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On Forgetting the Facts: Questions From the EU For Google, Other Search Engines
The Wall Street Journal lists 26 questions that Google and other search providers have been asked (in a meeting in Brussels earlier this week) to answer for EU regulators, to pin down what the search engine companies have done to comply with European demands to implement a "right to be forgotten." Some questions were asked directly of representatives of Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, while the regulators want answers to the others in short order. From the article:
Regulators touched on some hot-button issues in six oral questions and another 26 written ones, with answers due by next Thursday. They asked Google to describe the “legal basis” of its decision to notify publishers when it approves right-to-be-forgotten requests, something that has led to requesters’ being publicly identified in some cases. They also asked search engines to explain where they take down the results, after complaints from some regulators that Google does not filter results on google.com. That means that anyone in Europe can switch from, say, google.co.uk to Google.com to see any removed links. Among the questions: "2. Do you filter out some requests based on the location, nationality, or place of residence of the data subject? If so, what is the legal basis for excluding such requests?" and "16. Does your company refuse requests when the data subject was the author of the information he/she posted himself/herself on the web? If so, what is the basis for refusing such requests?"
This is a very slippery slope. Trying to balance the rights of individuals to remove incorrect information about themselves and trying to remove unflattering information about themselves. Having a process to verify the individual, the reasons for wanting the information removed, and is the public interest best served by removing the information.
I'm sure there are many public figures that would love a chance to remove some of the news items about themselves.
~~
The EU directive gives at best a false sense of privacy, since the information itself isn't removed, but only the links, kind of like the way an OS might "remove" a file but still preserve its data ready to be "undeleted" (unless it's a filesystem that tends to overwrite unused blocks).
The EU regulators don't want to appear as "censors" (with the unsavory connotation that the word carries in a presumably democratic environment) so they don't go after the source. This reeks of institutional hypocrisy. Why not just go after the publishers. If they shut down the publishers, bloggers, etc, then all that Google and Bing would be left are the dead links.
Once something is on the internet, it will NEVER go away. Live the rest of your life accordingly. Yes, it sucks if there's some inaccurate BS about you on the web. But there's NOTHING you can do to make it go away. Making a big stink about it only spreads it further.
I figure it will take another generation or so for everyone to be acclimated to living with the internet.
There is no, cannot be any, justification for removing indexes of factual reference.
There may be discussions on the pros and cons of "too much" information, but that Pandora's box is already open and we have to live with it.
Yes, very much so.
Also anyone with the resources/money can still find any of this information. This "privacy through obscurity" will shift informational power back towards those with money, rather than the obviously preferable democratization of information the internet had enabled and encouraged.
This isn't a slippery slope, this is simply a cliff. There is no right to be forgotten, because it would mean I don't have a right to remember and thus share that memory.
Think about it, if I printed a memoir in the 1960s, and have, perhaps negative, anecdotes of various people, would that book have had to be recalled from the shelves a few years later just because the right to forget kicked in? Oh right, internet. Changes everything.
The human species is going to have to grow up a little. First as an audience and consumer of the net, and realize that just because it's on the internet (or even wikipedia) doesn't mean it's true. It also has to realize what people said in the past doesn't always pose a true reflection of their current selves - that people change and evolve. Especially from a younger age like 13.
Second, it will have to grow up as individuals and realize, when you put it out there, you put it out there. And no nanny state can fix it.
They can only provide the illusion of fixing it. Because search engines outside the EU are going to ignore this. And savvy people inside the EU will be able to access those with ease, while the heavy handed censorship will only provide the drones with comfort they are taken care of.
Guess what a person's right to be forgotten would turn into in the US? Corporations, who are people, would jump in it.
Why is this being pushed so hard now anyway? Well, Germany got it's hand caught in the cookie jar along with the NSA. It's BundesNachrichtenDienst (BND) works alongside with and is just as if not more invasive than the NSA.
Of course, Merkel gets to put on her show and dance about being outraged her phone is tapped, but she says nothing about how complicit she is in tapping everyone elses phones in her country.
And don't think the EU countries are any more innocent in this.
So instead of really protecting the right to privacy, by people who want privacy in the here and now, by pushing bulletproof encryption standards without backdoors and other actual net positives for their citizens, they just put up this debate of this none-issue that feels really good but does nothing except what government is typically good at - banning certain behaviors from private entities and censoring hot potatoes from public eyes. Ony it's third speciality, making a tax for this, is missing and probably coming. Perhaps an ISP tax that will "help monitor and enforce your privacy online", which is code for another 1000 workers at the BND trading people's naked selfies.
