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Google Told To Expand Right To Be Forgotten
mpicpp writes with this news from the BBC: Google is under fresh pressure to expand the 'right to be forgotten' to its international .com search tool. A panel of EU data protection watchdogs said the move was necessary to prevent the law from being circumvented. Google currently de-lists results that appear in the European versions of its search engines, but not the international one. The panel said it would advise member states' data protection agencies of its view in new guidelines. However, a link is provided at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen offering an option to switch to the international .com version. This link does not appear if the users attempted to go to a regional version in the first place. Even so, it means it is possible for people in Europe to easily opt out of the censored lists.
Brought to you by the same people who invented Mandatory Data Retention, a politician's: we need to preserve accurate history for government control, but allow narcissistic individuals to enforce social forgetting. Only the powerful may control their own memory.
I mean, seriously, what will they be doing next? Asking all proxies, VPNs, and TOR to filter "right to be forgotten" search results. All airlines and airports offering international flights will require memory wipers to remove any "right to be forgotten knowledge" from your brain. All libraries, archives, repositories and public records offices will be required to go through old paper copies of documents with tipex...
(Fun fact: "Right to be forgotten" censoring was basically Winston Smith's day job in 1984...)
Send the request to be forgotten to the site that actually hosts the information. That way it will disappear in all search engines.
If Europe can regulate what the whole world sees on Google, why not China?
If they do go through with it, let's at least have a www.google.us without the censorship. (Probably a good idea anyway.)
If you have put something unpleasant behind you, then really it should not matter if details of it are still available for other people to read... In fact, if it does, then the matter isn't really behind you at all. if other people are going to judge you by your past, that's unfortunate, but that's also just life... It shouldn't be up to legislation to change how liable people are to judge books by their covers, as it were.... That's a moral failing on their part.
People need to live their lives the best that they can... everyone fucking makes mistakes, and we learn to live with them. I used to know somebody who was crippled for life as a teenager because he was being reckless. he could easily still be reminded every single day of his life, even now over 30 years later, of what he should have done... so you can't somehow say that the Internet is somehow different just because something online can last forever, because there's other stuff that can be just as interminable.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
EU is not going to shut Google down. What everyone's going to use? Bing?
Well, it's not that different from me (non-US citizen) receiving DMCA requests. If I mail them back that I don't care about laws that are not valid in my country some Americans seem unable to understand why I refuse to take action.
The Stalin-era edition of Soviet Encyclopedia — a monumental collection of large volumes not unlike Britannica — once had a large article (full of praises, of course) about Lavrenty Beria. When Stalin died, Beria lost to others and was promptly shot.
To erase the memory of those praises, all owners of the encyclopedia (there weren't that many) were required to cut out the article about him — and replace it with an article about Bering Strait. True story...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Editing the historical record sounds awfully like hiding your past. Why isn't this like pretending the Holocaust or Stalins purges just never happened? Wouldn't IBM like to assert (without contradiction) that it never assisted the Nazis in the Death Camps?
This is an initiative only a corporate tool could love.
Outsource their Advertising business to a subsidiary that has no control of what search results appear on the page.
Let that subsidiary do all business in Europe; let the search company not do any business in Europe.
And then the search company can simply ignore all requests to control search results as out of jurisdiction.
"He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future." - Orwell, 1984
For example, there was an infamous case in the UK a few year ago when a paediatrician -- a doctor who specialises in helping children -- was run out of their home by vigilantes who were too stupid to know the difference between a paediatrician and a paedophile.
So, you're arguing that due to English schtupidity (pronounce as Clarkson), Google should conceal factually correct data from being discovered while it is perfectly visible elsewhere on the web?
in reality the people accessing information on the Internet are only human, and in reality even well-meaning people may come across incorrect or misleading information and make judgements based on it without realising they were in error. That means sometimes it does make sense to conceal information, at least partially or for a limited period of time, in order to protect other humans from unfair harm.
No disagreement there.
I believe everyone has a basic moral right to fair treatment in this respect, particularly because the damage to a wronged individual if that right is violated will be far greater than the damage to someone who just didn't trivially find out about some possibly incorrect allegations.
