Google Rejects 58% of "Right To Be Forgotten" Requests

gurps_npc writes CNN Money has a short, interesting piece on the results of Google implementing Europe's "Right to be Forgotten." They are denying most requests, particularly those made by convicted criminals, but are honoring the requests to remove salacious information — such as when a rape victim requested the article mentioning her by name be removed from searches for her name. "In evaluating a request, we will look at whether the results include outdated or inaccurate information about the person," Google said. "We'll also weigh whether or not there's a public interest in the information remaining in our search results -- for example, if it relates to financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions or your public conduct as a government official."

Comments

The technology exists and is used

[i kan reed]

Social engineering, political pressure, and the fact that the worst people are most interested in covering up their past means this will be abused. Every sane and pragmatic consideration to prevent abuse will have workarounds well known to scummy specialists, who know who to ask, who to lie to, and how to submit requests.

Re:The technology exists and is used

[Rhywden]

The same argument can be made about the death penalty. As the US justice system has shown repeatedly there are quite a lot of innocent people on death row.

Now the question becomes: Do you rather want to abolish the death penalty so that no innocent people are killed - or do you want to make sure that criminals are killed and accept the innocent victimes as collateral damage?

Benjamin Franklin stated: "It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer". I find it interesting that the US have moved into the completely opposite direction.

Re:What right do they have anyway?

[Br00se]

The point is to determine if each request is covered by the law. The problem is that the requests they get are not individually approved by a court, that would make it too easy. Instead, they HAVE to be the judge of which requests are covered by the law.

Personally, I think this is a BS law. If something is legally present on web, ie. a ten year old news story, then it should be index-able. However, if there a a factual problem, or contains private information, then the site owners should be required to correct it or take it down. The idea of going after the index is ridiculous, not effective and lazy.

20 years there was no index

[aepervius]

20 years ago if you were caught giving a hand job to a guy in a corner, maybe youw ere drunk or whatnot, maybe it would ruin your life for a year or two but that would be over , unless somebody dedicated a good amount of time to search paper clip it would fall into forgetness. nowadays the slightiest stuff is kept forever. A society which does not forget is one which will not forgive minor transgression. Now that handjob will hunt you forever maybe even stopping you getting a good job. An unforgiving society is harsh and one I does not want to live in and apparently many others. Also remember freedom is not found at the middle road where everybody find everything acceptable, and reporting would be borring. Freedom lies on the side of the road, where the shadows are , but still on the lgeal side, and what is or what is not accepted by society lies. If you enforce an unforgiving society and one with 100% memory then you WILL lose freedom. In a way this is already hapenning in the US. I refuse to see that coming in europe. Long live teh right to be forgotten. I do not need it, but I will fight for that freedom for everybody.

Re:20 years there was no index

[Immerman]

Alternately, in a society where nothing is ever forgotten perhaps we can finally relearn to forgive on a social level, and/or simply ignore that which is not relevant. How is a 20-yo public handjob relevant to anything today?

Re:What right do they have anyway?

[Jason Levine]

"assuming the request itself is valid"

This is the sticking point. For example, my name is pretty common. Suppose there was a news story about a Jason Levine who did something bad and searches on my name were showing this news item. Could I petition Google to "forget" my name? (We'll ignore, for the moment, that I don't live in Europe.) Could the criminal with the same name as me do the same? Could I petition Google to "forget" a hypothetical video of me walking into a light-pole while texting? Can a company request that all mentions of a product be removed if said product was a flop?

The courts, thankfully, didn't tell Google that they had to honor all removal requests. Had they done so, Google might have just saved everyone time and simply shut down their search engine as they would be forced to remove valid search results for inappropriate reasons. The removal requirements the courts gave were somewhat vague so Google is forced to use their corporate judgement as to what constitutes a valid "forget me" request and what is an attempted abuse of the system (and should be denied). If anything, I'm surprised that the rejection rate isn't higher than 58%. The ability to have "the Internet forget" the bad things you did would be very tempting for companies and criminals alike.

Re:What right do they have anyway?

[king neckbeard]

If that were the case, I think everyone here would prefer to actually have that taken care of at the source, not through filtering Google..