BBC Curates The "Right To Be Forgotten" Links That Google Can't

An anonymous reader writes, quoting the BBC's Internet Blog: "Since a European Court of Justice ruling last year, individuals have the right to request that search engines remove certain web pages from their search results. Those pages usually contain personal information about individuals." The BBC, however, is not obligated to completely censor the results, and so has taken an approach that other media outlets would do well to emulate: they're keeping a list of those pages delisted by the search engines, and making them easy to find through the BBC itself. Why? The BBC has decided to make clear to licence fee payers which pages have been removed from Google's search results by publishing this list of links. Each month, we'll republish this list with new removals added at the top. We are doing this primarily as a contribution to public policy. We think it is important that those with an interest in the “right to be forgotten” can ascertain which articles have been affected by the ruling. We hope it will contribute to the debate about this issue. We also think the integrity of the BBC's online archive is important and, although the pages concerned remain published on BBC Online, removal from Google searches makes parts of that archive harder to find.

Comments

That's good

[pahles]

It will surely spark some debate!

Re:That's good

[AmiMoJo]

Let's discuss this article that was the subject of a removal request: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-sco...

It's about a rape. The only people mentioned are the criminal, the police inspector in charge of the case and the criminal's friend. The criminal wouldn't have been able to make the request (it's relevant), and there is little reason for the inspector to want to, so it was almost certainly the friend. Or probably ex-friend now.

There is no suggestion that the friend did anything wrong. None at all. He was just caught up in someone else's crime, and the media decided to name him because they can. Is it reasonable to have reports of this incident immediately served up when any potential employer googles his name? It's not really relevant, but it is very embarrassing. It talks about his private sex life, and associates him with someone who committed a horrible crime. I'm sure a lot of employers would think twice about hiring someone like that, especially in a role where they deal with customers who might google their name. It sucks but it's also true.

Re:That's good

[BradleyUffner]

Is it reasonable to have reports of this incident immediately served up when any potential employer googles his name?

Yes. Google's job is to index the context of web pages. Google is NOT responsible for the content or truthfulness of those pages. If web pages out there have his name on them Google should return those pages when someone searches for that string. If this man has a problem with the content of a page he should take it up with the people who published the page.

At least in a sane world, this is how things would operate.

Re:That's good

[AmiMoJo]

You could argue that it's a credit reference agency's job to report anything that might give a potential lender concern, but the law says otherwise because society decided that mistakes should eventually be forgiven and people should be allowed to reform.

Re:That's good

[Opportunist]

Because you'll have a hard time proving he based his decision on it. And unless the rapists (ex) friend is some rare and unique specialist in a hotly contested field, the employer will just toss him and move on to the next applicant who has generally the same level of experience and training but one less "bad thing" lurking about. Real or not, relevant or not, the employer will not bother to double check. Why should he? To him, hiring A or B doesn't make a difference.

Re:That's good

[KGIII]

I would not want to work for a company that employed stupid people who could not grasp the content of the article you linked to. To me that indicates that, by hiring me, I will either be required to do the work of several people because they are stupid or that I am being hired because I, too, am stupid. None of those scenarios appeal to me.

Re:That's good

[AmiMoJo]

Flip side. What if someone who had the history of crime obtained de-listing from search results.

The rules state that such people could not obtain a de-listing.

Re:That's good

[GoddersUK]

Oh they're still extant. But you're not allowed to talk about them (at least, not if your name's Google and it's within the context that right to be forgotten is about). Which make the fact they exist, rightly or wrongly, rather impotent. Please stop pretending this is a non-issue. If right-to-be-forgotten had as little effect as you make out people wouldn't submit requests. The fact that this is being used proves that there are consequences - consequences that we are right to debate. So don't take the cheating way out and claim there's no effect, provide a proper defence (or attack) of this so-called right.

Re:That's good

[Xest]

"Would you want the government to hide that record so they have a second chance? No."

You realise that's exactly what happens right? You know that in the UK such convictions only have to be disclosed for a certain amount of time afterwards yes?

"But simply hiding someone's history won't make me change what I would think about their history if I were to know it - it won't address the true problem, at best it might relieve the symptoms a bit."

Right, but that's a big if. If you weren't to know it then you're admitting that you will view them differently, which is kind of the point.

If we insist on condemning people indefinitely, making it impossible for rehabilitated offenders to get a job then what choice do you leave them but to go back to offending? If they can't earn money legitimately, then their only option for survival remains returning to crime.

Re:That's good

[Half-pint HAL]

I also think it's strange that somehow it's Google's job to remove pages.

Google is not a dumb index -- Google is a collection of cutting edge data-mining and artificial intelligence algorithms designed to provide data that is of direct relevance to the user's query. That is Google's job.

