Google Appeals French Order For Global 'Right To Be Forgotten' (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet Inc's Google appealed on Thursday an order from the French data protection authority to remove certain web search results globally in response to a European privacy ruling, escalating a fight on the extra-territorial reach of EU law. In May 2014, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that people could ask search engines, such as Google and Microsoft's Bing, to remove inadequate or irrelevant information from web results appearing under searches for people's names -- dubbed the "right to be forgotten." Google complied, but it only scrubbed results across its European websites such as Google.de in Germany and Google.fr in France, arguing that to do otherwise would set a dangerous precedent on the territorial reach of national laws. The French regulator, the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertes (CNIL), fined Google 100,000 euros ($112,150.00) in March for not delisting more widely, arguing that was the only way to uphold Europeans' right to privacy. The company filed its appeal of the CNIL's order with France's supreme administrative court, the Council of State. "One nation does not make laws for another," said Dave Price, senior product counsel, Google. "Data protection law, in France and around Europe, is explicitly territorial, that is limited to the territory of the country whose law is being applied." Google's Transparency Report indicates the company accepts around 40 percent of requests for the removal of links appearing under search results for people's names.

Comments

US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

interestingly the country google is from completely disagrees with googles stance as they regularly make laws and rulings around data beyond its borders

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. The censorship practice that is commonly called "right to be forgotten" is not mandated by data protection laws. Otherwise there wouldn't need to be a special law about it, and also the original web pages would have to be censored, not just the search results. TFA contradicts you in that it speaks of information that is "inadequate or irrelevant", not of personal data that would fall under data protection.

If you agree with the EU's cynical interpretation of "Libertés", what about other jurisdictions? Shouldn't Iran's and China's rules about what is deemed inadequate or irrelevant also be respected worldwide? If not why not?

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not simply use IP geolcation and refuse to display content from any of Google's domains if the IP is within an EU country? I don't see why that's any more difficult than Google's current approach.

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

If this were about data that is illegal to store, every web archive and browser cache would be in violation. Not to mention the web pages the search results point to. How can it be legal to publish something, but illegal to cite it or link to it?

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. The censorship practice that is commonly called "right to be forgotten" is not mandated by data protection laws. Otherwise there wouldn't need to be a special law about it,

Uhm.. laws are laws, some are not more "special" than others, and this most definitely is a data protection law.

and also the original web pages would have to be censored, not just the search results.

Not at all, because this is not the purpose of the law. It is not to remove the information from being available in original sources or for people who for some reason actively want to investigate deeply. It is to avoid that casual searches on your name, that people do all the time, constantly resurfaces old stories that can ruin your life. When applying for a job as a 30-year old your pot possession conviction from when you were 19 shouldn't matter anymore. It is over and done with, but with the extreme information gateway role Google plays in today's society, it won't die.

You can agree or disagree and think it is stupid (as you are free to discuss any law), but that is the purpose of this law, so what you say do not at all follow

TFA contradicts you in that it speaks of information that is "inadequate or irrelevant", not of personal data that would fall under data protection.

If you agree with the EU's cynical interpretation of "Libertés", what about other jurisdictions? Shouldn't Iran's and China's rules about what is deemed inadequate or irrelevant also be respected worldwide? If not why not?

France and EU are not requiring that their law is implemented globally, that is just hyperbole reporting and Google PR spin (both of which we used to dislike on this site). They are requiring that the Google.com domain follow the law within the EU law domain. This is clear if you are going to the sources, and they use this specific example in their complaint to Google: Users in France searching on Google.com instead of Google.fr get a search result today where right to be forgotten in EU is not implemented.

Google is trying to call .com a global only search result, but that is disingenuous and appealing to tech illiterate users -- both they and all others already do geo-fencing and geo-tailoring on what is served through a "global" .com domain.

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

And lose Ad revenue? Are you crazy?

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

If this were about data that is illegal to store, every web archive and browser cache would be in violation. Not to mention the web pages the search results point to. How can it be legal to publish something, but illegal to cite it or link to it?

Data privacy laws often treat aggregation of data, and/or facilitating new accessibility to it, different than each of the different original data sources. Even if this bit of information about you is available in one place, another bit another place, etc. and those are legal (the way they acquired the data and make it available) -- someone coming along and aggregating and connecting all this data about you, and/or facilitating new accessibility to it (including selling it to marketeers or to the public for ad dollars), will run into data privacy laws that the original sources didn't. You might think this kind of law is wrong (personally I think it is good for privacy protection), but this is a very common privacy law distinction.

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

What is "Libertés"?

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree with it being censorship - and data protection does have clauses about being able to correct information that is wrong. (Removal being a bit severe but you can't really expect them to rewrite the pages...?)

That's not to say it's not being misused, though.

As a final note, I don't think Iran or China would have been as foolish to try and impose their views on other countries but fear that their opinions on that may have changed.

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

How can it be legal to publish something, but illegal to cite it or link to it?

It isn't. It is perfectly legal for a search engine to link to it except when the search was for the name of someone who succesfully invoked their right to be forgotten. Other search terms can legally produce links to the web pages. The purpose of this law is not to censor the web, the purpose is to allow people to leave their past behind them if it shouldn't matter anymore but does in practice, because far too many people aren't capable of ignoring information about people's past once they've seen it, even if the person grew up in the meantime and wouldn't repeat his/her bad behaviour now. The law was created because the problem it aims to solve is real.

Re: US disagrees

[locofungus]

The censorship practice that is commonly called "right to be forgotten" is not mandated by data protection laws.

I am not a lawyer and I don't understand all the nuances around this but actually, in Europe, this is (apparently) mandated.

*Any* collection of personal information into a database is covered by data protection laws. *Any* european citizen can request a report of all the information held on them (subject to some exclusions that probably wouldn't apply to google) for a capped fee. *Any* citizen can request that incorrect information is corrected (again there are some exceptions where it's only necessary to note that the citizen disputes the item) and *any* citizen can request that any information held on them should be deleted unless it's continuing holding is necessary (for example, billing information for a continuing subscription, necessary regulatory regulations regarding data retention etc)

This is complicated by the fact that the highest European court did give a ruling that some of these regulations don't apply to search engines (a ruling that I approve of). Prior to that ruling it could have been argued that google was breaking the law just by building its search database as it should have obtained explicit permission from each person to collect any information on them at all.

Eventually this will get pushed up to the highest courts in Europe and they will clarify what the current law actually means with regards to search engines.

After that there will probably still be arguments about what is right and wrong but pretty much the only way it will change is if the EU states can get together and agree a European wide change to the law (For this particular type of treaty I don't know if it would be majority or unanimity that would be required.)

It should also be noted that many of the requirements of data protection laws in Europe come from treaty but the individual laws are set at a national level - i.e. the treaty says what must be allowed or prohibited but the individual nations are responsible for writing laws into their books that enforce the treaty. So sometimes a national law might gold plate a european treaty - so the EU courts might find that the French law is legal in EU land but not required or they might find that the French law is illegally overbroad and will have to change or, indeed, they might find that French law is deficient in failing to protect some right.

The British government (of all persuasions) is a great fan of gold plating EU regulations, either in rhetoric when they want to beat on Europe or in law when they want an excuse to pass some new draconian legislation. "Europe made us do it" when what they mean is "Europe required us to change the law but didn't require this law which is a superset of what Europe required"

Re: US disagrees

[Opportunist]

That would work, until politicians learn the meaning of the three letters VPN.

