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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.
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Oh, don't worry, the French are already doing that. Fortunately, this particular case demonstrated the Striesand Effect can still kick a bully's ass from time to time.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
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.
Suppose I did a search for "ReekRend", and found an article that said you had been arrested for a suspected child porn offence. That might hypothetically be true, but what that article doesn't say, because it happened a bit later, is that the police dropped all charges after they found that someone else had stolen your credit card and used it to buy child porn. You probably wouldn't want the original article appearing every time someone searched for your name.
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)
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.
Oh, I'm sure believing that WWI and WWII happened because of irrational hatred is a comforting thought to Germans, but it's not true.
You're such a git. If you really think that Germany alone caused WW1, you've been spoon-fed too much propaganda. Yes, Germany started WW1, totally true. But at that time, half of Europe was waiting for an opportunity to kick this or that neighbours ass, which is largely why everyone jumped at the chance to have a war. At any other time in Europe's history, the assassination of some successor of some second-rate country would've barely made front-page news, let alone cause any diplomatic trouble.
And you illustrate that many Germans still hold the same kinds of beliefs.
"git" is not a strong enough word for you, but I can't think of a better one right now. Maybe you could try history and actual arguments instead of ad hominem attacks. And if you insist on attacking people you don't even know, you could try to at least make it somewhat funny or interesting instead of just boring and stupid.
Germans were motivated by the strong conviction that their culture, economy, and system of government was superior, in particular to the Anglo Saxon model, and that they had a moral duty to spread it across Europe.
France and England barely avoided a war between themselves in 1904 and forged an alliance that Russia joined in 1907. You could have heard about it in history class if you hadn't been asleep, it was called the Entente and if you open your mouth to talk about WW1 and you forget to mention the Entente, you prove to everyone with some education that you're an idiot.
Together with everyones colonialism and increasing tensions due to colonial wars and growing military everywhere you got a complex diplomatic situation with several secret pacts (Italia and France, 1902, for example) that creates a situation that even serious historians call a powder keg and that they largely agree would have blown up sooner or later.
You attempt to simplify complex history to one source and one reason and one actor is typical of american movies where you always need a hero and a villain to tell the story, but it very, very rarely is appropriate to real life.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org