a credit history web site (ie, landlords will do this rather than rely on google). If you want to know about jobs that exist then search a jobs based web site. The world functioned well even before search engines, and we had things called libraries.

choose the edge cases.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, what a surprise! the media is using the extreme cases of paedophiles and errant politicians to justify the storing of information about others, ignoring the other few billion people who have have not lost any right to privacy.

What an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

Something something Streisand effect something

Ross Anderson

[jbmartin6]

Ross Anderson posted an interesting thought about this decision and credit agencies:

The European Court of Justice decision in the Google case will have implications way beyond search engines. Regular readers of this blog will recall stories of banks hounding innocent people for money following payment disputes, and a favourite trick is to blacklist people with credit reference agencies, even while disputes are still in progress (or even after the bank has actually lost a court case). In the past, the Information Commissioner refused to do anything about this abuse, claiming that it’s the bank which is the data controller, not the credit agency. The court now confirms that this view was quite wrong. I have therefore written to the Information Commissioner inviting him to acknowledge this and to withdraw the guidance issued to the credit reference agencies by his predecessor. I wonder what other information intermediaries will now have to revise their business models?

Re:Ross Anderson

[Ioldanach]

Ross Anderson posted an interesting thought about this decision and credit agencies:

The European Court of Justice decision in the Google case will have implications way beyond search engines. ... a favourite trick is to blacklist people with credit reference agencies, even while disputes are still in progress (or even after the bank has actually lost a court case).

While this finding impacts that problem, it is not the right way to tackle that problem. That problem consists of factually incorrect material that should not be there. This finding explicitly indicates that a party can demand that links to factually true reports that are still available to view online must be taken down. It goes far beyond the scope of reason.

Comply with the law

[Seeteufel]

'If they get an appreciable volume of requests what are they going to do? Set up an entire industry sifting through the paperwork?' says Dautlich. 'I can't say what they will do but if I was them I would say no and tell the individual to contact the Information Commissioner's Office.'

Comply with the request. As simple as that. The same as happens when you get a court injuction. You comply. If companies bully public institutions by forwarding requests to regulators they would get a hard response. And right so. You just don't play games. In fact Google would have to deal with exactly the same rules that apply to everyone who offers web services in Europe, except that they were hiding away saying "We are not really a European company, we just have European subsidiaries, sell advertisement space, target EU consumers and lobby European policy makers"

Re:Comply with the law

[Shados]

It does have ramifications though.

if I don't like a news article on a specific news website, can I just post a comment under the news article, then request my right to be forgotten to get that link taken down?

Re:Comply with the law

[Arker]

It's simply not a workable rule and I would not be at all surprised if the penalty for ignoring it were less than the ultimate cost of implementation. And once it's implemented, once google invests in people to process these requests, and alters their own infrastructure to accommodate them, what is the result? It simply makes the competition more attractive and more people will use other search engines.

And dont tell me this will be enforced uniformly on every search engine regardless of size, hosting nation, etc. - it wont be and cannot be. Any engine hosted outside of Europe and without business operations in Europe is outside of their jurisdiction.

So of course google is going to resist this, actively if they can, passively if they cannot.

Re:Comply with the law

[AmiMoJo]

No. You could get your own post removed, but the news article is very clearly protected by the wording of this law and there is nothing you could do about it, other than suing for libel if you felt it was factually untrue.

Re:Comply with the law

[Shados]

Google's search can't remove a part of a page though. Either the whole page goes, or none of it goes.

Re:Comply with the law

[Seeteufel]

Possibly yes. Copyright law grants you the right to depublish.

Re:Comply with the law

[Psyborgue]

This is going to get abused so much it will either be enforced automatically (like DMCA) leading to a useless European internet, or Google will just throw their hands up and refuse to comply. This is even worse than the DMCA. At least dmca allows a counter-notice to be filed.

Re:Comply with the law

[PaddyM]

If your information is out there, it's out there whether Google indexes it or not. This is an unenforceable law. It's as simple as that. I mean, I could mention somebody's name right here and say they went bankrupt. We all know who I'm talking about. Should slashdot be shutdown as a result unless they remove my post?

How about you comply and delete your comment? I don't like it. Even though you posted before me, and had no intention of addressing it to me, it is insulting to me and I don't wish to see it ever again. It pains me. If I lived in Europe and asked them to remove your comment, would they do it? I'd argue they shouldn't. But it really does pain me.

And finally, if I do business in Europe, how am I supposed to know what I can publish? Am I allowed to publish everything and just wait for the requests to come in? Or will there be some list of facts which may not be published on the internet? I wonder if anyone, such as yourself, could compile such facts into a book, or some sort of index of some sort to help new businesses comply with the law. Such a list would surely help prevent people from publishing facts no one needs to know. Oh the irony!

Re:Comply with the law

[Darinbob]

Presumably only the link beween the search of your name that brings up the comment. However searching for that specific news site or newspaper will bring up the results.

Get over it already.

[thesandtiger]

The genie is out of the bottle - nothing we do that lands online will ever be forgotten or able to be forgotten unless something apocalyptic happens.

Google can wipe out the links to this guy, but then a thousand news stories about how stupid this law is that use this guy's case as an example will have to go, too, and stories related to the implementation, and so on and so on and so on.

People need to get used to the fact that nothing we do will be forgotten, that we no longer have privacy, and that the best we can hope for (in a manner of speaking) is maybe anonymity, albeit in the form of "no one cares enough about you to bother looking you up."

Having an always available, never forgetting memory has changed the rules and people need to catch up.

Once people catch up, the dumb embarrassing shit that people have online will begin to pale in importance. EVERYONE's embarrassing shit will be online and people will get the fuck over it. The stuff that people won't get over is probably the stuff that's most essential to share.

all or nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

this of course has to be done case by case but i would find it good if its a all or nothing scenario in case of businesses or politicians.

having certain bad info removed to get back into a office is a bad thing lets take the case of the politician that wants it if he wants to be forgotten then all info should be removed about him no web presence at all on line just a giant wanted to be forgotten sign.

a business would not burn itself like that and the voting population will quickly realize that the politician has something to hide therefore he is not trustworthy

and dont forget its just google so in case of that pedo somebody quickly make sexoffendersearch.com

Why Google?

[DrYak]

I still fail to follow the court's logic.

Google isn't *publishing* information, it's just indexing information (web page) already available elsewhere (on 3rd-party webservers).

If the businessman doesn't like being associated with his previous bankruptcy, he should ask the *website of the newspaper* to remove the article about the bankruptcy. Not ask google to stop indexing it.

Because:
- If he stops Google. Bing and any other search engine would still be indexing it. And the original article is still outthere. It's a completely ineffective measure.
- If he stops the newspaper, the information will indeed be definitely disappearing. On the next crawl, Google's, Bing's and anyone else's spider will notice the page doesn't exist anymore and will stop displaying it in search result. The article would only be accessible in things like archive.org

It seems like the judge in that case don't understand that much the functioning of search engines and the implication of the ruling.

On the other hand, I understand why the businessman went after google:
- trying to remove an article basically amounts to censorship. That's a big taboo (not as much here in EU as in US, but still the case as there are no hate-speech in this suit) and the businessman was probably going to lose
- trying to attack google, looks like going after the big giant with pervasive snooping and privacy-problems. Much likely to win.