Let's hope they never. So far it's created the equilibrium where they get to play in their own little world where they can make laws and we can play in ours where we can simply ignore them.

Re: US disagrees

[Opportunist]

Pretty sure it's a French brand of cigarettes.

Re: US disagrees

[silentcoder]

Not to mention, as I recall (and memory could be faulty) the original court case that led to this law in the first place - was brought by somebody who was entirely innocent of the bad behavior which was showing up in a google search from a defamation piece false written by a third party. If I recall he was also suing said aleged defamer but I don't know the outcome of that case.

The point is - not everything that is on the net about your is automatically relevant or useful information, much of it may not even have a shred of truth to it. Look at the many cases world wide of people having their credit records ruined because some credit agency confused them with somebody else who just happens to have the same name. We even had a case here in my country where it happened to an airforce intelligence officer. Those guys are literally legally prohibited from ever having bad debts - it would create too much of an incentive for things like bribery andyou seriously do not want high-level military personnel who handle classified data to be easily tempted people. But a credit agency confused him with somebody else, from the opposite end of the country who had the same name and a bunch of bad debts. Took years to clear his record. Cases like that happen all the time.

  There are plenty of perfectly legitimate times when what information is available about you could be utterly false. The EU's laws in this regard are addressing a very real problem that seriously impacts on citizens liberty and lives - the only thing wrong about these laws is that they do not have equivalents in EVERY free country like the seriously ought to.

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

i dont search google for peoples personal data, it just turns up links in spokeo......convictions, address history...spokeo and the like are much better. this will only serve to curb the casual search. even then just do a search for personal data aggregators and put the name in one of those to find out their digital and paper trail, a whole law that can be circumvented with an indirect google search

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

i dont search google for peoples personal data, it just turns up links in spokeo......convictions, address history...spokeo and the like are much better. this will only serve to curb the casual search. even then just do a search for personal data aggregators and put the name in one of those to find out their digital and paper trail, a whole law that can be circumvented with an indirect google search

The law applies to all search engines and aggregators providing the links in question, not just Google.

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. The censorship practice that is commonly called "right to be forgotten" is not mandated by data protection laws. Otherwise there wouldn't need to be a special law about it,

Uhm.. laws are laws, some are not more "special" than others...

That argument can be DESTROYED with two words:

Sieg Heil!

Re: US disagrees

[Okind]

There are plenty of perfectly legitimate times when what information is available about you could be utterly false. The EU's laws in this regard are addressing a very real problem that seriously impacts on citizens liberty and lives - the only thing wrong about these laws is that they do not have equivalents in EVERY free country like the seriously ought to.

Exactly: the problem being addressed here is very real.

Personally I think Google is going against its own motto (don't be Evil) by purposefully allowing wrong and damaging search results to exist. Knowingly and willingly displaying search results that are wrong (and damaging) *is being Evil*.

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't this be best achieved by blocking access to google.com from EU countries altogether? (Think China's "Great Wall of fire") Residents can use .de, etc or whatever, and anyone using a VPN as an end around would be in violation of their own stupid EU laws. There is NO WAY to have the (every) company in every country abide by laws made in every other country. It is a non-starter, and anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves. The country passing this type of law has to be the ones implementing the regulations (via LOCAL ISP actions).

I do see the problem that sparks these laws, but the truth is that there is no solution. Richard Gear can have any/all search results removed that mention his name and gerbals, but it doesn't change the fact that the "embarrassing tabloid rumor" from decades ago won't be remembered by the masses! And written about by anonymous posters on technology sites decades later, and then listed in search engines again! Sometimes life sucks and isn't fair, but we can't regulate shitty circumstances out of existence, and certainly not through censorship. The best solution is to spend some time/money on creating your own site: " My name is Richard, and the Gerbal rumors are not true" with a detailed explanation, citing proof if possible, and working to get it listed high in search rankings. It doesn't eliminate the "story"...but the story exists, you CAN'T change that!

Re:US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just Google breaking the law and trying to frame it as something it's not.

Filing an appeal in court and following legal procedure to challenge a law that you don't agree with does not break the law in any way shape or form. This is just you completely misinterpreting the story in order to justify your Google-hate hard-on.

Re: US disagrees

[AmiMoJo]

The censorship practice that is commonly called "right to be forgotten" is not mandated by data protection laws.

This if factually incorrect. The EU issues directives on data protection in the mid 90s. The way the EU works is there is no "federal law", they just have directives that each member state must them implement in their own local laws. So in the UK we have the Data Protection Act which covers the right to be forgotten, and in France they will have their own specific data protection law implementing the directive.

You can think of it kinda like an API for law. The EU defines the API, and then member states write an implementation into their laws. Any EU citizen can expect the same basic API in every country, although some extend it with even greater (but non-breaking) protections.

There was some confusion because the EU was considering something called the "right to be forgotten", which would enable individuals to require companies to delete their data. So for example, Facebook would have to really permanently delete accounts instead of marking them dormant. That is going ahead, but in the mean time the media has assigned the name "right to be forgotten" to requests made under the existing 90s legislation. Companies that hold data about individuals and provide it to others, such as credit reference agencies and search engines, must abide by those rules.

the original web pages would have to be censored, not just the search results

This rule doesn't apply to journalists or individuals writing about someone else, for example. So a newspaper could publish and archive a story about your bankruptcy forever, but a credit reference agency or search engine must abide by the rules governing how long that information can be reported for when responding to a request for data on an individual.

That's why the results are only removed for searches of that person's name, and not for other search terms.

Shouldn't Iran's and China's rules about what is deemed inadequate or irrelevant also be respected worldwide?

It's not world wide. I didn't RTFA but the summary lies. It's only for results served in the EU. The "world wide" bit is actually just that Google has to remove the results if a French person goes to google.com instead of google.fr for their searches. An American using google.com will not have the results removed.

Re: US disagrees

[cavreader]

The Muslim theocracies have been pursuing the right to force their ideas of what is and what is not allowable on the Internet for quite some time at the UN. And damn near every country on the planet except for the US is demanding the US turn the governance over to the UN. Anyone who thinks this is a good idea is moron. And can someone point out where the "right to be forgotten" is granted in the US Constitution or Bill of Rights? And Google should stop using data to fine tune their advertising and instead just start charging a nominal fee for each user search. They could stop all this advertising and marketing bother and start making some real money. Of course someone will point out that free internet searches are a fundamental human right.

Re: US disagrees

[oobayly]

I thought it was some Spanish bloke who'd had is home repossessed.

The test case privacy ruling by the European Union's court of justice against Google Spain was brought by a Spanish man, Mario Costeja González, after he failed to secure the deletion of an auction notice of his repossessed home dating from 1998 on the website of a mass circulation newspaper in Catalonia.

EU court backs 'right to be forgotten': Google must amend results on request

It's an incredibly popular thing in Europe at the moment - censoring factual information. See the ludicrous ruling yesterday in the UK upholding a certain famous individual and their paddling pool related sexual antics. Something that is allowed to be published in Scotland (and of course the rest of the world), but not England and Wales. I have no interest in what people get up to, but the moment they try using their wealth and status to suppress information, then I'm going to make an effort to find out who it is. Celebrities don't understand the Streisand effect, but apparently their lawyers know how to use it to milk every penny from their clients.

Re:US disagrees

[oobayly]

Is it illegal for French people to call somebody abroad and find out the information? Or is it just this new fangled thing called the internet?