So putting this as some slippery slope is unhelpful. It implies that this is an actual issue that needs to be hammered out. No. It's just bullshit sand-in-the-face for those who don't see what's really going on.
I kept reading that wrong for some reason.
Table-ized A.I.
Aren't these the kinds of questions the EU should have been asking themselves before passing the law? The fact that so many of these questions need to be asked should show them just how poorly conceived and written the law is in the first place.
I think I'll switch to google.com, my local version is crippled because of EU law.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
One point I haven't seen raised in the debate thus far is that of "spent" convictions.
/. undergrowth will jump in and correct me (and even if I'm right, will still likely jump in to add the date the act was passed).
Here in the UK (and possibly other EU jurisdictions, I don't know), if you are convicted of a crime and have served your sentence, after a defined period the conviction will cease to appear on most employment-related criminal records checks (with obvious exceptions for high-risk roles such as those working with the young/vulnerable) and no longer have to be declared. This defined period varied with the severity of the crime involved/sentence served.
Historically, this meant potential employers in the lower-risk roles didn't know of convictions from a long time in the past unless the applicant volunteered the information, the HR staff involved had a far greater than average memory or could be bothered to pop down to the library and trawl the (barely indexed) microfiches of old newspapers on the slim chance that one of the current batch of applicants may have been convicted in a case considered significant enough to make it into the press. Now, it's just a couple of minutes on Google (or your other search provider of choice) to get this information that was considered unobtainable without compulsion or formal regulated checks when the law covering spent convictions was enacted.
This change is pretty fundamental, and MAY have been at least subconsciously involved in the court judgements that led to this discussion. That being said, IANAL. I do have a vague recollection of the statute being called the "Rehabilitation of Offenders Act" (there was a section about it and why it didn't apply on a set of security clearance application forms I had to complete over a decade ago, which, being a 20-year-old without so much as a speeding ticket, I only skimmed due to its irrelevance to me. Hence why my recollection is merely somewhat vague on the specifics), but I'm sure that if I'm wrong, some lawyer lurlikg in the
Just my $0.03 (At current exchange rates, my £0.02 is worth more than your $0.02)
+1
"They also asked search engines to explain where they take down the results, after complaints from some regulators that Google does not filter results on google.com. That means that anyone in Europe can switch from, say, google.co.uk to Google.com to see any removed links."
Duh. Because these arrogant European do not own the world. Despite the fact that they have repeatedly tried to conquer the rest of the world they do not make the laws in other lands. Those of us in the USA and other countries are not bound by European law outside of Europe. Bravo to Google for not forgetting things outside the European theater. Europeans and live in their little fantasy world where they rewrite history but the rest of us will take our dose of reality full strength.
The right to be forgotten was meant to be for normal individuals which went into a abd situation, then corrected it, but google always bring it up as first result thus meaning your chance of reintegration and finding a good job get NIL, and thus you enter a abd spiral or get your chance in life lowered. The example of that was a guy which went bankrupt paid back his debt, but still even after that the first result in google was his debt and bankruptcy, thus putting a burden on him.
It was NEVER meant for am public figure or a politician to hide their middeed or shameful action. >b>Google itnentionally allowed such removal as a kind of protest when such removal were not "granted" by the law. Google are the asshole here when they allow a public figure to remove their stuff.
Personally I am for the right to be forgotten. Previous generation including mine could do all sort of stuff including getting drunk, bankrupt, or get caught doing illegal stuff but never got punished foreever for it. It was always limited ansd people forgot, or you could move into another town. Nowadays it is different, you make a misstep, even something LEGAL but frowned upon, and BAM ! It is there for ever + longer.
A non forgetting society is a harsh society which I refuse. So excuse me if I think the slope was slippery before, when nothing was forgotten. Having a right to be forgotten remove a bit of that slope and make it more horizontal. Excellent.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
It was on the table long before anyone knew the name Snowden
Target knew in the mid-1990s. Target Welcomes Snowden
It would more accurately be described as the "right to be forgotten by commercial entities". [...] You are not required to forgot or remove information from your personal web site.
But where does a "personal web site" end and "by commercial entities" begin? At the use of modest ads to pay for the cost of hosting?