The European ruling was not about the deletion of information, it was a point about the relevance of information. A spent conviction is legally considered irrelevant, except in certain careers (particularly working with children) and therefore shouldn't be something that Google's algorithm returns. The immediate result was a headache for Google as they were flooded with requests, but this no doubt had an effect on their page ranking, increasing the bias towards recent information (fewer old hits should mean fewer right-to-be-forgotten requests in the long term).

As the internet gets older and bigger, Google's approach to search is starting to look too simple anyway. I can remember when I could find anything I wanted with a few clicks, but now the search resilts are full of amateur "Me too" pages, and the pages with the real information are lost in the noise. When I want to find old stuff I'm often crowded out with new stuff, and vice versa.

In future we will need to return tomore structured search, with date filtering etc to get any useful data out of our systems.

Re:That's good

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

Of course it has effect. There's such a thing as being too easy. Now, Jan Freese, the former head of the Swedish data inspection authority wrote a very good book on the subject, many, many years ago (in the mid eighties if memory serves), which unfortunately is in Swedish, so it won't do you much good. But one of his main points was that the existence of information isn't the main problem, but that manual barriers to its processing is.

It is my opinon that its become too bloody easy to find out too much about people today, for no good reason. In the important cases (not hiring child molesters at the day care) the data is still there, and still accessible for the concerned parties. That's not a problem. That everybody else should have access to the same data at the drop of a hat, needs to be argued. "Just because we can" isn't much of an argument.

So no. My original argument still stands. The data is there, no-one is arguing that is should be redacted. But that's not to say that the barriers to automatic processing should necessarily be as low as humanly possible. There aren't just benefits, there are risks as well.

P.S. And "information doesn't want to be free". If it wants anything it's to be $4.95, but even that is giving it much too much credit.

Weird

[Intrepid imaginaut]

There are some very nasty pieces of work on that list, rapists and murderers who presumably managed to get a removal order from within prison, but some are just weird, like "The news that lesbian couples in England and Wales who start a family through fertility treatment can now place both their names on the birth certificate has been welcomed by a gay couple with children. Eve Carlile describes the move as "practically really helpful, and ideologically great". "Why would they want that removed?

Mind you others are pretty silly, like the hacker who recorded a rude phone message after being left on hold for too long. Not sure why posterity needs that little tidbit.

Re:Weird

[AmiMoJo]

There are some very nasty pieces of work on that list, rapists and murderers who presumably managed to get a removal order from within prison

No. Criminals are not able to get removals under EU law until their convictions are spent, and for serious crimes convictions are never spent.

The removals will have been for other people mentioned in those articles, and only for searches of their names. If you search for the murder on Google the article will still come up. The articles have not been removed from Google entirely, just as results when searching for the specific person who made the request.

Re:Weird

[dryeo]

Recently in the news again was the story of someone who spent 23 years in jail for a rape that he didn't commit (the real rapist finished his sentence by dieing). It was the usual, a drifter or other low life in the wrong place at the wrong time and a police force/DA who really wanted a conviction. It happens enough that just because someone was convicted is not a guarantee that they're guilty. There's also been quite a few people on death row exonerated of their crimes, often by DNA evidence.

Take a moment to remember...

[Tokolosh]

,,,those who have been forgotten.

can someone from Europe please explain

[circletimessquare]

why anyone thought forced delinking will ever work?

it just draws more attention to what you are trying to delink

it seems so absurd. i can't imagine a group of adults believing in or supporting such a ridiculous concept

Re:can someone from Europe please explain

[fahrbot-bot]

i can't imagine a group of adults believing in or supporting such a ridiculous concept

Watch CSPAN and you'll see just what kind of ridiculous things adults can believe in and support - what kind of serious things they won't.

Holy buckets!

[AndyKron]

Looking at some of those links it's obvious the "right to be forgotten" law is extremely dangerous to the free press.

Re:Holy buckets!

[AmiMoJo]

How does this affect the freedom of the press? Keep in mind that the article is still on the site and findable with Google, just not for the one specific name that requested the removal. The person making the request will have to have reasonable grounds, e.g. criminals with unspent convictions can't cover up their past this way.

How exactly does this affect the freedom of the press to publish what they like on their own web sites?

Re:Holy buckets!

[Halo1]

Here's the first link I found related to a politician.

And guess what: if you search either for the politician or his son, the article is still found (first hit on the BBC site, in fact):
* https://www.google.com/search?...
* https://www.google.com/search?...

So neither the politician nor his son had the search results removed. Although if it had been removed when searching for the son's name, I would understand it. While politicians are public figures and cannot have such search results removed under the ruling (because there is a public interest in those results), I'm not sure the same holds for their family (it's not the son's choice that his father is a politician).

