Google Scours 1.2 Million URLs To Conform With EU's "Right To Be Forgotten" Law (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to a Google report the company has evaluated 1,234,092 URLs from 348,085 requests since the EU's May 2014 "right to be forgotten" ruling, and has removed 42% of those URLs. Engadget reports: "To show how it comes to its decisions, the company shared some of the requests it received and its decisions. For example: a private citizen that was convicted of a serious crime, but had that conviction overturned during appeal, had search results about the crime removed. Meanwhile a high ranking public official in Hungary failed to get the results squelched of a decades-old criminal conviction. Of course, that doesn't mean the system is perfect and the company has already been accused of making mistakes."
It could be said that at least they're trying. I doubt any system that has to make such judgement calls will ever be perfect.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
could've
would've
Oh, and "harnessing" might have been more appropriate than "harassing". Depending on your intent, of course.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
There are actually long established laws governing this stuff. The ruling was based on data protection rules going back to the mid 90s, it's just that until then search engines had argued they were exempt but the court disagreed. This is simply applying the law, and if there are disagreements each member state will have a regulator (the ICO in the UK) who can adjudicate.
The law seems to be working as intended, from the examples given by Google.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Please add scare quotes to "law" too, because there is no such law, and never has been. It was a ruling, a ruling stating local national laws also apply to Google evne if the local laws are stupid, but it there was never any EU laws involved.
Do newspapers also need to censor their old microfiche and archived paper copies, and also go door to door destroying any old copies that people or businesses may have laying around, and to the dump as well? If not, then why just pick on google, and not all other forms of media? Also, they should probably destroy the memories of human beings that remember the accusations coming out on the news.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
You're basically saying that data protection rules about "storing information about individual" should be consistent for both search engines and other content providers. I agree. My point is: under "the right to be forgotten", the rules are not consistent.
If the rules were consistent, people whose privacy was violated would simply go to the original publisher who put that information online to get it removed; Google wouldn't have to get involved. But under current rules, the original publisher can continue providing that information, it's just that search engines can't show it.
First, you're confusing privacy legislation and "the right to be forgotten": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The right to be forgotten is distinct from the right to privacy, due to the distinction that the right to privacy constitutes information that is not publicly known, whereas the right to be forgotten involves removing information that was publicly known at a certain time and not allowing third parties to access the information
Second, your analysis is wrong. Google only indexes and serves information that is available on the web, and when pages disappear from the web, Google stops serving them up in search results pretty much immediately. Forcing Google to remove search results makes sense only if you allow the original sources of the data to continue providing the information.