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

That's sooo easy. While I agree with you that politicians in general have lost much contact with reality and corruption is rampant, thinking your approach to the end means replacing democracy, with at least some amount of control by the people with corporatocracy, which is as undemocratic as it gets.

A step back in history, towards feudalism (only that the feuds then were tiny in their geographical scope compared to the likes of Google or the soon-to-be Bayer/Monsanto or...)

We need fresh ideas.

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Individuals who use Google services are presented with terms and conditions. Those terms and conditions outline what data they collect, how they use it, and how they sell it. What law has been broken exactly?

Re: US disagrees

[Andtalath]

Sweden loves doing that as well.
The data retention act originated in Sweden after Tomas Bodström failed to make ground in applying it here.

Then it came from EU, and we implemented it (not that draconically, but still).
Then the EU court decided that it was unlawful.

And yet we still have it and the only party against it in reality is the pirate party (still well below 1%) and the most notable agent against it is Bahnhof, a private ISP with a flair for dramatic stances on personal privacy.

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Google scoops up data from people who have never been through their T&Cs.

If a website publishes information about someone illegal, Google takes a copy of it, illegaly. That person may never have even used the internet.

Re:US disagrees

[shawn2772]

interestingly the country google is from completely disagrees with googles stance as they regularly make laws and rulings around data beyond its borders

Cite?

From what I've seen, the US frequently throws its diplomatic weight around and expects other countries to comply with its wishes, but I've never seen any expectation that US law applies outside of its borders, with respect to data or anything else. I'd be very interested to see examples where that's not true.

Re: US disagrees

[Kevin by the Beach]

I'm tempted to spin off a side business. "rule41.com"

It appears that we do have some constitutional protections from prosecutorial overreach, but that will be circumvented come December 1st. I have to agree with other posters that the technical prowess of the people writing our laws is juvenile at best, but it's the framework approach of our legislative system that allows 99.9% interpretation when things are enacted.

It's been raining here by the Beach

Re:US disagrees

[Applehu Akbar]

interestingly the country google is from completely disagrees with googles stance as they regularly make laws and rulings around data beyond its borders

And in this case the US government is wrong, not Google.

Re:US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

The DMCA.

Re:US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Both are wrong. The US cannot apply its laws in the rest of the world (and should not try to) and Google should stick to French law while operating in France.

Re: US disagrees

[AmiMoJo]

VPNs are irrelevant. The law covers companies operating in the EU. If an employer uses a VPN to research job applicants in an illegal way, it's a crime even if such research is legal where the VPN terminates.

Re: US disagrees

[bluefoxlucid]

So we already have defamation laws, from which the defense is the information is true; and now we need a "I just don't like the information, even if it is true" law to protect from the same sort of defamation?

In before Remember.Me becomes the search engine and old-style directory of information Google has forgotten.

Re: US disagrees

[Opportunist]

How about this: Everyone gets to do what he pleases as long as he doesn't cause damage to anyone else?

Not as a law, but as the foundation of it. It sure would be different, that much I give you.

Re: US disagrees

[Opportunist]

And as soon as you can prove he broke the law this is even relevant.

Here's an important bit of information: Laws mean jack shit if they cannot be enforced. It's nice that you must not discriminate by gender, race or sexual preference, but it's incredibly difficult proving that someone did just that unless he is blatantly saying it in your face.

Re:US disagrees

[shawn2772]

The DMCA.

In what way does the US try to apply the DMCA in other countries? It definitely applies it to people in the US who are uploading/downloading to/from other countries, but I see no evidence that it expects the law to apply to people in other countries.

Note that much of US copyright law terms are derived from the Berne Convention terms, so it may appear that some aspects of US copyright law are applied around the world, but that's only because many countries have signed the treaty.

Re: US disagrees

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I disagree with it being censorship - and data protection does have clauses about being able to correct information that is wrong. (Removal being a bit severe but you can't really expect them to rewrite the pages...?)

That's not to say it's not being misused, though.

As a final note, I don't think Iran or China would have been as foolish to try and impose their views on other countries but fear that their opinions on that may have changed.

Censorship is people with guns threatening violence if you say something they don't permit.

Sounds like censorship to me.

Re:US disagrees

[StormReaver]

interestingly the country google is from completely disagrees with googles stance as they regularly make laws and rulings around data beyond its borders

Google is not the U.S. Government, and your statement is an irrelevant strawman. Google is correct (logically, morally, and practically) that a country's laws cannot extend beyond its territories.

Re:US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

It definitely applies it to people in the US who are uploading/downloading to/from other countries, but I see no evidence that it expects the law to apply to people in other countries.

The evidence is the US' push to get other countries to sign the WIPO treaty, whose terms require signatories to enact a law like DMCA.

Re: US disagrees

[AmiMoJo]

It seems like it would be easier to enforce than things like discrimination laws that have been shown to be both enforceable and quite useful. At least with a VPN there will be some evidence produced. Billing, configurations, browser history etc.

Re: US disagrees

[Opportunist]

Billing: Between me and some foreign company. Good luck finding out about it, all I need is an account in the target country and you have a pretty hard time.
Configuration: On my computer, try to read it.
Browser history: Same.

Re: US disagrees

[GlennC]

And Google should stop using data to fine tune their advertising and instead just start charging a nominal fee for each user search. They could stop all this advertising and marketing bother and start making some real money.

The day Google starts directly charging for user searches is the day Yahoo and Bing have wet dreams about. People are too used to not paying for their searches out of their pocket. They prefer to exchange their data, even if they're not aware of it.

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Define 'damage' . . .

Re: US disagrees

[ooloorie]

Google scoops up data from people who have never been through their T&Cs.

Google index public information from sites that give it permission to do so, and then publishes a link to that site in response to searches. Your problem with publishing links to published information is... what?

Re:US disagrees

[ooloorie]

Draconian copyright laws didn't originate in the US, they originated in Europe, with the Berne convention. The US resisted those laws for decades. Finally, in the 1970's, it gave in and implemented it. And US fair use provisions and copyrights are still more lenient than in most other places.

Re: US disagrees

[Opportunist]

Damage would be defined as having a negative influence on the physical property or immediate physical well being of a person without that person's prior explicit consent.

Re:US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Try to transfer some money from a random country to a country the US has embargoed. Or have a customer do that.

Re:US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there is the tax issue, as well as acting like their espionage agencies committing crimes abroad is somehow legal because the US government has authorised it, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which has been used repeatedly to extort money from foreign companies thad had bribed officials in a third country, and a few other extra-jurisdictional abuses of power.

Re: US disagrees

[KingMotley]

Google is trying to call .com a global only search result, but that is disingenuous and appealing to tech illiterate users

No, google is **correctly** claiming that google.com is a US based search result, and your EU laws can go pound sand.

Re:US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't been looking very hard.....or even passively paying attention

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/09/microsoft-court-case-hotmail-ireland-search-warrant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaupload_legal_case#Arrests_in_New_Zealand

Re: US disagrees

[cavreader]

No, No, No! Bing and Yahoo would want their share of the per search revenue as well. The only losers in this scenario are the actual users.

Re:US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is not the U.S. Government, and your statement is an irrelevant strawman.

They dress the same. They wipe their asses with either their left hand or right hand or both. Explain the difference?

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is trying to call .com a global only search result, but that is disingenuous and appealing to tech illiterate users

No, google is **correctly** claiming that google.com is a US based search result, and your EU laws can go pound sand.

Yeah, well, I'm in Europe and your "US based search result" is giving me obviously locally tailored search results, and local ads sold by Google's local office to local businesses.

Re: US disagrees

[KingMotley]

And?

Re: US disagrees

[KingMotley]

Then feel free to fine your local businesses for whatever law you dream up.

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Then feel free to fine your local businesses for whatever law you dream up.

You missed that this is a product sold in France by the local Google subsidiary? The difference between .com and .fr is just semantics.

Also, Walmart is an American company, doesn't mean that they are allowed to deliver guns to users in France when this is illegal in France.

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

So we already have defamation laws, from which the defense is the information is true; and now we need a "I just don't like the information, even if it is true" law to protect from the same sort of defamation?

In before Remember.Me becomes the search engine and old-style directory of information Google has forgotten.

I do not favor the right to be forgotten solution. But the problem is real. These days everything is posted and tagged, and casual Google searches will re-surface it to the end of your days, while before it would fade into the obscurity it deserves. Guess we should just learn to live with it, but there are a lot of judgmental people out there.

Re: US disagrees

[N3wsByt3]

It isn't just semantics, it means google.fr is subjected to French law, and google.com is subjected to US law (basically, where the respective legal entities have their respective servers).

In that sense, let's try your analogy again. "Walmart France" can't sell guns in France, if it's against the law there. "Walmart US" CAN sell guns to France (in the hypothetical case where US law would allow this, which it doesn't). In that case, if a French citizen ordered a gun by snailmail, it would be fully legal for 'Walmart US" to send it to that person. If France has a problem with that, it either should seize the snailmail when it enters France, or find it illegal and punishable that a French citizen ordered it.

What it CAN NOT do, is demand that "Walmart US" does not send any guns by snailmail anymore, since they have no jurisdiction for that to demand it. so, to your answer, provided it would be legal to send guns in the US, then yes, they are allowed to send guns to users in France. Because it is NOT bound by the law of another country.

What is it, you find so difficult to understand?

If you still don't grasp the concept...: let's say China has trouble with searchengine sin the EU, because they are critical of their government. Can they now demand EU search-sites to censor themselves and to not show anything to any Chinese? Aka, deliberately place a "Chinese Firewall" on their own searchengine, just to accommodate the laws of China?

Why the heck would EU companies need to listen to the Chinese government, EVEN if they're being consulted by Chinese citizens?

You're just not thinking this through, squire.

Re: US disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

*any* citizen can request that any information held on them should be deleted unless it's continuing holding is necessary (for example, billing information for a continuing subscription, necessary regulatory regulations regarding data retention etc)

How does this affect users who want their fb account deleted?

Re:US disagrees

[hyades1]

http://www.ip-watch.org/2012/03/15/more-foreigners-find-themselves-targets-of-us-copyright-law/

Re:US disagrees

[shawn2772]

http://www.ip-watch.org/2012/03/15/more-foreigners-find-themselves-targets-of-us-copyright-law/

Read the article. The application of US law was based on activities performed in the US. The people weren't in the US, but the servers were.

Re:US disagrees

[hyades1]

Others have responded to this more eloquently than I. They've all been modded down to zero.

Simple question

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems like countries are increasingly demanding that corporations follow their laws globally. It's inevitable that we'll increasingly have laws in two countries that are mutually exclusive, but those countries will want their laws followed globally. A corporation doing business in those two countries has no choice but to either leave at least one country or break the law in at least one of the countries. What do you do in that situation?

The "right to be forgotten" involves the removal of personal information. However, what happens if a French citizen requests they be forgotten by Google while US investigators are looking into that same person on suspicion of terrorism and have a court order demanding preservation of the data? Which set of laws do you obey?

The premise of the question is simple. But the consequences and answers are anything but simple.

Re: Simple question

[Anonymous Coward]

There's currently another effort by leading EU politicians (German Socialdemocrats again, and behind them German media corporations) to force Google to disclose its algorithms. If this becomes law, the EU itself will have anti-Google censorship rules that are mutually incompatible, because publishing search algorithms would have to include the EU memory hole blacklist.

Re: Simple question

[Anonymous Coward]

There's currently another effort by leading EU politicians (German Socialdemocrats again, and behind them German media corporations) to force Google to disclose its algorithms. If this becomes law, the EU itself will have anti-Google censorship rules that are mutually incompatible, because publishing search algorithms would have to include the EU memory hole blacklist.

If you understand the intent and purpose of the right to be forgotten law this is not a problem, at all.

Re:Simple question

[Anonymous Coward]

The right to be forgotten involves the removal of some (not all) search results. Search results are a response to a search. Google can keep the data in their databases and give investigators access to it. The right to be forgotten is not meant to allow people to escape prosecution, it is not meant for recent events, it is meant for things that are unimportant to society as a whole and far enough in the past not to make a difference anymore. I don't think the problem you see actually exists.

Re:Simple question

[silentcoder]

> However, what happens if a French citizen requests they be forgotten by Google while US investigators are looking into that same person on suspicion of terrorism and have a court order demanding preservation of the data?

No problem. There is nothing in the right to be forgotten that requires Google to delete data, it only needs to delete the data PUBLICLY. Remove it from search results, nobody will check if they deleted the entry from the database or just flagged it for "do not display".

It's a ridiculously easy problem to solve.

But it's interesting how your basic assumption begs the question: what the fuck makes you think US investigators have the right to investigate somebody in another country ? He is NOT subject to their authority. Unless he commits a crime IN the US they have no right to be doing that investigation in the first place. If he does, their right ends when he crosses the border and they are supposed to hand the investigation over to Interpol and work with the authorities in the country the person is in now through this interpol. If the person was planning a terrorist attack in another country, then the authority to investigate him lies EXCLUSIVELY with the law enforcement of that country. You bet your ass no sane court would grant a right-to-be-forgotten request if it's opposed by legitimate law enforcement. US investigators do not have the right to investigate non-US citizens who are not currently in the US. We didn't vote for the US government, we get no say in your laws and we are not required to comply with them and your investigators have no right to so much as know our names. We have our OWN investigators thank you very much and we will investigate and prosecute our own criminals.
No country has yet invited the FBI to come investigate their criminals for them and no country is likely to ever do so. Countries do sometimes invite highly successful investigators from other countries (the FBI is frequently one) to come TRAIN their local investigators and bring some of those skills across, but the authority to USE them belongs to the local government. The US government's authority to do anything ends at your own borders and it's high time Americans figure that out.

Re:Simple question

[Ihlosi]

What do you do in that situation?

Simple. You determine the more profitable market, and remove any and all of your assets from the other country. They can try fining your company, but what good is that if all of your assets are out of their legal reach?

Re:Simple question

[Registered Coward v2]

But it's interesting how your basic assumption begs the question: what the fuck makes you think US investigators have the right to investigate somebody in another country ? He is NOT subject to their authority. Unless he commits a crime IN the US they have no right to be doing that investigation in the first place.

Of course they do. If they have reason to believe someone abroad has violated US law and did so with a nexus in the US then they are fair game. For example, if someone uses a bank in the US to wire money for illegal purposes then they are subject to US law; even if they never set foot in the US or their bank merely routed the money through a US branch. If a US company or branch of a foreign company based in the US has information of interest to law enforcement, even if the person is not in the US, they are obliged to turn it over subject to a proper court order. What France is doing is no different. They expect Google to obey French law for information they serve up in France, even if the information is located outside of France.

No country has yet invited the FBI to come investigate their criminals for them and no country is likely to ever do so.

You realize the FBI has agents stationed abroad that work with foreign governments and law enforcement?