Because job outfit only look for links in google

[aepervius]

Why would you having been in debt should bar you from a new job ? Why being lesbian should bring you problem ? Why a petty theft when you were 18 should still haunt you when you are 30 ? Keep in mind most justice system are rehabilitating in Europe, not mostly retributive like the US one. And you have as such a right to have for your average sentence to not have a fault you paid for with prison haunt you and bar your new job (there are some exception e.g. pedophilia due to the nature of the law breaking). If every job seeker are looked up in google and the first stuff which pops up is something you did 10 years ago and either grew out of it, or paid the price with a prison, that would bar you from occupation and reintegration into society, and make recidivism more probable. Asking firm to not do that would not work due to human nature. Removing it from google would work.

Keep in mind that until end of the 90ies we HAD a way to be forgotten : nobody would go into paper clip from 10 years before and check what you did. But with google even the most minor stuff stays forever. As I mentioned here, a society which do not forget, is a society which (on average) do not forgive. And that make rehabilitation far harder. You want to live in a society which do not forget even the slightiest transgression ? Well good luck with that. I certainly do not want. Not because I am a law breaking human, but because freedom lies at the edge of the road, not in the middle. And that is not even counting what children/teenager/young adult can do stupid legal stuff which can mark them forever, like partying drunk and being in the news. Well before the 90ies unless you want into archive journal you would never know as an employer. Nowadays if somebody catch you you have no recourse google remember forever. Heck just being outted as gay, lesbian or even transsexual can bring you a lot of problem, even in western democracy like the US. Thus the right to be forgotten. BBC should really be the first to understand that. But I am guessing they would rather fuck up people than admit it. And yes I am aware that some bad people will try to abuse it. That is why normally the court should be the one deciding whether a right to be forgotten is there , or not.

Re:Because job outfit only look for links in googl

[circletimessquare]

I wouldn't want to work for a company who judged me for the stupid shit I did as a teenager or if I were a homosexual.

You are entitled to a private life, but if you make something public, it's public, period. No take backs. Not because I said so but because of the nature of public information.

There is no technological fix for that and Europeans, and yourself, have a deluded "solution" to a reality and a fact of life which is not actually a problem and does not go away, ever.

Own who you are, be ashamed of nothing, including your mistakes. Anyone who would bully you into submission with sensitive areas of your life is no one you should want to associate with and merely an announcement of your own insecurity and weakness.

Re:Because job outfit only look for links in googl

[newcastlejon]

You are entitled to a private life, but if you make something public, it's public, period. No take backs. Not because I said so but because of the nature of public information.

For the sake of argument, what if someone with a twitter feed decides it's newsworthy and does it for you?

BBC's motto

[faway]

DO be evil? What about victims who NEED to be forgotten?

Re:Death penalty

[umghhh]

If you were caught at 3am urinating in playground of a kindergarten while on the way from a session then you may find yourself on register as child molester, destroying your life indeed forever.
This may be pushing us all into either keeping all convinced rapists etc in public housing also after they served their sentence or we would have to offer them some way of hiding their real ID which would make finding them difficult enough for an average Joe. With progress of technology the late option will be less and less viable I suppose. So either this, they go into underground or we have to accept them as they are among us.
I am not sure how this relates to court orders about removal of misinformation about your alleged deeds but somehow I find none of the options really acceptable.

Please forget history

[Midnight Thunder]

My question is at what point does the right to be forgotten interfere with the need for historical record. For example, the British asking Google to forget about that wholeb Boston Tea Party thing which made them look bad. Sure this is not about an individual, but where is that line drawn?

Re:Because job outfit only look for links in googl

[janoc]

I am sorry, but this is BS. This charitable idea unfortunately rests on the false premise that Internet works the same way as press does (and thus one can control and censor it using the same means).

This is not about kids being drunk and getting a photo of them sleeping in a garbage bin posted on some news website - that sort of stuff will pretty much disappear after few years by itself, because it is expensive to maintain all this crap accessible and its publicity value has been zero few hours after it was published already

The larger problem is that a lot of information that is public in common interest gets suppressed - e.g. why a crook should have the information about their crime removed only because they feel like it? E.g. here in Europe it is common that for many jobs you have to bring a copy of your criminal record showing that you haven't been convicted. Expunging something from there typically takes an act of court and many years (typically only after 10-20 years after the sentence has been completed you can ask the court to expunge it). If a kid was stupid and landed in jail, having their crime removed from Google will help them exactly zilch. Then you have people who want to have information about them suppressed for vanity or political reasons - that is straight censorship and there is little reason why that should be allowed.

