Slashdot Mirror
BBC Takes a Stand For the Public's Right To Remember Redacted Links
Martin Spamer writes with word that the BBC is to publish a continually updated list of its articles removed from Google under the controversial 'right to be forgotten' notices." The BBC will begin - in the "next few weeks" - publishing the list of removed URLs it has been notified about by Google. [Editorial policy head David] Jordan said the BBC had so far been notified of 46 links to articles that had been removed. They included a link to a blog post by Economics Editor Robert Peston. The request was believed to have been made by a person who had left a comment underneath the article. An EU spokesman later said the removal was "not a good judgement" by Google.
Court's judgement, not Google's.
Quit offloading the responsibility for your censorship onto a third party. KTHXBAI.
Was the article removed in its entirety, or was the *association* between the name and the article removed.
Of course Google should not remove the entire article. That was never what the law said. If they did so, it was just another blatant attempt at manipulating opinions of journalists in the hope that journalists reporting will start sway public opinion.
If it was just the *link* between a commentator name and the article that was removed, i.e. you would still find the article through googling words from the content of the article, then what is BBSs problem?
Google is blatantly trying to manipulate public opinion through journalists. They are deliberately misinterpreting the law to create an impression of draconian consequences.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
The only thing Google can remove is what's on their server, which is simply a pointer. Apparently the EU Court didn't understand this when they ordered Google to remove links to content.
No, you've misunderstood the goal. It isn't about deleting the information, it is about increasing the barrier to finding the information. The goal of the court is to turn the clock back, just a little tiny bit back, towards pre-internet status. It used to be that various records of our activities were spread around different "data silos" - newspaper articles were at the library, property records were at the tax assessor's office, arrest records at the court house, etc. You could still find the information but you had to care enough about it to do a little legwork. We had a sort of privacy by default - the information was public but not easily public.
Rarely is anything in life black-and-white, all-or-nothing. The EU court ruling is about acknowleding that reality and trying to bring back the gradients of privacy. Complaining that about google delistings is kind of like complaining that you can't easily search facebook timelines from google or that google obeys what is in a robots.txt file.
You'll note that the articles are not even delisted from google, it is only certain specific search terms that no longer pull up the articles. For example, in the economics article, if you search for any of the keywords in the article, it still comes up in google. But if you search for the name of the guy who wrote that one comment, then the article does not come up. That's all - they've just broken the direct link between one person's name and a public record about that person. The information is still there, you can still find it in other ways, it just takes a little more legwork so that there is a little more privacy.
That's not how data protection laws work in the EU. They apply to businesses that provide access to information about people, even if they didn't create the information themselves. The classic example is the credit reference agency, which merely catalogues credit information provided by third parties and publicly available information like bankruptcies. Even so, data protection laws require them to "forget" certain things, such as bankruptcies after a certain period of time.
Data protection laws are very important in Europe. They are what allow criminals to rehabilitate. The prevent companies selling or allowing access to private health or financial data for their own benefit. It allows you to have incorrect information corrected, or get a complete record of the data they have relating to you.
You are also factually incorrect about what Google is doing. They are not removing articles from their search results entirely. They are only removing those search results for a specific individual's name. Other search terms will still find those pages. Your approach, which I note seems to be the US approach, is to never forget or forgive any mistake or anything uttered by anyone in a public forum, for the rest of their lives. It's like the permanent record some schools keep, only a mistake made when young and blight your entire life and the only way to recover is to start a new identity. Europe doesn't do that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC