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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 "In evaluating a request, we will look at whether the results include outdated or inaccurate information about the person," Google said.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."
Google's approach to this is reasonable. Criminals and public officials voluntarily give up a level of privacy due to their voluntary status as criminals and public officials.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
They can do this until they get another legal spank once again. Who is Google anyway to decide the "public interest"? Since when the public interest trumps the private interest and how and why Google self-appointed to be the judge and the jury to decide what is relevant or what is not?
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.
Maybe because as you said... it is their goddamned search engine. They can do whatever they want with it.
This. If they're bound by law to remove results upon request, then they should remove them (assuming the request itself is valid).
They shouldn't be deciding which requests to approve or not beyond a technical / common sense capacity. John Doe obviously couldn't request all results for the generic use of his name to be removed, nor could he request that a specific page for someone else's name be removed.
Anything else should be honored, in accordance with the law.
Yup. If this had to be done (I disagree, but let say it has to...), then you need a judge or something to make the call, not some random underpaid bozo making the call. The time it would take would also ensure a lot less requests go through...
In order to annihilate n KG of matter, you needed n KG of antimatter. You couldn't even annihilate this message on your computer with all combined antimatter, the mass of the memory cells this post is stored on your computer exceeds produced antimatter mass.
(At least I think so)
On one side you have Google as it was, everything it finds, indexed categorized and available to be found. The other end of the spectrum would be a world without search engines. A vast array of options exist between those two points. Yes, Google is judge, jury and executioner for now as it is their %$%$ search engine and they haven't been forced to do otherwise. Who would you have sit in judgement instead? Who should bear the cost? Honoring no requests is not an available option for Google any longer, it has been decided for them this can not be the case. In regard to honoring all requests, that's not a workable solution either. Would have have it so that I could request that all positive information about you be removed from search results? No, then someone has to arbitrate. Why foist rules upon a new system in the midst of its infancy? If you don't like the results of your request, you can appeal or avail yourself of the courts.
"The law" tends to have attributes about what is valid that require some subjective assessment. Nominally these are ironed out through extremely legalistic language, and court precedents. In practice, it frequently includes those the law applies to making judgements.
Theft laws, for example, don't preclude my occasional unsolicited handling of your property within the bounds of common sense, like, say, me bringing you your umbrella you left behind by accident.
It's their servers and their search algorithm. They have the right to do whatever they want with it. Any information they display on their web page is protected by the first amendment. Of course, exceptions are in place for any speech, including libel or copyrights. Now, whether that's best for all involved is another question.
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.
Well, technically it's more some sort of "it-doesn't-matter"...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Maybe you'd like to reevaluate that opinion if someone is out there on a slandering campaign against you and you try desperately to get those photoshopped pics of you out of the system...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think the more important fact is that Google is actually complying with 42% of these requests. That number seems extraordinarily high to me.
I don't know, I think that it's appropriate to allow victims the right to not be remembered as such. Perpretrators that were convicted, "on the record", don't generally deserve that same right. I will be happy to acknowledge that those that had their convictions overturned, or after a period of good behavior or the completion of court-mandated courses had their felonies voided in favor of misdemeanors, would also deserve to qualify to not be so readily remembered. Beyond that, since the verdict in court is supposed to be public record and for the public, I don't think that it's right to remove those verdicts.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This story is about Google operating in Europe. They have their own laws there.
It's their search engine. Start your own search engine and you will get to decide what's in it.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
"But in Switzerland, a finance professional who asked Google to remove more than 10 links on his arrest and conviction for financial crimes had his request denied."
Would such a request not already be denied just because Switzerland is not in the European Union?
And by the way, most of the comments here seem to be unhappy about the fact that Google is making these decisions. Guess what, Google doesn't want this either. They fought this tooth and nail up to the highest European Court, but the court decided to force them to remove requests under certain (but not clearly defined) circumstances. Read more here (I haven't reviewed the article so can't vouch for accuracy though): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
How is it that Google thinks they have the right to decide who is and is not removed from their results? They should either honor all requests or no requests, not 'play god' like this.
Dear Google,
Attached is a request to remove all results for the 4 billion named individuals hereby requesting the right to be forgotten. I look forward to your expedient honoring of the request.
Sincerely,
Marissa.Mayer@yahoo.com
That's Google's job.
Still, stay with me and compare what Google does with this:
Some company develops a fleet of drones that hover over all public places, record everything that is said or done there and put it into a database indexed with all the metadata, searchable over the Internet. Is this OK? It's just public data!
Some company deploys lots of license number scanners that scan all public streets and record all cars driving through and indexes all that data together with GPS data and makes it available to everyone. Is this OK? It's just public data!
Someone develops an extensive system of crawlers that scan all of the public Internet and puts this into a database, searchable by everyone. Is this OK? It's just public data!
Face it, Google Search is a virtual drone that hovers over you, invisible, where ever you are in the public Internet. This virtual drone notes every page with your name in it and happily delivers to everyone a complete list of every page you wrote something with your name attached to it (or somebody else saying something about you).