Re: Simple question

[silentcoder]

As trainers not active duty. If an FBI agent tries to arrest me in my home country I have every right to use deadly force against him because outside US jurisdiction it is not a legal arrest. It is kidnapping and shooting him is self defense. No sane judge would convict me.

Re:Simple question

[Jason Levine]

What France is doing is no different. They expect Google to obey French law for information they serve up in France, even if the information is located outside of France.

I have three problems with this statement.

First of all, Google is complying with the French version of Google (Google.fr) but not the main Google.com. Google.fr serves up automatically if someone from France tries to load Google. So if someone from France goes to the Google.com website, they are purposefully going around the system - possibly in an effort to get the blocked content.

Secondly, complying with this law - the way France wants Google to comply - would mean removing/blocking this content for EVERYONE due to a law in one country. This would mean that I (in the USA) wouldn't be able to find content simply because France said no to is. How far does this extend? Can Saudi Arabia demand that Google censor search results worldwide to comply with their laws? What if two countries have conflicting laws? Is Google compelled to observe the conflicting laws at the same time?

Finally, this can be extended beyond Google. I run a few websites. Suppose I post something that is perfectly fine in the US but that someone in France decides is against their law. Right now, there's no problem. My websites only need to comply with the laws of the country I live and operate in. However, if we insist that I must "obey French law for information [I] serve up in France, even if the information is located outside of France", then suddenly French law applies to me merely because someone from France loaded up my website. Adding Point #2 into this, it means that I might be forced to comply with the laws of ANY nation that decided their laws extend beyond their borders because websites can be loaded via the Internet onto computers in their country.

Re:Simple question

[Registered Coward v2]

What France is doing is no different. They expect Google to obey French law for information they serve up in France, even if the information is located outside of France.

I have three problems with this statement.

All good points. Mine was, which may have not been clear, is countries attempt to apply their laws extra-territorially and the internet makes it a much more complicated scenario given the ability to easily cross borders without leaving physically.

Re: Simple question

[Registered Coward v2]

As trainers not active duty. If an FBI agent tries to arrest me in my home country I have every right to use deadly force against him because outside US jurisdiction it is not a legal arrest. It is kidnapping and shooting him is self defense. No sane judge would convict me.

Actually they take part in investigations as well. You are correct that local law enforcement makes the arrest, although technically a US citizen abroad would fall under their jurisdiction based on US law; but it is impractical to actually arrest them unless they stray onto US territory while abroad.

Re:Simple question

[Jimpqfly]

Ummm... no. Each people in France has the right to see its data DELETED from any company database. This is personal data regulation.

Re:Simple question

[Anonymous Coward]

Secondly, complying with this law - the way France wants Google to comply - would mean removing/blocking this content for EVERYONE due to a law in one country. This would mean that I (in the USA) wouldn't be able to find content simply because France said no to is.

No it doesn't. It is trivially easy for Google to geo-target what they serve from .com to France vs US (I would bet a case of beer they do this already), and the law is only requiring them to implement right to be forgotten for EU, not the US.

Re: Simple question

[Anonymous Coward]

US law is irrelevant abroad. Unless given that power by local authorities (which I cannot imagine ever happening), the FBI cannot legally arrest anyone, American citizen or otherwise, outside the US.

Re: Simple question

[Paul Jakma]

Publishing an algorithm doesn't imply publishing all possibline input to the algorithm. You can publish an algorithm that, say, contains functionality to scan an exclusion list, without ever needing to publish any exclusion list that might exist.

It is not about global - it is about .com

[Anonymous Coward]

The letter from the authorities to Google that complained about Google not complying with the court order specifically used the example that users in France searching on Google.com instead of Google.fr get a result where the right to be forgotten is not implemented.

Google is trying to call .com a global only search result, but that is disingenuous, both they and all others already do geo-fencing and geo-tailoring on what is served through a "global" .com domain.

Re:It is not about global - it is about .com

[Luthair]

I posted something similar on previous Slashdot stories, I'm not a believer forcing search engines to censor results but the way Google's done this is artificially structured by TLD. If they want to do business in the EU then they should follow their laws when someone in the EU is accessing Google services regardless of TLD.

Call me when the EU starts trying to censor results of people searching from Canada.

"One nation does not make laws for another" ???

[Anonymous Coward]

One nation does not make laws for another, except warmongering USA.

Re: "One nation does not make laws for another" ??

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. Italy routinely makes laws that are meant to be valid all throughout the universe. They just lack the firepower to enforce them.

Re: "One nation does not make laws for another" ??

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw you, troll. This doesn't involve US laws. It involves a multinational company headquartered in the US that's not following EU laws. Lots of countries try to extend their laws beyond their borders, and in some cases it makes sense. Sometimes it doesn't. The new EU data protection directive is much more aggressive in extending the rules beyond EU borders.

Let's say a US citizen travels to Canada and is injured from staying at a hotel in Canada. Because it's a multinational hotel chain with a presence in the US and the injured person is a US resident, they would potentially sue for damages in US courts. The case will be heard in the US, but the US court will interpret Canadian law in its ruling. Why? Because the hotel has no obligation to follow US laws in Canada, even when the guest is a US citizen. In this case, Canadian laws effectively extend beyond the border in the sense that they are what the US court ends up interpreting. In fact, sometimes US laws actually require that US courts interpret foreign laws.

Citation

[Anonymous Coward]

"If this right was limited to some extensions, it could be easily circumvented: in order to find the delisted result, it would be sufficient to search on another extension (e.g. searching in France using google.com) , "

https://www.cnil.fr/fr/node/15814

TTIP

[Anonymous Coward]

Are corporations so big they can play off one jurisdiction against another to do whatever they want?

TTIP, is the trade agreement that lets corporations sue governments in a kangaroo court (of corporate lawyers) to remove laws. If that passes than Google could demand EU remove the "right to be forgotten" law, and it would be a few corporate lawyers hearing things in secret who would decide.

Re:TTIP

[silentcoder]

>Are corporations so big they can play off one jurisdiction against another to do whatever they want?

Yes. A great many of them are. Which effectively makes them entirely lawless organisations - and that's exactly why corporations can be far more dangerous than governments. Governments all have to answer to somebody, even the dictators end up answering to other governments (too much bad press and you end up with UN soldiers showing up to "relieve you of duty"). Corporations only answer to shareholders - none of whom single-handedly holds enough sway for any moral concerns to influence behavior and can and do commit any atrocity that can somehow save or make them money - by simply going somewhere it's legal to do.

The only way you will end that is if governments start saying "If you do business here you must comply with our laws EVERYWHERE, otherwise you are free to NOT do business here". But that will never happen, and I'm not sure the trade-off is worth it as there would be nothing stopping Iran and North Korea from doing the same.
It may be worth allowing for certain very narrow legal areas - like labour law and tax law, provided we put in place enough checks and balances to prevent scope creep.

Currently - corporations are the most brutal and murderous entities on the planet but VERY recently that title belonged to governments. We do need to take care that our response to the current problem does not aggravate the former one. It's not like governments ever got LESS brutal, corporations just managed to overtake them.

Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[shanen]

The root of this problem is the death of privacy. Especially amusing as the chief killers of personal privacy are most prominently self-proclaimed "conservatives" trying to conserve the profits of large companies. They profit by treating us a mindless sheep following the carrots of our personal interests and even strengths.

If our personal information was OUR property, then we should be entitled to store it where WE want to keep it, even if that was a place that the google could not conveniently copy. The legal default should be NO ownership of other people's personal information. The only exception I can think of is where several people are involved, in which case each of them should properly have a copy of the transaction AMONG themselves.