And this is the part where it becomes interesting. Remember what is happening here. Google is a search engine, an indexer of information that is readily available elsewhere. If the Guardian reports about child-abuse allegations against John Doe, and Mr Doe is acquitted in court, the report about the allegations are still correct. You're arguing that Google should no longer be allowed to produce search results that link to the original allegations. I'm arguing that this is a silly way of handling things. If one would really want to protect the acquitted, the law should mandate that the article be amended with information regarding the acquittal.
Obscuring the fact that the original allegation was made by passing laws against an indexing service smells like Chinese Censorship to me, and I find that to be a dangerous slippery slope.
I also note that the justice systems in almost every civilised country take a similar view, often such that even actual criminal convictions become "spent" after a time and no longer need to be disclosed. It turns out that sometimes people do change and that encouraging the successful rehabilitation of past offenders makes that much more likely than leaving them with some minor infraction hanging over them for the rest of their lives.
Totally agree there. But my point remains valid: in such a case the origin of the information should be affected, not the indexer. And also, most criminal convictions will stay on the record (especially in the case of felonies), but won't be taken into account (or to a lesser extent) when performing a background check. In my former home country (The Netherlands) that usually means 4 years for infractions, 8 years for felonies. The record itself stays and the individual can go to the courthouse to see the rapsheet, but it will not be disclosed to anyone.
I assume that in yours my freedom of movement also extends to the right to enter your home and my freedom of expression extends to the right to spray paint abusive comments all over it?
You have the freedom of movement that extends to the border of my properties. Your freedom of expression extends to the right to say whatever you want. Spray painting is not free speech, that would be infringement on my property rights. I think it was Thomas Jefferson who once said:
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
I'm arguing that because of human nature search engines should be required not to promote misleading or inaccurate information that may lead to unfair inferences being drawn about innocent people, once the search engines are explicitly made aware that they are doing so.
Unfortunately from this point of view, there are plenty of places in the world where they will tell you to go hang, because their right to mislead people about you is more important than your right to be treated fairly. This law is the closest we have right now to routing around that problem.
Ok, so we have nailed your point of view down to "we can't control the content of the book, but we do control the table of content". Don't you think that's a bit like shooting the messenger? Furthermore, don't you think that you're now placing an undue burden on a company that has nothing to do with the content that is being indexed?
I find this a typical case of where governments go wrong. They won't go after the one they need to go after, so they go after the one they can go after.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
I'm pretty sure for "most of our history" people have lived in the same rural communities where, not only did everyone who regularly encountered you have a pretty good running list of all your past major mistakes (which makes a great way to pass the time) but good luck outliving their memory, especially for the big ones. Identifying tattoos have been used as punishments since at least Roman times, and I'm not aware of any historical laws which really reflect the idea of a "right to be forgotten." Obviously anyone who could write could have gone out of their way to keep records on you at any point in history.
Which is not to immediately say this right to be anonymous is a bad idea, but I don't see how you could support it as some kind of social inheritance.
But note where you have gotten your ideas of anonymity. I assume you're from a modern urban area. There are so many people and so many things to keep track of that everyone is effectively anonymous unless someone goes to an effort to make it otherwise. But this same process is exactly what is happening with the internet. The more information which is provided the more your individual details are washed out. Believe it or not Google and the modern data age is making you *more anonymous.* Lives are not being ruined forever. As time goes on we are soon going to start having to reconcile with the fact that *everyone* is going to have embarassing crap online, not just the unlucky few. In all likelihood we are going to quickly move past it as a society, at least as much as we have ever done before.
As for the accusation of revisionism and censorship : this is the exact reason why the search engine are asked to remove stuff, and NOT the original publication. Because then the information is still reachable by the same OLD fashioned way we did before : old fashioned research.
And exactly how long do you think it is before someone wants the original publication delisted as well? Or before governments realize that there is *lots* of stuff they can think of good reasons to delist? How hard do you think it is to extend the capability? Since you're interested in how history informs the present, why don't you go back a couple hundred years or so and pick out a dozen governments you would trust to have this level of control over what information is presented to the public. Any contenders?
As far as I am concerned the major improvements and liberalization in many governments in recent years relates directly to an increase in public transparency and communication. To a large degree those things happened simply because they were outside the government's control to stop. Now we're back on the otherside of the pendulum where technology is returning power to control information into their hands. I think if you want to bet on their continued benevolence, then you aren't betting on history.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.