Just because Google does what it does not mean it should be free to do as it pleases. If anyone would do the same with public data like license numbers or conversations held in public or all photos from cameras in public places you'd be up in arms.
"The right to be forgotten" should actually be named "the right to not be stalked in the public Internet". Just because something is public does not mean everybody should be allowed to record, scan and index all that data and make it searchable for everyone.
Note that "the right to be forgotten" does NOT mean that any data is removed. It just means that URLs you don't want to be shown when someone searches for your name is shown in the list of hits. Not more, not less. The data itself is still there, and you will even still find it with Google if you search for actual facts instead of the name of that person.
It's like a public search engine for license numbers that does not allow searching for license numbers (and then getting a full tracking profile for that car) but still allows searching for locations and then find all license numbers that drove through this location.
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.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"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.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
You could forget this latest redesign? Shit, I thought beta was bad.
P.S. If you can't design understandable icons - and you can't, and if you lived three lifetimes you still couldn't - then maybe use an old-fashioned thing called an alt-text.
UX scumbag nonces.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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..
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I believe the European courts themselves appointed Google to head this task. They told Google to remove these requested references if they aren't in the "public interest." As far as I can see, there are four options:
1) Google removed everything. There is no filter and no attempts to curtail abuse of the system. If you request it removed, Google removes it, no questions asked. If this option were taken, the Google search index would rapidly become useless.
2) The European Court system handles each and every removal request and issues a ruling on each one. This would not only raise the cost of a removal request and the time required to approve/deny one, but it would seriously hamper court activities. The courts would get overloaded with requests.
3) You appoint a commission just for this purpose. Of course, said commission will likely grow highly political in nature and will be willing to approve requests from big campaign donors. "It's a shame that the story of my kid's DUI arrest keeps coming up in Google. If it were removed, I might see fit to donate a few million to your re-election campaign." In addition, a political party/movement in power might use it to suppress bad information about themselves and allow bad information about other parties/movements. ("Story about our corrupt party head? Removed. Leaked nude selfie of our rival's drunken underage daughter? Removal denied.")
4) Google is the arbitrator and can approve/deny as they see fit. If you disagree with them, you can either give up or take them to court. This is the current system. Is it perfect? Of course not, but if you accept the "right to be forgotten" as a necessity (which I don't but which the European court system said is one), then this is the best of all possible options.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
>I'm surprised that the rejection rate isn't higher than 58%
As am I. I suspect "whether the requestor can make our lives difficult" is a significant consideration. Or contrariwise "whether a generous donation to the corporate lounge room fund was included". At the extreme end I doubt any request from Google executives would be rejected, regardless of how invalid it may be. Of course having the courts make the call isn't necessarily a guarantee against such abuses, but if we're asking someone to make judgement calls on socially relevant secrecy requests it seems like it would make sense to have it done by somebody at least titularly hired becasue of their ability to Judge potentially complicated questions of social justice.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The law, which was specifically written that way, and was one of the things they very strenuously argued against when the law was being discussed. But don't let facts get in the way of your Google bashing.
It's their search engine. Start your own search engine and you will get to decide what's in it.
Blackjack and hookers, duh.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
But with great power comes great responsibility, aren't they standing up and taking that responsibility now?
...
They don't just allow them to cherry pick, they require them to.
As an European I would have preferred a middle finger, just to show how stupid the law is.
This. If they're bound by law to remove results upon request, then they should remove them (assuming the request itself is valid). They shouldn't be deciding which requests to approve or not beyond a technical / common sense capacity.
Umm, the court ordered them to decide which requests to remove, based on the vague criteria mentioned in the summary. And they're legally obligated to get it right, too.
Did you miss the big hullabaloo shortly after this went into effect, when Google was accused of removing stuff that didn't meet the criteria defined by the court? The allegation was that Google was intentionally doing exactly what you said they should -- in violation of the order -- and removing everything requested, in an attempt to show how ludicrous the law was. (In actual fact it turned out that it was an error on the part of the reporter who wrote the story, that in fact Google had evaluated the situation correctly and acted correctly, but hadn't been able to fully explain the decision because the explanation would have violated privacy rights of people mentioned on the page in question.)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Might is always right. In this case it works differently though. European states have might based on violence, so they get to make the laws on areas where they can use said might. One of these rules outline ownership rights, for services such as search engines. Because of this rule Google can decide a lot that happens when you enter their website. Not everything, because european nations have decided on some points that must happen, an some that can't happen(libel, hatespeech, childporn, warez, etc.). One of these rules is the "right to be forgotten" rule. Which, in my opinion, if applied right, would be a damn nice rule (although I don't think it CAN be applied right in the long run, so I actually oppose it, as little as that matters) It looks like google is actually currently doing a damn good job following the rules. And not failind bad by just granting every request.
Also, I don't think the requests should be granted of denied by google, but some court. And they should have a filing fee to keep the most stupid requests out. The fee could be some nice amount, say 20000 euros (or even better; 10% of your yearly income plus 5% of your networth, to keep rich criminals from spamming), which you would get back if the request is granted. Just make the rules clear so there won't be "i hope this passes" requests.