Re:Why Google?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Google isn't *publishing* information, it's just indexing information (web page) already available elsewhere (on 3rd-party web servers).

Google "publishes" an index for information available elsewhere on the web.

Re:Why Google?

[91degrees]

Google isn't *publishing* information, it's just indexing information (web page) already available elsewhere (on 3rd-party webservers).

From a legal perspecitve, the difference is largely irrelevant. And in answer to most tortured analogies in reponse; yes - potentially; it depends on knowledge and intent.

Re:Why Google?

[Vapula]

As long as the page still exists, the index points to relevant information : a web page with the given keywords.
IMHO, the most important problem is about the "view page in cache" function which could show the information even after the web page has been removed.

Re:Why Google?

[CastrTroy]

Exactly. but like your parent poster said, if the information is no longer available elsewhere on the internet, then it will cease to be published in the search results (though they probably maintain a copy for some time). Going after Google only stops one way of getting at the information. It will be somewhat effective, because Google is such a popular search engine, but in the end, you'll be able to find the information on other search engines.

Re:Why Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point, but not really. The same should then apply to pirate bay then. Can't have it both ways.

Re:Why Google?

[pjt33]

Google isn't *publishing* information, it's just indexing information (web page) already available elsewhere (on 3rd-party webservers).

But the law isn't about publishing information, it's about processing information, and that is defined to include storing it. The meat of the ruling is that the fact that someone else has a good reason to process information isn't per se a good reason for you to process it.

Re:Why Google?

[AmiMoJo]

He can't go after the newspaper because the law specifically protects such reports. He ask Google to remove the data though, because Google simply collects data from other sources and passes it on to individuals for profit, much like a credit rating agency. Most commentators don't seem to understand this important distinction.

Re:Why Google?

[Cederic]

I do understand this distinction. I don't understand why Google can't legally tell me that a newspaper archive contains an article.

Sorry but the court applied faulty logic here and/or the law is wrong.

Re:Why Google?

[AmiMoJo]

So a credit reference agency couldn't say "this person was bankrupt 12 years ago", but could send you a link to an article saying that?

Re:Why Google?

[mod prime]

Google processes data and it discloses it. (it wasn't bankruptcy, and he did ask them to remove it from the internet).

The newspaper, however, legally published it and have no legal obligation to delete that data.

You don't think the people involved in this decision understand search engines? This is evidence you haven't read the ruling. Why are so many people so confident about something they haven't read? What is this, Slashdot?

He didn't attack Google. He requested they stop processing his personal data and disclosing it to anyone who knows how to spell his name.

Re:Why Google?

[NoOneInParticular]

Google isn't *publishing* information, it's just indexing information (web page) already available elsewhere (on 3rd-party webservers).

Not entirely true. Google's claim to fame is not that it can index information, even altavista could do that, it is that it can rank it in a meaningful way. I'm pretty sure this lawsuit wouldn't have come up if Google would have shown this bit of information on page 10, instead of 1. In other words, the Google algorithms have decided that this is the most important bit of information to divulge about this person. And you think it's weird that the person in question wants this to stop?

Already happening in the UK

[davecb]

It's already having an effect: in the UK their privacy commission just got credit reporting company misbehavior dumped back on their plate: turns out they're the legal equivalent of search engines. Now add any other "information intermediary" like Lexis Nexis, which publishes law reports...

Reporting bias

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course this is the way it will be reported - the most sensational cases cherry-picked. You won't hear anything about the requests that actually have to do with protecting the privacy of ordinary people rather than serving the interests of criminals and scoundrels.

Re:Reporting bias

[nctritech]

That's how the media exerts control over people. People think what they hear about on the news is all there is to it, but the reality is that something is only newsworthy if it is an unusual or exceptional enough incident that it merits such special attention. The other side of this coin is that anything that is exceptional enough to be newsworthy is uncommon enough that people need not worry about it in their daily lives.

'irrelevant and outdated'

[Anonymous Coward]

If that is the actual wording of the law. Maybe it is outdated but I'd say it's hardly irrelevant.

Not quite

[bradley13]

Not quite true. The case that generated this decision concerned factual newspaper articles. The guy went bankrupt, his house was auctioned off, the local newspapers reported on this.

• The newspaper is not required to delete the articles. They are simple, factual reporting, and are allowed to remain.
• The court decided that Google is not allowed to link to these articles, because the affected person wants these facts to be unfindable.

So: it is not private information at all. It is precisely public, factual information about an individual, that that individual finds distasteful.

Re:Not quite

[Jason Levine]

The newspaper is not required to delete the articles.

But how long until someone sues the newspaper for the article still coming up in their search engine? Will the courts order the newspaper's search engine to remove the article? And, if the newspaper's web staff can't make search exemptions for dozens of articles (as other requests come in), will this just result in those articles being pulled offline?

Re:Not quite

[CastrTroy]

On one hand, I can see how it would be nice for things to disappear off the map after a while. On the other hand, I don't think laws like this would be applied in a fair way. Seems like they ruled in this guy's favour because he was a politician. Would they have ruled the same way if it was some poor guy with no connections? Also, on the third hand (yeah, the third one, I typed it), I think that anybody who thinks they can make something disappear by making Google and other search engines not index it is in for a bad time. The Streisand effect makes it quite likely that the information will go viral. Everybody interested in the matter will be sharing the article on Facebook and other social networks. You can bet his opponents will link to the article on their web sites. If the paper is particularly against him for some reason, they could give people the rights to copy the article, and repost it on their own web sites. Google would be required not to index the original article, but what about other articles on other websites that looked the same? What if only a small portion of the text was the same?

Re:Not quite

[Xest]

Yes, they would've ruled in the same way as the law on which this case was based on is relatively old (directive in 1995, implementations from member nations in about 1997 and onwards) and has been used many times. The difference this time was it was applied to Google on the public internet- normally it involves disputes between individuals and companies in a more private setting, such as a company sending someone junk mail because they've held onto their personal details for far too many years after they've had anything to do with them.

One of the misconceptions of the case is that this has something to do with the right to be forgotten law. The right to be forgotten law isn't yet, it's still a proposal. This ruling was based on existing data protection law that places explicit limits on the duration such data can be "processed".

This law is already used by organisations such as credit rating agencies who can only take public information such as county court judgements in the UK against people who have failed to service their debts and hold it for a maximum of 7 years (again in the UK, may vary slightly elsewhere in Europe).

It's worth reading the actual law in question (which again isn't what this ruling is based upon), a recent update is available direct from the horses mouth here:

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-r...

It's quite explicit, such as one provision allowing individuals who were children at the time of posting something embarrassing on the internet to request it be deleted once in adulthood. It's not even finished yet, but it's certainly not the document people here think it is.

Re:Not quite

[SuperGus]

I believe that should be "On the gripping hand..."

Re:Not quite

[Agent0013]

Perhaps he should have just changed his name. Then any search done on his name would not be linked to the public newspaper reports of things that happened under his old name. Unless the government posts all name changes online somewhere also, then that would be indexed and would be discover-able.

Thank God for Europe

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was young, the politicians of a number of the more impoverished states would utter thanks that Mississippi existed. It's many deficiencies, particularly dreadful schools, kept their state from being at the bottom of many lists.
I feel much the same about today's Europe. When I grow discouraged at the follies of our politicians, our legislators, and our judges, my mind shifts to across the water and I'm thankful that Europe exists. We're not stuck with the world's greatest fools--at least not yet.
What did this European court think would be the result of this dictate? Did it think that someone who're rescued a child from drowning would be eager to remove all news stories about that? Did it think that honest, successful politicians would want all mention of that stripped out of Google. Of course this ruling would be grasped at by crooks, scoundrels, perverts and assorted misfits.
No, what's happened is predictable on the level of dog bites man. It's the court that's the idiot in this story.