If you start from that perspective, then the entire situation looks very different. If owning another person's personal information without their permission was a crime, then you don't have to create a bizarre right to be forgotten (which is fundamentally impossible because you have to remember what to forget) and you can just go after the criminal who is publicizing your STOLEN personal information.

So what is the chance of fixing the problem? ZERO. The google profits are just fine the way things are and they are NOT going to allow any major changes.

Remember, "All your attention are belong to us [the google]."

P.S. I'm aware of the sticks of negative personal information, but it is quite obvious and gets plenty of discussion. The carrots are actually more dangerous.

Re: Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to play devil's advocate here. Let's say I'm running a web server and have logs of which IPs have accessed it. Let's say that my content is displayed on a lot of pages. This isn't necessarily naferious because I could be hosting legitimate images. However, I can also see which sites are linking to my images. My server logs will record that information, including the IPs. I could use the server logs to build a profile of which IPs are visiting accessing the images on my server, and which sites they are linked from. My server logs contain information that can be used to track users and build profiles. There are ways this could happen even if I'm not doing any advertising any all. Are the server logs my property? Do I have any right to keep logs of anyone accessing my server?

Re:Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[Zandamesh]

Google just links to the information, they don't remove it. Why does none of this responsibility to preserve privacy fall on the shoulders of people who host it in the first place? I'll tell you why, because it's too much of a hassle to go after each of the ones hosting the info, so they go after Google, mainly because it's easier. But the information does not go away, and if people really have an interest about searching about people, alternatives will become available. Especially because technology is constantly improving, how long until every newspaper ever written fits on a single hard disk? This law to censor Google will soon become obsolete but it won't be removed because that would be too much of a hassle as well.

Re:Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[Anonymous Coward]

> Google just links to the information, they don't remove it. Why does none of this responsibility to preserve privacy fall on the shoulders of people who host it in the first place?

Asymmetry. It's the fat behemots the Internet begets who are making the difference today (see below)

> [...] because it's too much of a hassle to go after each [...]

That's too simplistic, I fear.

> This law to censor Google will soon become obsolete [...]

I agree with that one. And that's why I think we need a good debate about how we *want* to go about those things, instead of letting technology, industry and capital just go their ways. We are facing a change which will make Industrial Revolution (that one with coal, steel, steam and Spinning Jennies) seem a minor event. It ain't gonna be pretty anyway, but if we don't try to manage it, as a society, it'll be even worse than that.

If this (in my eyes pathetic) attempt by CNIL helps kicking off that debate, I'm all for it.

Re: Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[Opportunist]

Wrong question. The question is, will anyone know you have these logs. If the answer is "no", it doesn't matter.

Re:Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[Anonymous Coward]

Google just links to the information, they don't remove it. Why does none of this responsibility to preserve privacy fall on the shoulders of people who host it in the first place? I'll tell you why, because it's too much of a hassle to go after each of the ones hosting the info, so they go after Google, mainly because it's easier. .

No this is not why, you haven't understood the purpose and intent of this law at all. It is specifically *not* to remove the original information, in any way or form. But to address the problem that casual searches on Google will forever re-surface old stories about you that should be left to the obscurity of the original stories and not continue to ruin your life when no longer relevant. You can agree or disagree if this is a good purpose, but at least try to understand the purpose before attacking it with something that is completely irrelevant to this law.

Re: Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[Anonymous Coward]

Not for ever. The logs have legitimate purposes, and you can keep them for whatever period these purposes require (within reason, a judge won't easily be convinced that you still need ten year old logs). Personally identifyable data has to be removed when the logs have served their purpose. If the purpose includes tracking users and building profiles, you are required to ask for the user's explicit permission first, and without that permission you aren't allowed to use the data in this manner.

Re: Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[Anonymous Coward]

Different AC... what if I have a website which displays nothing but the server logs of the website?

Re: Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, those places would include news outlets, which would me a much more obvious hit to freedom of the press. (With Google we can engage in the great doublethink that we aren't censoring the press, we're just making it impossible to find some of the content the press produces.)

Re:Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[AmiMoJo]

Why does none of this responsibility to preserve privacy fall on the shoulders of people who host it in the first place?

Actually it does. Any business handling personal data has to abide by data protection rules.

Re:Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[Registered Coward v2]

Google just links to the information, they don't remove it. Why does none of this responsibility to preserve privacy fall on the shoulders of people who host it in the first place? I'll tell you why, because it's too much of a hassle to go after each of the ones hosting the info, so they go after Google, mainly because it's easier. But the information does not go away, and if people really have an interest about searching about people, alternatives will become available. Especially because technology is constantly improving, how long until every newspaper ever written fits on a single hard disk? This law to censor Google will soon become obsolete but it won't be removed because that would be too much of a hassle as well.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you pointed out it's easier to go after Google. If they tried to force the sources of the information to remove it they would probably wind up in numerous court fights as well as run afoul of press freedom laws making it impractical to take that course. So the "right to be forgotten" becomes the "right to make it harder to find out."

Re:Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[ooloorie]

If owning another person's personal information without their permission was a crime

Google doesn't claim "ownership" over information about you; they simply provide a link to information that is already on the web. The search results will disappear as soon as the original pages disappear. If you have a problem with that, you need to take it up with the people who put the information on the web in the first place, not Google.

Secondly, the information that is at issue in "right to be forgotten" cases usually isn't "personal" information, it's public information: legal judgments against you, articles others have written about you, etc. You don't own that information and you shouldn't be able to control it, even according to the EU and proponents of the "right to be forgotten", because they don't force the original publishers of that information to take it down.

Re:Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[ooloorie]

Actually it does. Any business handling personal data has to abide by data protection rules.

Which tells you that the information covered by the "right to be forgotten" is, in fact, not personal data, because otherwise the original site would have to safeguard it.

by the way I'm a fuckwit

Yes, you are.

Re:Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[Karl Cocknozzle]

They also go after google because it's the main source of headaches for people with dated/inaccurate/slanderous information out there about them.

Consider: If you publish a web-site attacking me as the world's biggest jerk, it only really matters if people can find it. It's sort of the same way you can slander someone in the forest and never get sued. Slander is still actionable when spoken in a forest, but since nobody is around to hear it, witness it, and testify in court to the slander, you're pretty much in the clear. (Also, because nobody heard the slander, there wasn't any real damage done.)

But it's the same notion here: When it comes to slanderous, out of date, or just plain false information, Google operates like a white pages for slander. Which is why they're the target of the laws.

Re:Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[Anonymous Coward]

Google just links to the information, they don't remove it. Why does none of this responsibility to preserve privacy fall on the shoulders of people who host it in the first place? I'll tell you why, because it's too much of a hassle to go after each of the ones hosting the info, so they go after Google, mainly because it's easier. But the information does not go away, and if people really have an interest about searching about people, alternatives will become available. Especially because technology is constantly improving, how long until every newspaper ever written fits on a single hard disk? This law to censor Google will soon become obsolete but it won't be removed because that would be too much of a hassle as well.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you pointed out it's easier to go after Google. If they tried to force the sources of the information to remove it they would probably wind up in numerous court fights as well as run afoul of press freedom laws making it impractical to take that course. So the "right to be forgotten" becomes the "right to make it harder to find out."

Completely misunderstanding the intent of the law is hitting the nail on the head? (hint: see a few posts above here if you don't bother with the research yourself)

If assuming majority of Slashdot commenters are Americans I'm beginning to understand the success of Trump and his play at making ignorance a virtue and a good basis for getting engaged in the discussion.

