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to pages about his conviction after a European court ruled that an individual could force it to remove 'irrelevant and outdated' search results.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I don't see how a conviction for possessing child porn is irrelevant or outdated.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.

[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.

[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.

[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?

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

[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?

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.

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.

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.

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

[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:Insanity

[just_another_sean]

Won't someone PLEASE think of the advertisers!

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.