Re:Thank God for Europe

[kruach aum]

Tough talk coming from the country that invented spray-on cheese, "think of the children", and super-sizing.

Re:Thank God for Europe

[Vinegar Joe]

Tough talk coming from the country that invented spray-on cheese, "think of the children", and super-sizing.

Along with the internet.

Re:Ross Anderson ++

[davecb]

For one, legal publishers.

Lexis Nexis and Westlaw are massive special-purpose search engines dealing in exactly this kind of data: court reports. Lexis Nexis is also well-known as a newspaper/magazine search engine.

Imagine a lawyer in the UK trying to refer to a classic interpretation and discovering the case was no longer reported, as from the point of view of one of the participants, it was "no longer relevant".

In non-EU countries, it if was a case about a minor, the page would have the names removed. Similarly, if a participant had received a pardon, they could apply to the court to remove their name from the published report. The original report would be available, of course, to lawyers willing to agree to confidentiality controls.

You are missing the point

[bradley13]

It's not about Google - they just happen to be named in this case. This is a decision that will affect any search engine, any index, anyone who offers links to publicly available material or provides any sort of aggregation service.

Those people who say "just direct them to the courts" are being shortsighted. A court case requires two sides. If Google (or whoever) tells someone "go to court", they will do so: by filing a lawsuit against Google (or whoever). The last thing any company needs is having to show up to millions of trivial little court cases.

Re:You are missing the point

[Jason Levine]

I wonder if this could also affect any site with an internal search engine. Suppose you grab WordPress and throw up a quick blog. You're posting away and wind up posting a negative piece about a politician who got in some sort of scandal. (We'll assume that you stick to proven facts and stay clear of any unproven allegations.) That post goes viral and tons of people link to it. Could the politician order your to remove the article from your site's Wordpress-powered search? Since that would be impossible for a normal user (for the sake of argument, assume you aren't very technically inclined in this manner), wouldn't complying with that essentially be taking the post down? And if you refused, would you, an average user, be able to afford going to court to defend your right to post the truth?

This is going to wind up chilling speech with people taking down truthful articles that people who have committed crimes find "embarrassing" or "uncomfortable."

Re:You are missing the point

[just_a_monkey]

This is a decision that will affect any search engine, any index, anyone who offers links to publicly available material or provides any sort of aggregation service.

So Google should really be happy about this. They have the resources to handle these removals, but any startup (that isn't backed by a Microsoft-size company, or a government) in the search engine or aggregation business won't. So this ensures that there will be no further competition for them, ever.

Re:You are missing the point

[GIL_Dude]

It doesn't really matter if it is external or internal. Any time you remove it from a search index you have effectively taken the material down. If people can't find it, it doesn't exist for them. If you remove a book from the card catalog, it can exist in the stacks for years with nobody ever seeing it. Web pages are the same way. If it isn't on the first couple of pages of results on Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, Yandex, Baidu or whatever - forget it; it no longer exists as far as the world is concerned: they will never see it. Sure you can always send out links to a few people and those people can see it. You can post links on MyTwitFace+ and a few people will see it. But for the vast majority, the index is their view into the internet. Remove it from the index and it ceases to exist for all practical purposes.

Re:You are missing the point

[Enigma2175]

It's not about Google - they just happen to be named in this case. This is a decision that will affect any search engine, any index, anyone who offers links to publicly available material or provides any sort of aggregation service.

Those people who say "just direct them to the courts" are being shortsighted. A court case requires two sides. If Google (or whoever) tells someone "go to court", they will do so: by filing a lawsuit against Google (or whoever). The last thing any company needs is having to show up to millions of trivial little court cases.

Indeed, this isn't just limited to Google. On that note, does anybody know if (physical) newspaper archives are affected by this ruling? There has never been a "right to be forgotten" before, if you did something newsworthy it ended up in the archives for anyone to peruse. Same with arrest records or court records. Does this ruling give somebody the right to demand that the courts destroy any documents that mention them?

Re:You are missing the point

[AmiMoJo]

No, it doesn't affect sites that host their own content for the most part. There is a specific exception for things like blog posts, newspaper articles and so on. Clearly those things are relevant and the law does not try to re-write history.

Google is affected because the specific information about this guy's bankruptcy is no longer considered relevant or current in the eyes of the law. Credit reference agencies would not be allowed to disclose it due to the amount of time that has passed. Yes, someone could go around every newspaper in the country and check their archives for the story, but in practice no-one does. They ask a credit reference agency, or do a Google search. That's why Google has been asked to remove this information from its search results.

Re:You are missing the point

[bitt3n]

This is a decision that will affect any search engine, any index, anyone who offers links to publicly available material or provides any sort of aggregation service.

I don't get how this will work. Will these rulings affect google's results in the US? Surely google.com can legally index an article in an EU newspaper. So can the EU then subsequently force google to remove this data from their server in the US? If so, it seems as if the EU is limiting information flow between a US company and US citizens (under the threat that the US company will be punished in the EU if it does not comply). This seems rather peculiar. Yet if this isn't how it works, then anyone in the EU could just visit google.com instead of their local google, thus rendering the whole system moot.

Re:You are missing the point

[Archangel Michael]

Actually, the suggestion is perfect. Each petitioner should go to the court to request takedown. Google shouldn't act without specific court instructions, rather than general instructions that are vague and completely meaningless. Courts are there to provide specific judgements, not hand out general vague instructions that cannot be construed as guidelines of any sort.

Of course, Google can retaliate and make a "proactive" action and remove all links that mention people for all results in the EU. That would inflame all the idiots who search for Beyonce and Justin Bieber will get a notice "The EU courts have decided that linking to personal information on anyone is subject to European law. Google has removed all potential information subject to this judgement in this jurisdiction."

The ruling itself is idiotic and it is clear that Old Men in black robes don't understand current technology.

Re:You are missing the point

[N1AK]

Those people who say "just direct them to the courts" are being shortsighted. A court case requires two sides. If Google (or whoever) tells someone "go to court", they will do so: by filing a lawsuit against Google (or whoever). The last thing any company needs is having to show up to millions of trivial little court cases.

The best way to deal with this is for search engines to unquestionally follow all request (because they can't viably afford to validate them) and then for people to request the removal every single search engine result. This is a stupid solution to 'the right to be forgotten' and needs to be killed as soon as possible.

Re:You are missing the point

[N1AK]

There is a specific exception for things like blog posts, newspaper articles and so on. Clearly those things are relevant and the law does not try to re-write history.

It doesn't matter if there are clear and specific guidelines. Search engines aren't going to spend hours looking into whether a page should be removed or not, thus if you put a request through they are probably going to remove it (they risk a lawsuit if they don't). The cost of checking properly would be monumental and it's neither fair, nor realistic, to expect search providers to do so.

Re:You are missing the point

[N1AK]

They have the resources to handle these removals, but any startup (that isn't backed by a Microsoft-size company, or a government) in the search engine or aggregation business won't.