It's not even a law. It's a court ruling.
a law would at least give some legal foundation. Another court may decide in a few months that some other name should habe not e taken down.
bickerdyke
Thanks to a prior ruling (in the same case) the source is explicitly protected by press freedom.
After losing that round at court, that spanish guy who went broke years ago simply kept on sueing the next in line, which happend to be Google.
bickerdyke
The data protection laws say, in summary, that companies who process peoples' personal information are responsible for keeping that information accurate and up-to-date, and to discard that information when it is no longer relevant.
The court ruling decided that search results on a person's name constituted personal information about that person. Hence search engine indexes are subject to the fore-mentioned laws.
What? Google didn't even exist when the 1995 European Data Protection Directive was being discussed. This is the law which the courts deemed Google to have breached.
The 2012 refresh is STILL being discussed.
Google is not the final judge in the matter, the courts would be if someone feels Google has not made the correct decision, but as the data controller and data processor Google has a legal obligation to ensure that all personal data which it holds is accurate, uptodate, relevant, and obtained with permission.
These are the criteria Google must use when determining whether it should continue to hold such data. Thus, for example, claims (with proof) of data inaccuracy or outdatedness, claims against data which is not relevant to Google's task as a public search engine (i.e. personal medical history), and claims of data being obtained without permission (personal nude photos) would all pass the test for Google to remove them from search results.
Personally I thought Google was being quite difficult in that it was intentionally pretending it was hard done by by removing legitimate public interest news articles and so forth, but after the European Commission slapped it on the wrist and after it's competitors started following the law without trying to play politics Google fell into line and started fulfilling it's legal obligations without engaging in censorship for the sake of political point scoring. As such, and given the 58% rejection rate it would seem that Google is now doing what it's supposed to and hence doing a decent job of adhering to the law at last.
It still has the opportunity to get the law changed in it's favour through lobbying and negotiations over the 2012 Data Protection Directive update which is the correct avenue to pursue any issues it takes with the law.
As a European you obviously have no idea what the law protects you from if you're saying such a stupid thing.
Have a read here to get an understanding of how important data protection laws are and to understand what you're arguing against:
http://www.dataprotection.ie/d...
Despite what you say, you probably don't actually want to live in a world without data protection laws and there's no reason to think Google should be some special case that's immune to them.
Removing stuff putting people who don't want to be in the public into the public would do.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Your strawman doesn't work out too well either. Try again with an example where the victim isn't the culprit of something else.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yes. Of course. Try to convince the hoster in the country the name of which ends in -stan that your problem is of any importance.
Hint: You don't pay for the server. The person slandering you does. And, well, that's what you get when you export capitalism without ensuring a stable legal system first...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I suspect that the overwhelming majority of the requests are aimed at sites from domestic sources, with a large share of the remainder being in the EU. For most people, there aren't random Russian sites hosting slanderous articles about them, and even if there are, they probably aren't on the first page of a local Google search.
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If the content is illegal, they can take down at the source, and it will be removed shortly from Google automatically. If the content is legal, then they aren't profiting off illegal content.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Actually, it's more likely that the source is in the US (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, ...). They might comply eventually, but it would remain in the search index of Google for a while.
Plus, if I really wanted to ruin someone's reputation, rest assured that the server I rent would be somewhere in Genericstan.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If it's Facebook or Twitter, they both have European offices, so would probably comply fairly quickly, and something from ten years ago on either site probably wouldn't be on the first page of Google results.
But why would Google point to your server? You are creating a ridiculous hypothetical here. You want a slanderous or insulting article based in a country unfriendly to yours on the first page of Google results. That is certainly not anywhere close to representative of the norm for these requests.
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Not the norm? You might remember various Google-Bombs involving someone famous, where you would get a ton of other search results on his name yet still it was very possible to connect him with some less than favorable search results. How much easier do you think it becomes when your target has a not too common name? Certainly it would be nontrivial to get the front page for "John Smith" but a name that would usually not return any sensible results except for something akin to firstname.lastname@gmail.com it would be quite easy to whip up something that gets the frontpage easily.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am not saying that the "right to be forgotten" is bad. I'm saying that the law is stupid.
The really stupid part is that search engines have a say in what is and what is not a valid request. It shall be a judge's job.
Judges do have the final say, but it's impossible for judges to assess every single data acquisition and processing by every company, it would be an impossible task. Companies have to make the first decision as to what is and isn't acceptable, and if a company is believed to have made a wrong choice then that is challenged by whichever party in court where a judge (or jury) does have a say.
The norm is going to news articles. Most other stuff would be already well covered under slander law.
I know Santorum was Google bombed, but that was an ongoing, concentrated effort by a lot of people. Yes, it's possible that for people with interesting names but boring lives could piss off someone who is going to set up an offshore site and then get Google to put it on the front page, but having to have all of those factors means it probably hasn't happened yet even once.
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Who do they think they are? They think they can "decide" what level of privacy an average person is allowed?