Re:Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[shanen]

Apparently none of the direct replies to my comment were based on what what I wrote, so I'm ignoring them, but I feel like I should agree with the person who commented on targeting google as the publicity agent for bad information. My point was the bad information should be the target, not google, even though google is doing plenty of EVIL stuff these days.

As regards google not having direct 'ownership' of the personal data, that person apparently doesn't know how google works and also ignores the question of caches. My suggestion would actually make it much harder for google to update its indexes.

Re:Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[N3wsByt3]

"Casual" searches? Is it explicitly mentioned as such, and is a definition given of 'casual'? I highly doubt it. There is no clear line between 'casually' looking it up and 'non-casually' looking it up on google.

So that point doesn't matter, and thus, it amounts to: "to not show the original info". Period. And then we come to your primary assertion: that it's ok since it doesn't remove it, it only doesn't show it, so you can't find it, at least not with a search-engine.

Now... for me, and I think I can make a logical case for it, this amounts to simply diverting and obfuscating the actual result of this. It is, in fact, a semantic way in deluding someone it's something else, while it amounts to the same. Because, let's face it, if you can't find any info, it amounts the same to no *having* that info. Maybe not in the strict sense, but certainly in a de facto sense.

It's like... making a law which forbid to read books. And then saying: "Oh, but we did NOT forbid books! We just forbid to *READ* books."

That might be an important distinction to you, but not to me (nor most other people with a rationally thinking mind, I wager). Because forbidding *READING* books has the same effect as forbidding books themselves, and they loose all intent and purpose, since the whole point of books is being able to be read. The same goes for information on the internet; if you're not able to find the information, than that information could as well be considered non-existent, and there is no de facto difference anymore between deleting all findings, and deleting the info itself.

Re:Radical idea: My data is NOT google's property

[Anonymous Coward]

They link AND cache information, so yeah they sure do store it.

Also, the link will not disappear as soon as the site is offline, read the cache. It may disappear next time the spider hits the site again in a week or whenever. (this can be frequent or infrequent spider grabs based on algo's)

That'll just lead to laws prohibiting data-export

[Anonymous Coward]

The consequence of this will probably be that european countries will prohibit exporting data which might fall under its privacy laws, as it won't be able to enforce those laws on data outside its territory. I'd also be somewhat amused if they'd have the idea to "license" the data and revoke the license if the data is used in a way contradicting local laws (i.e. "you don't own the data you gather in this country, we just grant you a license to use it under certain conditions for a potentially limited amount of time").

Open letter

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Google,
How about you stop hiding behind the laws and your highly paid lawyers and actually do something that's right for a change?
You know, 'Do no evil'. Yes it was always a bullshit slogan, and you've been doing evil ever since the beginning, but here's your chance to stop acting like a complete asshole and recognise when you've gone to far, whether or not the letter of the law in your favourite jurisdiction says otherwise.
So, Google, how about you clean up your act, and be the good guys for a change?
Sincerely,
The Rest of the Fucking Internet.

Re:Open letter

[91degrees]

You know, 'Do no evil'. Yes it was always a bullshit slogan,

It was never Google's slogan. They had "don't be evil" as an unofficial slogan, but that's subtly different.

Re:Open letter

[oobayly]

What are they doing wrong? They're obeying a local law. France wants its laws to apply outside of their borders. Imagine their reaction if Saudi Arabia demanded that they repeal their ban on face covering in public places.

Re:Open letter

[Anonymous Coward]

How about you stop hiding behind the laws and your highly paid lawyers and actually do something that's right for a change?

Seems to me that providing unbiased search results to already published data on the Internet is the right thing.

What the EU wants, namely to distort the public record, is the wrong thing. The fact that you get behind this in your shiny jackboots makes you another bad guy.

Re:Open letter

[Jimpqfly]

No. France wants its laws to be applied on any service SOLD (if it's free, then you're the product) on the French territory. France doesn't care if the service is sold through a .com or .fr domain name.

Re:Open letter

[thegarbz]

One can argue that the very fact that when you type google.com into the browser you're automagically redirected to google.fr is actually doing exactly what France wants it too. Otherwise it better start closing it's borders and locking down the grey market lines too. After all here's an example of a company doing everything possible to comply with local laws by producing a personalised product for that country.

Re:Open letter

[Anonymous Coward]

What are they doing wrong? They're obeying a local law. France wants its laws to apply outside of their borders. Imagine their reaction if Saudi Arabia demanded that they repeal their ban on face covering in public places.

This is factually incorrect. In this case France only wants its laws to apply inside their borders.

Re:Open letter

[dotwhynot]

One can argue that the very fact that when you type google.com into the browser you're automagically redirected to google.fr is actually doing exactly what France wants it too. Otherwise it better start closing it's borders and locking down the grey market lines too. After all here's an example of a company doing everything possible to comply with local laws by producing a personalised product for that country.

It's a first visit soft redirect, if you go to Google.com anyway that will stay your new default, and is also serving results personalized for your country, with local ads sold by local Google office. It is a product Google is delivering and selling in France, and then has to follow French law too.

To follow the law Google would just have to geo-target the right to be forgotten on search results served within EU regardless of what domain the EU user is going to (as they already do with the search results and ads). That Google just implemented it on .fr is an obvious protest against a law they didn't like in the first place.

Re:Open letter

[thegarbz]

Hardly. Why would we hold Google accountable but not any other physical business? There's nothing stopping someone buying something online that is illegal for sale in their home country, but not illegal in the sellers country, and no one breaks a law as a result. Oh wait there is something. It's called customs.

Google doesn't need to geofence. They've made a good faith effort to serve local content from local servers on local domains in the local language. The fact that people circumvent this is not Google's responsibility, it's the governments. If they want to block all web services that don't comply with local laws despite the fact those web services are located in a different jurisdiction and are operating under different laws then they should, but there's no reason a foreign company hosting foreign content on a foreign domain for foreign target audience should need to implement systems to prevent people in another country from accessing it.

Dare I say China are the only ones who've figured this out. But even then we can see how well the great firewall works. Customs doesn't work well online and France is having a bit of a cry about it.

Re:Open letter

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardly. Why would we hold Google accountable but not any other physical business? There's nothing stopping someone buying something online that is illegal for sale in their home country, but not illegal in the sellers country, and no one breaks a law as a result. Oh wait there is something. It's called customs.

I'm quite sure that if Walmart had a business presence in France, but the US part of Walmart started selling illegal things, lik fx guns, to France, french authorities would definitely have something to say about that. Walmart France pointing to their US office and saying "it is not us" would not hold, at all.

So the moment a tech company has to obey EU laws

[Anonymous Coward]

...it becomes an American company again?

I sure wish they took the same view come tax time.

EU is making laws for Google, not for other countries. If you want to keep operating there, play by their rules.

Tell that to the US

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the US is working on enacting laws that will allow search warrants for computer crimes to be executed globally. Seems like that's pretty much the same thing...

Devil's advocate

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's complicated. As it is always when several people share something in common. Those server logs are traces of interactions you (well, your Web server) had with others, and as such "belong" to you as they belong to your peer. Conceptually, there is a corresponding entry in a "client log" (browser cache, whatever) at the other side.