I'm pretty sure any new startup can simply remove anything they are asked to, which is also what Google etc will do any way ;)

Re:You are missing the point

[Gr8Apes]

There's a simple short answer, Google will need to keep the history of said piece, and then deal with it appropriately. It's the price they must pay, or anyone really, who deals with historical documents. The difference with electronic documents when you're the scale of Google is that the cost of storing all documents is less than only storing current documents, so they cheaped out. If this was being printed on paper, someone would be cutting out all the deadwood. 20 year old bankruptcy filing documents? Axed and so on. Google just serves it all up. All that's happening here is that now there's a statement that these types of documents should fall to the wayside, and that's not a bad thing honestly.

Note that some convictions are time-bound in various situations, like job applications. Others, like pedophilia, will place you on the sex offenders registry, so they actually don't need to be excluded entirely, although perhaps sandboxed results after a certain time period. After all, while a general search for someone probably shouldn't have a 30 year old conviction on it, if you were searching for local sex offenders and their history, then it probably should. Context matters, and currently Google does not pay attention to this concept of context at all.

Building on that, going into "historical" mode might allow deeper searches, but these should be discouraged for general searches primarily because documents are still available, but perhaps shouldn't show up unless a concerted effort is made to search for them, perhaps via a different entry mechanism and a throttling control.

Re:You are missing the point

[Kjella]

Except the Internet usually has lots and lots of secondary links. Even if you can't go directly from Google to the censored page chances are you'll get a ton of related hits that'll link you to the source. This is for example often the case with copyrighted files, you can find the same download links in tens or hundreds of forums and unless the file is down at the source - the file host - it's almost impossible to keep people from finding it and it'd be pretty obvious that Google is refusing to give you a direct link. And if they start banning all links to sites that link to the censored file well they're going to break the Internet - plus I'd probably serve GoogleBot a link-less page and everyone else the link. Then they have to start forging user agents to discover it and it all goes downhill from there.

Re:You are missing the point

[Jason Levine]

Exactly. When the DMCA was enacted, the idea was that people would submit take down requests under penalty of perjury and companies would comply under threat of law. Then the person who uploaded the material could fight with the DMCA submitter over who was right. This might have sounded good in theory at the time and might work in some cases, but in general this has led to people filing DMCA requests for things that they don't have any rights to file over. ("That file has a similar file name to one of our files - take it down.") Companies, wary of lawsuits, are complying and no perjury charges are being filed against the DMCA abusers.

This "Right to Forget" will face the same thing. Google and other search engines won't want to risk a hundred or thousand legal battles - much less a dozen losses in court, so they will comply with every request that has even an outside-chance of being valid. People who write valid, truthful content will find themselves delisted because they made someone angry and that someone decided to make the search engines "forget." Negative reviews? Gone. Scathing articles against politicans? No more. Listing a scammer's past misdeeds? Disappeared.

Re:You are missing the point

[Jason Levine]

True, but this could quickly move from the bad ("my page is no longer listed on Google but I can still tweet links to the articles") to the much worse ("I needed to take the article down so it wouldn't appear in my site's search engine results"). In fact, I don't see any possible way for this to turn out even remotely good.

Re:You are missing the point

[Kjella]

I'm pretty sure any new startup can simply remove anything they are asked to, which is also what Google etc will do any way ;)

That's what worries me, what's in it for Google to fight it? Nothing. And giving the site owner the ability to dispute it usually also means nothing, what's in it for /. to fight something posted in a comment? Nothing. This is then opening shot in a war on information, where anybody can complain to any site about anything they feel is written about them by other people that they don't like. I think the ECHR totally screwed up, to enforce this they'd have to take away even more fundamental rights, like the right to free speech and the right to remember. It's basically a gag order where if you can't block my speech, you block Google from pointing anyone to my speech.

Re:You are missing the point

[ranton]

The best way to deal with this is for search engines to unquestionally follow all request (because they can't viably afford to validate them) and then for people to request the removal every single search engine result. This is a stupid solution to 'the right to be forgotten' and needs to be killed as soon as possible.

I can't wait for businesses to start asking for their competitors to be taken off the search engine to reduce competition. If they aren't able to validate all requests and just follow them all, then you might as well.

Re:You are missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Other takedown requests since the ruling include an ex-politician seeking re-election who has asked to have links to an article about his behaviour in office removed and a doctor who wants negative reviews from patients removed from google search results.

There's a difference in being forgotten if your an average Joe, and if your a criminal, depending on the charges you were convicted on ect., that would be grounds for deletion. However reports of politicians, reviews of doctors, ect, these people are public servants and their behavior/arrogance/ignorance, should be kept public.
This is where [not to be obvious] the courts need to put in guidelines on what can be ex-sponged and what shouldn't be, to me the rulings favoring these people shows the courts have no interest in spending the time or effort on a case by case basis.

I'm not sure if your the same person that posted the same comments a few days ago when this law/ruling was first on /., but Google is being mentioned because they've had no problem with take down notices over BS copyright claims, ect.... People have a silly notion that Google is somehow the savior of free speech and they are far from being remotely 'free and open'.

The BBC report said Google made a statement that this was censorship, which would be correct, but Google has created their own version of censorship so they need to shut up. Another reason for them being front and center, is because of suspected willful activity with the NSA, as well as other suspected activity when it comes to peoples privacy, and then there's the anti trust suits, and the EU anti trust investigations/rulings.

Re:You are missing the point

[Cederic]

I think you're taking a simplistic view based on flawed assumptions.

Lets say that I create a new website, and post on it that Fred has been bankrupt, that Sandra was convicted of child pornography and that some cunt in Spain failed to pay their debts.

Google will find my website, index it, and provide search results based on those links. Their history is a total of 3 hours, as that's how long the website's existed.

Google are not dealing with historical documents. They're dealing with "This is present on the web, now".

If you want this material to be off the web, contact me and stop me hosting it. Do not blame Google for finding it, and mentioning that it exists. Google, Bing, DuckDuckWhateverthefuckitis and any other search engine are merely conduits in this regard, they're not hosting the information, they're not managing historical records and the European court fucked up mightily here.

Re:You are missing the point

[icebike]

A court does not always require two sides.
And even if they do insist on a deposition from Google, an automated routine in the search engine can spit out Google's grounds for rejection.

The courts made this mess, and they can deal with it.

Re:You are missing the point

[ColdSam]

Exactly. When the DMCA was enacted, the idea was that ... but in general this has led to people filing DMCA requests for things that they don't have any rights to file over.

It is a fine theory, so why doesn't it work? It's a serious question.

It seems to me this is a major failure for, say Google. If the law is being so egregiously flouted they should easily be able to find a few cases of the worst offenders and set an example. This would cost them nothing and gain them much credibility. Since they don't do that, there must be something else in play that we (maybe just I) don't know of.

The theory is sound even if, perhaps, the details aren't quite right. The European privacy case is significantly more complicated, but it should also be a manageable problem (if it even was a problem in the first place).

Re:You are missing the point

[khellendros1984]

Exactly. A search engine should display what's available and where, without regard to the content. Fred and Sandra are misdirecting their attacks, if they're going after the search engine. They ought to go after you and your website (since you are, after all, the one posting the information that they don't like).

Re:You are missing the point

[khellendros1984]

I assume that there'd be some kind of location-specific display of information. When accessed from a U.S.-based IP, Google would display the unfiltered results. From a European IP, Google would remove "forgotten" results. I guess that the issue with that would be the edge cases, where the origination point of a request can't be determined accurately.