The search engines shouldn't be (and cannot be) the ones shouldering the burden of whether some of these requests should or shouldn't be allowed. They don't have the resources to judge whether or not the request is valid and they have a conflict of interest as well - it is pretty much to be expected that they will simply remove stuff by default in order to reduce the hassle and avoid having to go through courts (why would they - it would be only a net loss for them either way, even if they won it). So in the most cases the public interest just flies out of the window. .

Finally, this approach of how to achieve the goals of removing the information is completely bogus - basically it is like court-mandated sticking head in the sand so that you don't see the problem. That you stick the head in the sand doesn't mean that the problem ceases to exist - the fact that Google or Bing stop listing the information doesn't mean that the original website that has actually hosted the information pulls it down as well. So nothing has been actually "forgotten" and it only takes a search on something like Yandex or some other search engine that doesn't care about these requests (e.g. BBC) to uncover it again. I am pretty sure that sensation-hungry tabloids will be using this to fish out juicy dirt in the future. So what has been achieved apart from spending millions on a bogus remedy here? Andersen's Emperor's New Clothes comes to mind here - it only takes one person to yell that the emperor is naked ...

Re:Because job outfit only look for links in googl

[CrimsonAvenger]

You are entitled to a private life, but if you make something public, it's public, period. No take backs. Not because I said so but because of the nature of public information.

For the sake of argument, what if someone with a twitter feed decides it's newsworthy and does it for you?

Umm, for someone with a twitter feed to decide some part of your private life is newsworthy, you had to have told him about that part of your private life.

And once you tell someone something, it's no longer "private".

Remember: "three people can keep a secret as long as two of them are dead"....

Keep kids out of it

[namgge]

A number of the BBC stories amount to publicity-seeking parents violating the privacy of their non-censenting children by allowing them to be named as subjects in, particularly health-related, stories.

Note for parents: Children are not your property. Even if you think that publishing self-serving stories about them in the media or on the web is your prerogative they will eventually grow up and decide that you had no f***ing business so to do.

Re:Other removed results?

[Tokolosh]

https://chillingeffects.org/

Re:Because job outfit only look for links in googl

[circletimessquare]

so people should be judged for stupid shit they did as teenagers and should be ashamed of that their entire life? out of fear of remaining employed by narrow minded douchebags? that's your vision of life? you're a weak piece of shit aren't you

but you are right: before the internet this info decayed. and? so what

welcome to a new age

technology changes things. life before nuclear power, the gun, the printing press: all very different

society was, is, and will be dramatically altered by new technology. i'm certain some nobleman somewhere started pouting it wasn't fair peasants were now reading and demanding something called "democracy" too. so we shouldn't adapt new technology?

things change. can't put the genie back in the bottle friend. adapt or die

however, i agree with you: i too think it's lame someone might be judged for stupid shit they did in high school 20 years later or for their sexuality. so i think we have the basis for an actually effective, moral law: prosecution of piece of shit bosses for moronic shallow employment decisions

but certainly not a dumb law like "we can magically make public info private in the age of the internet"

Re:Because job outfit only look for links in googl

[circletimessquare]

if i push you out a window that's not fair. but you can't take it back either just because it's not fair. you can and should prosecute me for pushing you out a window. but you can't magically snap your fingers and magically you never fell out a window. same if i divulged your private info publicly

Can you say how it is failing? Sure, the information is there

uhhh...

Re:Because job outfit only look for links in googl

[AmiMoJo]

So basically you are saying don't trust anyone with anything you wouldn't want made public.

In Europe, we don't want to live in a society like that, where we all distrust each other at a fundamental level and there is absolutely no expectation of privacy or ability to leave your past mistakes behind you.

Re:Because job outfit only look for links in googl

[AmiMoJo]

but certainly not a dumb law like "we can magically make public info private in the age of the internet"

That would be a dumb law, but that's not what this is. You really need to understand it before you start criticising it.

Libraries keep archives of newspapers, often on microfiche. Any articles about you are recorded there indefinitely, but they are not easy to find. Someone has to go there, have some idea of what they are looking for and where and when it find it, and then spend considerable time manually searching.

Then credit reference agencies came along and started collecting data about people and selling it on for profit. Suddenly it became much easier to find out if someone went bankrupt 20 years ago. People realize this was a bad thing, because a mistake 20 years ago could prevent that person from say getting a mortgage or starting a new business, despite not having had any problems since then. So laws were introduced to limit what credit reference agencies could report.

The story about that bankruptcy is still there, sitting in a library archive somewhere, maybe even on the paper's web site. But it isn't easy to find, and most people won't bother going to the lengths needed to discover it.

So, it's actually a very sensible, practical law that works in the real world.