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European Commission Spokesman: Google Removing Link Was "not a Good Judgement"
An anonymous reader writes in with this article from the BBC about Google's recent removal of a news story from search results. "Google's decision to remove a BBC article from some of its search results was "not a good judgement", a European Commission spokesman has said. A link to an article by Robert Peston was taken down under the European court's "right to be forgotten" ruling. But Ryan Heath, spokesman for the European Commission's vice-president, said he could not see a "reasonable public interest" for the action. He said the ruling should not allow people to "Photoshop their lives". The BBC understands that Google is sifting through more than 250,000 web links people wanted removed."
...but that's exactly what the ruling does. The original case was a businessman objecting to Google links to newpaper stories about his life. This is no different.
Fact is, the court that issued this ruling screwed up big time. Perhaps, if Google can find a few more egregious deletions to make, the European Parliament will correct the error.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
The important question for me personally is this: As someone living in Europe, how can I ensure that I see the US search results? Does switching to google.com suffice? Or do I have to use a proxy or VPN?
Apparently Robert Peston did some digging and it wasn't searching for the Article that was being removed but searching for one of the comments. Right to be forgotten is all well and good, but using that to try and remove a post you yourself put in a public place is a bit barmy. Props to the first person who changes their name to Anonymous Coward then makes the request for all their posts to be unsearchable.
I photoshop my life constantly.
Google shouldn't have to make intelligent decisions as to what needs to be removed. It should all be automatic. Either everything is removed, or nothing is removed. Only by court orders otherwise.
Those people, who want to be forgotten, should go after those hosting the material, not the search engine pointing. Don't we have an expectation to know where things are when searching? The search engine should be neutral is discovering the information.
The existence of a site doesn't necessarily mean something is negative. Facts are facts. If it's copyright infringement, defamation, libel, whatever, then it's the site that should be dealt with, not someone pointing to it.
To me, the E.U. isn't making progress. (I'm an American in the U.S.A.)
How does the existence of facts make a person any less qualified to do a job, if said facts aren't relevant? Employers, lenders, whatever, shouldn't be allowed to take factor in certain things when it comes to hiring people. It should be illegal. Kind of like how when asking about criminal activity, here in the U.S., I don't think they can count convictions over 10 years old. Why not do that sort of thing for stuff over there? Wasn't this whole thing originally about some guy and his tax foreclosure on his house or something like that?
Well the court judgement was not a good judgement; it set a precedent without any guidance about how to apply it to other cases. It also wasn't a good judgement because it creates a right to alter history, but that's another thing... Also Google have received tens of thousands of requests, can they really be expected to give each one a thorough legal analysis? Of course not, they'll just play it safe. So it may be an error of judgement by Google, but that's only because the court made an error of judgement.
Whilst it's a good idea for most people to be able to hide some embarrassing stuff about them, sadly it can be used to hide information that should be public. For example I know of someone who owes me a considerable amount of money, and several others. He deliberately ran up the debt with no intention of paying. Whilst trying to find information about him the other day Google showed that it has hidden a results because of the right to be forgotten. I know that he's done this so he can get out there and con more people with less chance of being found.
This has been pointed out in comments in earlier stories already, Google is behaving like a 10-yr old being ordered to follow the rules.
Unfortunately, the court system is not stupid and are fully equipped to deal with kids throwing tantrums.
I wonder if Google will end up pulling out of EU just like how it pulled out of China when it finds out governments won't let tricks get a pass.
I've been doing a bit of digging on the page, apparently the takedown was because of one of the comments so I did google searches for the page and each commentors name and they all came up ... though the searches
were very slow and occasionally died with a 500 error.
of everything that has been removed due to these complaints.
Google is deliberately misinterpreting the law in an attempt to show that it's unworkable.
Some people who don't like the law will, rather than debating it on its merits (and there are obvious arguments both for and against), use Google's misleading behaviour in their defence.
It's like having a law against inciting racial hatred (as many European countries do) and using that as an excuse to remove all discussion everywhere about race.
... I thought this law was so forward-looking and enlightened and European (but I repeat myself) and all. But now it's a censorship tragedy instead?
It's so hard to keep up with what I'm supposed to think these days ...
Europe... the new USA.
Justin Deed was a Streisand fan,
Doo dah, doo dah,
Saw her Effect and had a plan,
Oh da doo dah day,
Scrapin' screens all day
Scrapin' screens all night
Tried purge the whole Internet
'Cause he won't too bright.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
There must be a list of "forgotten" URLs. They certainly contain interesting or embarassing stuff which I would like to relish. If any one of you fellow slashdotters knows of such a list, please share.
First, I'd point that for many quite common names, you may find several people with same Name+Surname in Europe... sometimes hundred of people sharing the same name. So, what if John Doe A ask to remove some fact about John Doe B ? That's clearly impossible to google to judge about it.
I think that a quick "fix" to the problem would be Right to be cast in oblivion... Google just has to keep (in addition to removal of a specific link) a list of the people who asked to have their name removed and simply refuse any search with these names (no result, people cast into oblivion) with a big message "John Doe asked that links about him were removed from search results".
This would someone backfire to people asking such removal... You want to get a job ? recruiter try to look you up in Google and find that you asked to be removed from search results... and get told about it... that open any awful reason (sex offender ? serious misbehaviour ? other ?) and is likely to rule you out. You're a politician ? no publicity about you (except that "asked to be removed") is clearly worse that one or two old pages on the web about you... and so on...
And, somehow, google is complying : people want info about them removed... and that info is removed... And people get to know about who asked it (to be sure that's it's not an arbitraty removal).
IMHO, list of people who asked some removal SHOULD be public...