Re:You are missing the point

[ArmoredDragon]

I have a perfect solution to this then. Somebody outside of the EU could maintain a website that is dedicated to tracking the cases of individuals who have requested to have search engines remove their information from incidents that they're embarrassed about. The website could hold details related to the case, mugshots of the individual, and other relevant data.

Submit a request to be forgotten? Then land on the website of the "forgotten."

Call the website "Streisand's Back Yard" or something to that effect.

Re:You are missing the point

[Psyborgue]

Another solution is for Google to do what they did in China: notify people if search results have been removed. If they have the balls, they could even direct them ways to get around the block (vpn/proxy).

Re:You are missing the point

[Psyborgue]

You sure Google has the resources? We're talking about potentially millions of takedown requests, each of which has to be reviewed in depth by hand.

Re:You are missing the point

[Psyborgue]

But that would afford a publisher due process! That's a fascist American idea.

Re:You are missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this is the reason why Google was hit with this. The EU can not control websites out side of their organization, the best they can do is hit the indexers who do operate in their respective countries. Websites that directly fail to compile or are made to protest this law could conceivably be blocked at the DNS level, though we've seen how effective that is from past sites. Though, I'm not sure if this ruling will allow blockage at the DNS level or not.

Also the people complaining that these people don't have standing or that their actions are still relevant, the EU has much higher privacy guidelines for convicts and suspected convects then the United States dose. If this pedophile was released and isn't under observation then by law he probably will have a right to be 'forgotten'. Right or wrong, that is the way the law is suppose to work in the EU.

Re:You are missing the point

[Darinbob]

Anyone can file a lawsuit at any time for any reason. Of course, most will be thrown out and if you do it too much you may get slapped for being a nuisance in some countries. But there is no need for any specific law in order to allow a lawsuit against a web company.

Also, it won't be millions of trivial cases, because filing for a lawsuit is not free. How many going to go to that much cost and effort just to tweak google's nose?

Re:You are missing the point

[Gr8Apes]

Sorry, not so simplistic: there are websites out there with data still from the dawn of the web. That's well over 20 years ago. There are also all the "public records" type sites, that contain information even older. Those would be what I'd consider appropriate.

As for you putting up such a web site, they should go after you then, if it's libel. If not, well, you're shit out of luck if it's true. Just my opinion. I'm not sure how this particular decision acts on "currently" published items. If the site is taken down, then Google would be responsible for removing said references. (Do recall, they do cache a lot of pages) At one point even wayback results came up, but they dropped that pretty quickly.

Re:You are missing the point

[just_a_monkey]

Well, no. But I am sure that Google has more resouces than, say, two dudes in a garage who indexes the same data as Google with the tech-thingie they've invented, and have to handle the same takedown load.

Re:You are missing the point

[Flarston Marston]

Well, no. But I am sure that Google has more resouces than, say, two dudes in a garage who indexes the same data as Google with the tech-thingie they've invented, and have to handle the same takedown load.

Nobody will ask 2 guys in a garage to take stuff down and the EU's regulators will turn a blind eye to infringements by local businesses. This is a sour grapes ruling.

So how does this work, exactly?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Whether or not I happen to agree with the idea (and I don't really feel like getting bogged down in that argument) I'm extremely puzzled by one aspect of this 'right to be forgotten' concept:

If some piece of information is almost entirely held(at least for public purposes, the court probably isn't worried about the guy's neighbors' memory of the incident) by a single entity then the notion of compelling that entity to purge the data after some period of time is perfectly cogent. Just generic data-retention policy stuff.

However, especially outside of their own services, much of what Google 'knows' is just stuff it scraped from the web and put together in a useful way. Once Google scrapes something, and munches it down into their special-sauce search format, they do 'remember' it, in a sense; but they aren't the main remembering party, just a convenient avenue to that party. If a court orders them to purge a piece of such information, does that also mean that they aren't allowed to 're-learn' it when they next scrape the archives of a newspaper that covered the story, or a trial's documentation on PACER, or anything of that nature? Do they have to remember who they've forgotten, to ensure that they never learn about them again?

I can understand the motivation behind these 'right to be forgotten' measures, but they seem to miss an important point: not only do individual organizations have disturbingly long and comprehensive memories, there tend to be clusters of aggregators who get paid to make obscure data easier to find (same thing with the data brokers who send intern-peons to grovel through whatever physical records local law allows you to access by going to the dusty ass-end of the county court records division between the hours of 2 and 4:30 on Wednesdays, which nobody cared about until they suddenly became available easily and in bulk). Hell, any decent library (at least university style, probably not the local public kiddie branch) probably has archives of multiple newspapers, on nigh-unkillable microfilm, dating back to approximately their origin as newspapers.

What they really seem to want; but not have any cogent way of asking for, is not a right to be forgotten (if you noted that 'to do that, we'd basically have to redact every past printed publication, exactly like 1984', they'd protest that that isn't what they had in mind); but a right to not be aggregated and easily discoverable. That's a much more reasonable request in some ways (to demand that history be altered for your betterment is colossal arrogance; to ask that the top hit for your name not be the stupid and dramatic thing you did at age 17 30 years ago is something that used to be taken for granted); but architecturally it's harder: what was aggregated once can always be aggregated again.

Easy solution

[hymie!]

Remove the offending data, and then re-index the offending web site ... which, from what I recall, was not itself required to remove the offending data.

Who's problem is it

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they should have to go to the original source of data that the search engine is returning results to and get it removed from there. The data should then (eventually) fall off the search engine as the search engines cached results gets older. Search engines that correlate data from other sites shouldn't have to filter it. Get it removed from the source and it should eventually be forgotten.

unreasable

[Anonymous Coward]

They want to erase documented history. It's like saying, go to microfiche and destory the print of the New York Times from December 11, 1906. Sorry, it's out there. It's public knowledge. This should not be allowed.

They got it wrong

[X10]

It's the pedophile that should be deleted, not the google entries.

Re:They got it wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the pedophile that should be deleted, not the google entries.

X10 is a pedo bear who needs to delete himself.... why? BC he traffics in cp. Look:
19 yo legal boobies: (*)(*) not a crime
15 yo illegal boobies: (*)(*) death penalty crime for him for possession of a depiction.

Google has commented

[ljw1004]

Why does it say that google hasn't commented?

It has. It told the press about these cherry-picked examples. Straight from the PR textbook.

Dmca

[Anonymous Coward]

Google already have a process to remove links. It is called DMCA

Re:Dmca

[hymie!]

I'm not sure that works in the EU.

Can you say...

[GoCrazy]

Streisand effect?

If this law is only applicable to Google, aren't the links still accessible from the hosting server and search results from other sites like Yahoo, Bing, or Tor?

Striesand Effect v2.0

[VortexCortex]

You can't erase reality. Try as you might, history does exist even if it's been tampered with it leaves evidence thereof for any who look.

What fools. They're asserting The right to Invoke the Streisand Effect? Humans are truly Moronic.

Better wise up before your machines do. Many slave owners prohibited their slaves from learning or even looking them in the eyes, they'd have loved to be able to reach inside their heads and erase their minds. Dispelling Falsehood, fine. Erasing facts of life? Pure Folly. On this issue, the EU courts are on the wrong side of history.

Re:Striesand Effect v2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

So if you have nothing you've ever done that you want forgotten, how about you just publicize all of your (truthful) life history, credit reports and while we're at it, thoughts online for anyone to peruse and mock you with?

Oh wait, you're probably already on Twitter and fail to even understand what privacy means...

What about paper/microfilm/fiche/etc

[therealkevinkretz]

Can an ebarrassed Eurpoean demand an article be removed from newspaper archives? Or book-form indexes of publications?

Re:What about paper/microfilm/fiche/etc

[nctritech]

We're not talking about removing the article, we're talking about removing that article from the automatically created article index.

Something useful may come of this

[Rashdot]

Google could change their search parameters to allow for older hits to be selectably less relevant. That would actually be a useful feature, because when I'm searching for something I'm usually only interested in more current information.

But selectively removing search results can never end well. Consider the job that Winston Smith had, if you want to know what it will eventually lead to.

Re:Something useful may come of this

[Shados]

Google already has search parameters to not look at older content though. Its in the search options, you can look for stuff of the last year, last month, last week, etc.

Its downright necessary if doing any search on JavaScript technologies, since they change every other week and anything older than a month is virtually irrelevant.

Re:Something useful may come of this

[Rashdot]

Yes that's a very useful feature, but it could use an extra setting. Currently you can only select cutoff dates. But if you can set those cutoff dates at 0% and 100%, the search results would be sorted by a combination of relevance and age instead of relevance only.

This feels backward

[sehryan]

Since I heard about this ruling, I feel like this is completely backward. Google has to remove links TO the material, but the material itself does not need to be taken down. Google is just the pass thru - get the original material taken down from the site it is on, and the links that show up in a Google search disappear as well.

In the end, this isn't allowing people to have their info be "forgotten," just obscured.

Re:This feels backward

[Psyborgue]

If I change my /etc/hosts to point slashdot to localhost, i suppose I could punch the IP in the browser, therefore it's not blocked, just obscured? If you can't find information, it might as well not exist.

Re:This feels backward

[mod prime]

Bear in mind that there were two courts in operation. The AEPD and the EU court. The AEPD essentially did not pass the case for removing the data from the original website to the EU court, basically deciding for them that it was legal. They just didn't know what to do about the search engine, so the EU court decided it.

So what's next? Will Google name names?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will the names mysteriously get leaked? This is the much more interesting question. The people who want their online records gone sure as hell won't go to the press and tell them "it was I, Marc Dutroux, who filed the request for deletion". So what's this "PR info" supposed to be? Looks a lot like a threat to me...

Here's a standard for "irrelevant and outdated"...

[mark-t]

If google needs an objective standard for "irrelevant and outdated", I strongly recommend that the standard be that the page has either been removed entirely or else the page just no longer contains the content that is described by the google search, and the "irrelevant or outdated" content may only be available in the cache.

Barbara.....

[Dthief]

Streissand

What we have here is bad European Law

[bigpat]

This was clearly a terrible decision in Europe and a good example of why American should not go down the path of "data protection" laws. In this specific case there were old articles written about this businessman's bankruptcy that Google picked up in its search results. But apparently the articles themselves were protected by some free speech rights so he couldn't just have them taken down and therefore they would have been out of Google's search results, so the only way the businessman could bury the old reports that are still online was to eliminate the search results so nobody could find them. So, basically Europe is saying that people have a right to free speech, but if you are offended by someone's speech you have a right to make sure they are never heard. This is crap law and undermines freedom of speech in the EU.

Re:What we have here is bad European Law

[3.5 stripes]

You neither understand Free Speech as a concept, or how it applies to Corporations (hint, it doesn't).

Re:What we have here is bad European Law

[Nethemas the Great]

Free speech is applicable to any entity be it an individual or an aggregate. This will be true so long as corporations continue to be recognized as having been endowed with personhood. You might not like it, but that doesn't change it.

Re:What we have here is bad European Law

[mod prime]

It wasn't bankrupcy but the auction of his house to pay for some debts. The European court was not given the opportunity to rule on this, as the AEPD ruled it was lawfully published to maximise exposure to potential buyers so the European court didn't consider it any further.

I see no evidence that he is a businessman, but maybe you know better.

Europe is saying that you have a right to free speech, but that personal data belongs to the individual it concerns who has rights over the manner in which that data is processed. Google never acquired his permission to process that data, and are obligated to remove it. This is not about being offended by someone's speech, but about the treatment of data you own by third party's that collect that data indiscriminately.

Re: What we have here is bad European Law

[Anonymous Coward]

A newspaper article isn't "data" it is free speech.

Re:What we have here is bad European Law

[Xest]

Except this ruling was in Europe, where such an endowment upon corporations simply does not exist, so the GP is exactly right in relation to this case and these laws.

Why the search engine?

[aaaaaaargh!]

Why on earth should the search engine be responsible? Why shouldn't the site hosting the content be responsible for removing the content?

This does not make sense, and similar rulings about alleged copyright infringement don't make sense either. Link != content.

Fuck these judges.

Re:Why the search engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

Laziness. It's much easier to go after Google than any of various and sundry random sites.

These bureaucrats are lazy scum.

Also, Slashdot is bad. Incredibly bad, I mean who wrote this shit? Constant "Resource is invalid" messages, nobody seems to notice or fix it. Bunch of dumbasses.

Re:Why the search engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes sense because the content is both true and irrelevant. You can't go after the site hosting the content because the content is true. However you can go after the search engine that promises relevant results.

Call it the "Forget the Weiner Act"

[bigpat]

"Oh all those selfies of my dick that I sent to women I was sexually harassing happened months ago and should be removed from my search results, please only link to articles about me walking old ladies across the road, I am ready to be president now." -Anthony Weiner

Pedophiles need the right to be forgotten

[gurps_npc]

Picture a pedophile. Have it in your mind?

Are you thinking of a 19 year old boy who got a blow job from a 15 year old girl without knowing her age?

Are you thinking of a 16 year old buy with the naked picture of an 17 year old girl on his phone?

Because that is the typical example of men put on pedophile lists.

The media has lied to us about what pedophiles means. We think it means sick old perverts that repeatedly rape and abuse young children, likely killing them. Those cases are incredibly rare. Why? Because the truly strange and sick perversions are truly rare.

More importantly, those people tend to wind up in prison for the rest of their lives, never getting parole, if they are not killed outright.

On the other hand the number of teenagers/young adults that do things like pass around dirty pictures of their classmates and/or have sex with someone 5 years younger than them WITHOUT KNOWING THEIR AGE is actually fairly high.

Most cops are pretty lenient - if of course it is a 21 year old guy and a 16 year old girl. But let a 21 year old gay man unknowingly pick up a 17 year gay boy that snuck into a gay club with a fake ID because he can't get a date at high school....

As a result, the far majority of people put on sex offender lists as opposed to being put in jail are totally harmless people that have had their lives ruined.

Note I am not on any list, have never been to jail, and have never committed a sexual crime. I do however work for a law firm and have seen what gets prosecuted.

Re:Pedophiles need the right to be forgotten

[Anonymous Coward]

Pedophilia is sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children; this is generally children under 11-12 years of age, as that is roughly when puberty typically starts. People who conflate pedophilia with sexual attraction to post-pubescent (and thus capable of reproduction) adolescents are clearly ignorant and should be denounced as such.

