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.

Comments

Court's judgement, not Google's.

[tlambert]

Court's judgement, not Google's.

Quit offloading the responsibility for your censorship onto a third party. KTHXBAI.

Re:Court's judgement, not Google's.

[Anonymous Coward]

The court is specified in the first sentence in the link you pointed to. Apparently you didn't read it. It does work that way. A court's judgement said that Google had to remove links when requested if they met some nebulous definition of out of date, inaccurate, etc. The court also made it the search engine (not just Google's) call because they didn't want to deal with it. So yes, the court told the search engines to be the ones to decide. Google told them that that would be stupid and that it would cause mistakes.

Re:As expected from google

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:As expected from google

[AmiMoJo]

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.