Muslims want all reference to the twin towers bombing and the london underground bombing removed. Sure it's irrelevant! Translations of the Qur'an - sure it might give people the idea that Islam isn't all peaceful
I officially no longer understand how the hell our government works.
Isn't that exactly, to the letter, what the ruling does?
Howto: 1. As a paying google customer, can google include the storage of all history as a part of the service for a paying customer. 2. www.google.com / non-EU - will show EU hidden. 3. To discourage, www.google.com/RightToBeForgotten web page so you can see those with lots to hide, in effect raising their profile.
You understand correctly.
In the American Oligarchy, justice currently means endless retribution, highlighted by driving perceived social misfits into a bottom-feeder class where work, housing and relationships are all truncated, in past years by convention, and today by extensive law.
One cannot attempt to equate Europe's general move towards the public good with the AO's drive to isolate and disadvantage. This country has long enjoyed a stratified class structure. It has gone so far as to abandon its constitutional underpinnings to see to it that formal stratification and restricted access has become law. The general attitude is that there is no social disadvantage too extreme to heap on the bowed back of any citizen who has not complied with the prejudices of the day, who commits a crime of any significance whatsoever, or who attempts to undertake asserting consensual, informed choice with or without like-minded companions.
In the AO, the attitude is one of not caring in the least for one's fellow citizen, and certainly not if said citizen has actually acted out in any way. You can see it in the extreme resistance to taking care of its poorer citizens (The AO is one of the last "developed" nations to actually acknowledge the otherwise obvious fact that a healthy population is a strong basis for a strong economy); You can see it in the willingness to export jobs outside the country, leaving the poorer citizens without work; You can see it in the "never forgive, never forget" nature of the justice system; You can see it in the horrific conditions across the country's prison systems; You can see it in the numerous "services" that allow us to scan the lives of our fellow citizens and uncover everything from minor peccadilloes to serious breaches of the law; and you can see it in the rapid erosion of the constitutional principles that were supposed to restrain the government from intruding on the lives of the citizens in the first place.
Europe is by no means perfect. There are many laws that criminalize acts that should be no business of the government. But it seems clear that there is little attempt to intentionally lock out the citizenry who have run ins with the law on a permanent basis -- such class stratification isn't even on the table. This is somewhat ironic, given that this region is where dukes, earls, kings and queens were (and in a sort of faded, ghostly way, still are) the actual government structure. Perhaps it is this very experience with formal stratification that reminds Europeans that one person, after all, really isn't that much better than the next.
On this July 4th, perhaps citizens of the AO should take a moment to regret the country's failure to tread the path its founders laid out for it. Although that would take time from the barbecue, reducing the overall opportunity to gossip about who is on what list, the *nerve* of some *felon* trying to actually get a decent job, and "those druggies" down the street who actually Smoke Pot. I suppose we can't have that.
I'm sure the average citizen won't even recognize what I'm saying here; the nationalist nature of the AO spirit, exceptionalism and disdain for any way not their own serves as a powerful set of blinders. But I am also sure that historians will spend no time arguing about the fact of the AO; the contention will only be about exactly when the country lost its way, mutating from a constitutional republic where equality was a key underpinning of the national consciousness, into an oligarchy where corporations bought law designed to benefit themselves, while laws enabling and formalizing inequality were the meat and potatoes of political rhetoric from election to election.
were really in a 1984 novel
seems to me that it's better to err on the side of safety by complying with all requests than have to deal with people in court because joe blow didn't like that you wouldn't remove his misdeeds. i mean, there are about 1000 requests a day and if you deny even 1% of people, you could end up in court in multiple countries in just one day.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Some of this would be solved by simply not indexing local news stories and police blotters. As these are generally of interest mostly to locals (surprise!), little loss of significant information access would occur. I already know where to go for my local information. I don't really benefit from the ability to find your local news and police blotter without an actual interest in your locality (and in which case, hunting down your local websites is trivial.) The ability to see everything from everywhere by searching for the essential equivalent to "search term: John Doe" is only something really of benefit to the gossipmonger's mentality. I really don't think you could ever convince me that such gossip is of much positive use to society.
Google wouldn't even have to do anything; all it would take is a legislated robots.txt entry, and bingo, local news and blotter gossip is gone.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I said we wanted a slope. Nobody said it had to be slippery.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
And these comments by the EC spokesman are unfortunate.
I don't ever want to see the ability to delete or edit comments once they are posted. Google is right on this, I certainly hope they carry on in this matter until the law is repealed or other indexers come online to get around it. Censorship is evil, always. It is invariably a tool of despots.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Well, demanding that Google remove references based on its judgement of what should be removed or not is in itself an instance of bad judgement, since its implementation will depend on judgement by individuals in Google, some of which will be bad. q.e.d.
if people and companies always had "good judgement" there would be no need for laws and legal precedents in the first place. Laws are a fundamentally there to replace judgment, they provide a prescription of what one can or may do given a set of facts. They replace the use of ones judgement.
Maybe the EC should recognize that the problem lies with their law codes and their courts and not with Google.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
It is an american Corporation with no assets in Europe! In the United States it is protected by the Speech Act! Europe can not corerce DuckDuckGo! It has a policy about not recording your searches!
Does not exist.
It didn't exist before the Internet, and it doesn't exist now. It's a complete fiction. I don't even know why we're discussing this as if it exists. It doesn't. I can't go back and tell people to forget things or destroy newspaper clippings about what I did any more than I can stop the tide from coming in.
--
BMO
Hm, actually having someone with your own name do something heinous is pretty much a way to get disgraced without doing anything. I shouldn't have to respond for the crimes of John Doe B. Or imagine John Doe B is a known sex offender, or a pedophile. Scary.