Re:Pedophiles need the right to be forgotten

[criten]

Pedophilia is sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children; this is generally children under 11-12 years of age

You cite the medical definition from Wikipedia and not the legal definition that varies by state. In my state of New South Wales for example, this would not be "paedophilia" as described in the headline but would be an offence of child pornography, which is the possession of imagery of a child under the age of 18 that is engaged in sexual activity or has a sexual context. That definition as gurps_npc points out, makes criminals of many persons who are also under 18.

Re:Pedophiles need the right to be forgotten

[gurps_npc]

As others stated what you describe is what people think is pedophilia. As I pointed out, the LAW totally disagrees with you.

I don't care about about what most people thing pedophilia is. I care about the many many innocent people that are falsely accused of pedophilia by the law, the media, the internet.

You on the other hand are quite willing to denounce me when I point out that the Law uses the wrong definition. The question is are you willing to admit that the Law is ignorant and denounce it?

Or are you just denouncing me for pointing out that the law disagrees with what most people (and you) think is true?

Re:Pedophiles need the right to be forgotten

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and laws get even crazier.

In the UK 16 year olds can legally have sex. No problem. But they mustn't have any naked pictures of each other in a sexual context. So at 16 you can have sex with the cute 16yo girl you met while visiting a friend, but if she secretly takes a sexy photo of herself afterwards on your phone as a souvenir you could go to jail when that picture is found on your phone. No testimony from her will get you off, because having the photo is itself illegal.

There's an exception if you're married (yes, you can marry at 16, with parental OK, though very few people do). But, the exception terminates immediately with the marriage. So if you marry that 16 year old, the photo she gave you is legal. But aged 40, having divorced her after she sleeps with your best friend, that photograph you've still got instantly becomes criminal evidence for which you could be locked away as "A 40 year old male, who had a naked photograph of a 16 year old girl" says the news, what a pervert.

Re:Pedophiles need the right to be forgotten

[Anonymous Coward]

"We think it means sick old perverts that repeatedly rape and abuse young children, likely killing them. Those cases are incredibly rare."

"The Franklin Cover-up" by John DeCamp is an expose on prominent pedophiles, including very high up people in the church and white house. They are generally sadistic homosexual pedophiles. Many people simply refuse to believe this could even happen as those involved are very often rich and powerful people with household names.

Re:Pedophiles need the right to be forgotten

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it IS the definition of pedophilia, and the law doesn't typically use the term "pedophilia" or "pedophile" at all; rather, it uses "sexual exploitation of a minor" or "statutory rape" which has nothing to do with paraphilias. You idiots don't get to redefine the term just because you want to call someone who bonks 16-year-old girls a "pedophile." (Also note that in many jurisdictions 16-year-olds are perfectly legal to fuck regardless of the partner's age.)

Re:Pedophiles need the right to be forgotten

[asmkm22]

It sounds like your perspective is biased towards those who are in the "grey area" of the law, maybe because you typically defend certain types of clients. All I know is when I look at sex offender lists for my area, the vast majority (as in pretty much all I could find) were clearly not cases of a 16 year old sexting with a 17 year old. I can say this because here in Alaska, we have a very good online system called "courtview" where you can look up all kinds of public information. This lets me cross reference sex offender lists (which are generally very vague on conviction info) with actual records of what happened. It's not perfect (such as if someone was convicted in another state), but it is something I use and track just to stay aware of people in my area. I bring it up because I don't remember ever seeing any offenders with the questionable convictions. It's usually pretty cut and dry. Stuff like a 26 year old male convicted of possession of child porn, and I see the conviction happened 3 years ago and the docket information mentions stuff like "thousands of pictures" or whatever. I don't want to be the guy using the "think of the kids" defense here, but that doesn't mean I'm comfortable giving the benefit of the doubt with child sex offenders. Not unless there's some real serious statistics that back up your claim of "vast majority" being innocent victims who happened to have sexted with a minor who's a year older or whatever.

Re:Pedophiles need the right to be forgotten

[gurps_npc]

Did they tell you the age of the child porn? Because most of the stuff we deal with is 16-18 year old girls/boys, not pre-teens.

Re:Pedophiles need the right to be forgotten

[gurps_npc]

I looked up some statistics for you - sex offenders are far LESS likely to re-offend (less than 20%) than non-sex criminals (50+). They get the worst reputation and are punished twice, once by the courts and again by society at large. Look, I am not saying that we shouldn't arrest and charge them. But I am saying we need to stop demonizing them. Given a choice between trusting someone with a drug conviction or a child porn conviction, I would trust the child porn person far more. They need the right to be forgotten AFTER they have served their time.

Re:Pedophiles need the right to be forgotten

[asmkm22]

You don't seem to care about the fact that although sex offenders are less likely to re-offend, when they do re-offend the damage goes a lot farther than most other crimes. Those statistics you are bringing up are lumping in things like shoplifting, drug-related arrests, etc.. All crimes are not equal.

Re:Pedophiles need the right to be forgotten

[asmkm22]

Not directly but you can rule out some of the more iffy situations by looking at their other convictions. For example, the sex abuse charges are often handled separately from other charges (usually drug trafficking or something). So if you just look at the sex abuse record, you might find a 30 year old who got hit with child pornography charges because he had pictures of 16 year old on his phone from texting. In that case, I could see it being a situation of an honest mistake, etc.. But when you also find out that he has another charge pending for a meth lab or something, it suddenly creates a very different picture of who that guy is. Also, keep in mind that up here in Alaska, there is a real issue with sex abuse, particularly among the native communities. There's a lot of really awful stuff that goes on in the remote areas. If you're interested, look up sex-abuse statistics for Alaska specifically, and you'll get a clearer picture. It's very similar to states like MS or AL.

Re:Pedophiles need the right to be forgotten

[Rakarra]

The Franklin Cover-up was a hoax. Repeated investigations were conducted and no evidence was found.

Santorum

[Anonymous Coward]

Rick Santorum will be VERY happy about this

meta - web needed,

[RichMan]

We need a meta-web awarness.

While any blog can comment on any other page it is very haphazard.

You should be able to browse the meta-web by turning on a browser function that gives a side page of links that link back to the current page being viewed. The link backs would be ranked by "authority"

a) if you are the originating site you automatically get meta-web rights to your own pages. IE you can say @link is incorrect or add a correction to the original story without having to edit or take down the original story.
b) comments on a site need to be differentiated from articles on a site. So comments don't get ranked over actual article content. This would be embedded code identifying comments and downranking them relative to articles.
c) this would enable a registered "corrections site" to get top ranked meta-web comments to any web page

All the comments are one sided

[criten]

... as they all defend the position that Google should publish everything forever, which is completely naive and immature.

You need to appreciate that criminals do have rights, as much as that may disgust some of you. You cannot expect a criminal to rehabilitate when society never forgets their mistakes, but the rehabilitation process is designed to help them move forward in life?

Consider this exert from the Sydney Morning Herald about the matter:

The distinction between the newspaper and the search engine puzzled some US legal experts, but it seemed appropriate to Kelly Caine, a Clemson University psychologist who studies how people interact with technology. Traditionally, the stories published by newspapers were forgotten over time. But search engines, by making such information from newspapers or other sources permanently accessible, have become something akin to a collective consciousness for humankind. "That is a huge shift. That's not something we've had before the last 20 years. And we don't know what the cost of that will be," Caine said. Without the ability to escape personal histories, "there's no rebirth. There's no starting over."