You deny the existence of a category "correct yet misleading", such as a mention of someone being accused of a particularly shameful crime but later being acquired or otherwise having the charges dropped. Google allegedly makes it too easy for human resource personnel and others who routinely perform background checks to mislead themselves about a candidate's character.
"6. Do you notify website publishers of delisting? In that case, which legal basis do you have to notify website publishers?" Laws are restrictive not permissive. The response from the search engines should be "by what legal basis do you have to prevent us from notifying website publishers?"
Meanwhile, someone who isn't Google and doesn't have offices in the EU will surely make up a page of links to this information. If the page generates traffic, someone will pay for add space there.
And then the next logical step is for the EU to impose some sort of sanctions on the infrastructure and payment services involved if any of them have any connection to the EU -- just as the US government has done with things like DNS and payment services that are conveniently within its jurisdiction.
I'm not sure I like where this is all going. I'm sure we can all agree that overall the Internet has been a great advance for humanity, and in recent years governments from all over the world have presumed to carve it up and control it in their own interests, almost invariably to the detriment of people somewhere else (or, in some cases, their own people).
However, we are going to have to confront some difficult philosophical and ethical differences sooner or later, because clearly we also can't have a situation where the Internet is somehow above the law, but we don't always agree on what that law should be. Frankly, the US government have been throwing their own weight around for years, and Google have been doing things that push the boundaries of typical European legal and ethical standards for a long time too. Neither has shown any particular concern or remorse about the effects of their actions abroad, and neither has suffered any significant negative consequences so far, with the possible exception of the Snowden fallout. Sooner or later the rest of the world was going to push back.
In as much as this marks a change in the general acceptance that the US can export its laws and ethics but won't be subject to anyone else's, that is probably a good direction to move in. It will force the issues of Internet governance and extra-territorial law enforcement into the open, where at least we can scrutinise and debate them honestly, instead of everyone's government doing sneaky things often without much public scrutiny and often because of coincidences involving which infrastructure happened to fall somewhere they could get at it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The difference is more in how the information is treated. Did you write a news article or blog post about some person? Then it is okay to keep it (as long as it isn't slander or breaking other laws). It would be okay to keep it even if you had ads and especially if you're running a news site with publication license then you've got additional protection. Are you keeping a database and listing people from certain criteria and with additional (maybe even personal) details? Not okay.
This could be a slippery slope if this was a new law or a new application of the law, but it is neither of these: this is just the existing application of existing EU laws that exist for, what, 30 years or more? There are very precise and well-understood laws in many countries of Europe stating that yes indeed, it is absolutely forbidden for a company to retain information about EU Citizen that can be processed automatically without these citizens having their say about it. Having that information as part of an index, meta-data or whatever doesn't really matter. You have that kind of information, you must abide by the law. The companies storing personal information are very aware of these laws and have processes in place to cater for the "having their say about it" part. And believe me or not all the newspaper are fully compliant with the law, for many, many decades. And no, this part of Europe (that is, not UK) is not well-known for its strong censorship stance. So there is no problems. At all. What you are depicting here is for some kind of arrogant US company that believes it knows better than the people of Europe how to deal with their own laws. Surprisingly enough, that will not end up well for them.
What I want is when a site is blocked by a court order, government seizure or blockage, RIAA cyberattack etc. the site should not just disappear, you should be directed to a web page which states that the web site www.joepublicsucks.com that you are trying to reach has been censored by court order xxxxx at the request of Joe Corruptpolitician. I'm not talking about the generic "we don't like this site" notice that ICE puts up, but one that details who ordered the censorship and what court is enforcing it. Unfortunately notification of such will never be allowed in a "free" world.
Surely, if a link is being removed to a website, the owner of that website is entitled to be informed? They might WANT people to find that information. And given that Google is where most people go, that harms that website - or potentially does. Censorship aside, what about the rights of the website that these links point to? The newspaper links being removed are a good example. They are commercial entities, and derive a significant portion of their income through advertising, and getting people to visit their sites and see ads on those sites. By doing this you are preventing these companies from carrying out their business. Removing these links is effectively removing those sites or pages - a death sentence for some. Some information will just vanish from Google and the person whose site it is will have no idea why they are struggling to get views on it.
Just change your name for godssake.
How should one go about making these monopolies less palatable to legislators?
To me it seems strange to focus on search providers. Search indexes content and metadata. If the content doesn't exist it isn't indexed. Shouldn't the site offing the content be the one responsible not the search provider pointing to it?