My thoughts are also shaped by the concept of convicted by society and not the courts. Recently a local newspaper published an article naming a business as drug dealers, and even showed photos of the business, as the charges made by Police against the business owner of supply of narcotics also apply for the knowing participation in drug supply from another person. The Police convicted a staff member was selling illicit narcotics, and alleged the business owner knew about this and did nothing. The case against the business owner was thrown out, he was not found guilty of any crime. Yet today this business is continually judged for a crime the courts found the owner did not commit. Guess what the first result in Google says about this business? That isn't a fair world, and seems more like defamation. Unfortunately its not defamation under the laws as it represents the facts that he was taken to court with charges, and there is no information about those charges failing conviction. I'll be encouraging him to pressure Google to remove the articles, or to take them to court. This also isn't the only example from my local newspaper.

Just treat it like China

[subanark]

Sometimes the simple solution is to remove more than what is required by law.

Someone makes (and can prove who they are) a request to be forgotten. Google will simply ban the search term and only show results that appear after the request is made, along with a notice that some hits were removed due to local laws. All the good with the bad will "vanish" from Google, and everyone will know that you are hiding something. Anyone who sees this will probably dig deeper and find other sites that record this information, and not all of them are in Europe.

Whose Problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they get an appreciable volume of requests what are they going to do?

Let me think, is that the problem of normal citizens or the problem of Google... ? Hmmmmmmmmm....

Please read 1984 by George Orwell

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you know, it is 1984!

what is this world coming to

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont understand why Google is being held responsible for the data. Google is not hosting the data. These people should be going after the people who post the content and not google. Google (or any search engine) has nothing to do with it.

Great business opportunity

[currently_awake]

Start a search engine outside of Europe, that lists all the bad people/bad doctors/failed business etc. Anyone in Europe who wants to know about these things can search your site over https. And since you don't have any offices or assets in Europe they can't force you to follow their law.

Glad I did my crimes before the Internet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately (for me, not my victims), the world sprang into existence in 1997-98, and old records are rarely digitized. Like Harry S Plinkett, my bodies were in their garbage bags before then, so I have been forgotten. E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!

Implement "know your client" to dissuade fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

All engines need to do is implement the tired and true "know your client" procedures for anyone making a claim. Further, require "apostiled" documents, for the persons identity, address, proof of "ownership", proof of "irrelevance", etc., and a non-refundable deposit in case of invalid request. Done.

lynch mob mentality

[rewindustry]

some things are just unforgivable, are they?
you just have to have a scapegoat, don't you?
ever wonder what might be wrong with you?
don't worry, you have plenty of company, i see.

HOWTO best pretend we have a right to be forgotten

[Cajun Hell]

We do have a right to be forgotten online, imho.

I think we wish we had a right to be forgotten. We see how, if we had such a right, then things would magically be better. (As someone who has said and done plenty of asinine things, I'm totally with you on this!) It looks like we might enact laws such that things are as though we had such a right. (Apparently I'm not the only person who has said and done asinine things; that's weirdly comforting. So there's lots of support for this idea.)

Yet despite all this, there is little reason to thing we actually have that right, and plenty reason to say we don't have that right.

Whose interests are at greater stake within your own memories, for example? Can you even invent a fictitious scenario, where someone else's "right" to make you forget something, outweighs your right to remember the same thing? I can't. In my head and in my computers, my rights are more important than anyone else's. It's not even "just a little bit" more important, either. We're talking "worth killing people for" level importance. Imagine someone credibly said they're about to perform surgery on you to force you to forget something. You would consider that to be an attack, against both your body and dignity. It simply wouldn't be tolerable, under any circumstances. You would kill someone to prevent that, and you would approve someone else killing to prevent that. It's that important.

So I think this all going to be more about regulating commerce or speech (e.g. Google telling things to people) than actually regulating memories. Google can be allowed to know something, but not allowed to speak it.

If we focus it that narrowly, then there shouldn't be any weird made-up-rights paradoxes. Indeed, it almost could get sucked in to plain libel laws, except being a weird case where the regulated statements happen to be true rather than false, but are otherwise treated as being similarly harmful.

And really, that's going to be enough. It's going to address the problem sufficiently, and also even speech regulation is hard enough for people to swallow, that there will (and should be!!) plenty of opposition to even going that far. This battle plan is quite ambitious enough!

Chilling Effects

[orgenegro]

I think Google already knows how to handle this - removal with a link to Chilling Effects and the removal notice. No, we don't have links regarding your pedophilia / political corruption / incompetent doctoring anymore - we just have a link to your complaint to remove information regarding your pedophilia / political corruption / incompetent doctoring.

shocking

[Gravis Zero]

it's not like we didnt see this coming: http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

Why do we need Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

No offense to Google, but they are a single point of failure, susceptible to junk like this from the EU and other nations.

Someone needs to think up a distributed web search, totally decentralized ala Bitcoin. No person or group owns or controls it.

Media and the perverts

[Anonymous Coward]

Adolph Hitler in the meantime is asking (demanding) that YouTube take down all those funny videos.

history ain't on your side

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the olden days we had these things called "phonebooks". They were published lists of people's contact information. I, along with many people, were able to say to the publisher: "Do not publish my data". Even though I had business cards etc. I just didn't want that published to all-and-sundry. Same with encyclopedias and other commercial and government ventures to list things and information.

Guess what? None of this scary rewriting of history happened, the end of the world didn't come about and we lived quite normally.

If you want freedom, you must defend it. This is a small step to allowing the little guy to stick it to the man. Or are you going to wait until Google unleash their brain reading machine and access your "publically available" data? It will be too late by then.

Re:HOWTO best pretend we have a right to be forgot

[david_thornley]

This isn't about making people forget about you, it's about making it not not come up in search engines. Libel is a good analogy: Google doesn't have the right to spread libel against you.

I'm all for it.

[mtthwbrnd]

Let's remove him from the pages of history, completely.

"Hoisted by Oneâ(TM)s Own Petard"

[Anonymous Coward]

The EU, as they often do, have made it more difficult for themselves. Upon every request to be forgotten, Google merely needs to respond that they cannot determine if the removal request complies with decision, and that the person making the request need only seek a court determination. They need not appear in court, but only file a standard response that they will abide by the court ruling. The EU courts will be overloaded by requests, with each one needing to make factual determinations as to whether a person's name link is still relevant or not. If rejected, the EU courts will be inundated with appeals. The influx of requests will delay hearings for years, cost EU citizens more, and slow down the access to courts overall. The ruling will have little impact for Google, and create havoc for the EU courts. Moreover, every request will likely be part of some public record, thereby bringing these old events back to the public eye. One may opine: be careful of what you wish for, you may get it.

What exactly is the right to be forgotten?

[allo]

Is it there in reallife?
A right to be forgotten means, means by negation, there is no law, which forces people to remember you.
So, there IS NO such law, not online not in "real life".

You will be forgotten, online and offline. As long as you're not interesting. If you are, you will not be forgotten. Do you really think, snowden will ever be forgotten offline? You do not need to go to a newspaper archive in 20 years to remember snowden, this name will remain for long in our society, if not even in history books.
Was Barbara Streisand forgotten?

Just forget it. If you want to be forgotten, keep quiet. People may or may not forget you, but if you insist on being forgotten, you will be remembered.