If you squint, this is an old problem: my garden (I wish I had one, but let's pretend :) shares a common border with my neighbour's. If I like, say, a bit of chaos and let the weeds grow, my neighbor might be miffed that seeds are blown over and mess up her orderly array of tomatos and zucchini. A classical conflict of interests, which will have to be resolved in some way. In spite of millenia of experience with that, we haven't really reached a point where we could be satisfied with how we resolve those conflicts; sometimes the process is messy and painful.

What's new is the fast globalization process we are seeing. Coupled with the radical economy of scale we are witnessing (which more or less leads to a "winner takes all" situation and begets huge behemoths, and highly asymmetrical "business" relationships). That's a recipe for trouble.

So I don't really know which one to side with: whereas CNIL's position seems authoritarian (and a bit pathetic), and I wouldn't like state actors who I don't know much about messing with my search results (disclosure: my preferred search engine is *not* Google), I'm a bit relieved to see Google hitting some snags in its unhindered expansion.

Race to the bottom

[Anonymous Coward]

If every single country can pass law and applied to all. There would be nothing left of internet search engine. The next step of the law would be applied to all internet and not just search engine. Imagine newspaper or magazine would require to remove article.

What's stopping MPAA and RIAA buy off a country to pass law to regulate internet?

If this law stands Google needs to pull out of France

Re:Race to the bottom

[Anonymous Coward]

If every single country can pass law and applied to all. There would be nothing left of internet search engine. The next step of the law would be applied to all internet and not just search engine. Imagine newspaper or magazine would require to remove article.

What's stopping MPAA and RIAA buy off a country to pass law to regulate internet?

If this law stands Google needs to pull out of France

But that is not what the law or France or EU says, at all, it is just hyperbole reporting and PR spin. They just want Google to follow the law also on the .com domain within EU. They use this exact example in their complaint to Google: If users in France search on Google.com instead of Google.fr they today get search results where the right to be forgotten in EU is not implemented. When Google implemented this law they did it in the most "fuck you, we are above the law" way possible, by not doing it on a geo basis but on a .fr domain basis, and that is coming back to them now.

GeoIP

[Anonymous Coward]

*Sarcasm*

So Google never heard of GeoIP

A company that sells targeted adds, can not even guess where you are connecting from

That is called contempt of court in anglo-saxon juridictions

Google's reasoning makes no sense.

[silentcoder]

The law is NOT being enforced externally at all. Nobody on the ECJ is going to give Google any grief if they ignore a request by me to be forgotten - I'm not a European citizen and my country does not have such a right.

But Google has to comply with the laws of the countries it operates in, in so far as it concerns data about people from those countries. By Google's reasoning, if you kidnap somebody and take them to a country where kidnapping is legal - you cannot be prosecuted ? Their right not to be kidnapped dissappeared after you took them to a country that doesn't recognize it ? Of course not. They are still citizens from a country where that is a right - and their government still has a duty to protect that right, even if they are not currently within it's borders.
I see no reasonable reason why a person's data should be any different.

Re:Google's reasoning makes no sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is complying with the laws. Google France obeys the laws, Google Germany obeys the laws. Those are both companies registered in those respective countries. So fall under the jurisdiction of those countries.
Google.com, what everyone thinks of as just google does not have a legal or physical presence in either of those countries, or any other EU state. It is a US based company, and all its servers are in the US. So it does not fall under EU jurisdiction.

Let me give you an example of why Google is in the right in this case.

Lets say you own property here in the US, and also own a house in Saudi Arabia. You obey US laws while you are here in the US. You obey Saudi Arabia's laws while you are in Saudi Arabia.
Alcohol is against the law in Saudi Arabia, but not in the US. Should Saudi authorities be able to punish you for having alcohol in your US house?

Re:Google's reasoning makes no sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

The law is NOT being enforced externally at all. Nobody on the ECJ is going to give Google any grief if they ignore a request by me to be forgotten - I'm not a European citizen and my country does not have such a right.

But Google has to comply with the laws of the countries it operates in, in so far as it concerns data about people from those countries. By Google's reasoning, if you kidnap somebody and take them to a country where kidnapping is legal - you cannot be prosecuted ? Their right not to be kidnapped dissappeared after you took them to a country that doesn't recognize it ? Of course not. They are still citizens from a country where that is a right - and their government still has a duty to protect that right, even if they are not currently within it's borders. I see no reasonable reason why a person's data should be any different.

I think your analogy is very questionable, but let's go with it anyway. The key point here is that Google doesn't host or provide the data in question; it's generally hosted by news sites in the EU. They're the ones providing the information. Google is just providing a link to it. If the person's data is "kidnapped", shouldn't the site that's actually providing it be required to take it down?

The answer is no, because it's not personal data. If it were, EU data protection laws could be used to remove it. In fact it's public information about a person, which is why the news sites are allowed to continue serving it up. The EU has this silly notion that legitimate public data should be removed from search sites, which is fine if that's what they want to do, but they shouldn't be able to impose their silliness on the rest of the world.

Re:Google's reasoning makes no sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

" By Google's reasoning, if you kidnap somebody and take them to a country where kidnapping is legal - you cannot be prosecuted ?"

That analogy is pretty flawed.

Let's go by it step by step.

What is being 'kidnapped' (retrieved) here? Is google retrieving data from France (aka; kidnapping someone)? I dont think so. More adept would the analogy be, thus, if you said that a FRENCH citizen retrieves (kidnaps) data (person) from the USA, and then France sues not the one retrieving it (aka doing the kidnapping) but instead aks the entity of whom it was retrieved, and who lives abroad, to stop the kidnapping or be fined. Even if the retrieving of the data (the allowing of the kidnapping) is legal in thier country.

Does that makes sense? No it doesn't. Why the heck should google be responsible for French citizens retrieving their data from their server in the USA, and why should they have to comply with EU laws when that particular server is on US soil?

The google.com do NOT break the law where their jurisdiction is. So why should they comply with EU laws because French citizens specifically ask it on their servers?

If you have difficulties comprehending this, let's make it more simple. Say, google.com and google.fr would be legally different entities. France/EU then demands google.com to abide by their laws. There is absolutely no reason for google.com to comply, nor could they be compelled to do so *because they are NOT subject to their jurisdiction*. the fact that French citizens still can access their data and that isn't 'allowed' by their laws does NOTHING to refute what I just said. Just like China asking to forbid certain thing on servers on the EU does in no way compel EU-besed servers to abide by Chinese laws. EVEN if Chinese citizens make use of their servers. Now, the case is more complicated because 'google' is an international company, and I'm not sure how the legal standing is of daughter companies. But in the essence of the matter, this changes nothing. Because it still boils down that the EU demands complience with their laws, to an entity (aka, google.com with it's servers in the USA) which it has NO jurisdiction over.

If France doesn't like that it's citzens can still access data, they have to do like China does it: create a firewalled 'great wall'.

The solution for google, if this isn't the case already, is to make clear that while google.fr operates in France and is legally bound by French law, google.com is a different legal entity, operating in the USA. In that case, the EU laws have no recourse on it.

If you REALLY want a good analogy, it would be like, on the border of the country (A) next to you, there is an add that is against the defamation laws of country B (but not A). Citizens at the border of country A can look at that defaming billboard. Country A doesn't like that, and demands the company of the billboard to remove it, because it's own citizens an see it, and it's against their law. The billboard-company is also active in country A, but follows all the rules *there* (aka, it doesn't place defaming adds in country A).

Your contention now is, that the billboard-company should remove its billboard in the *other country* too, or make it 'invisble' to their own citizens. My question is: why the f- should they? They comply with all the laws where they have jurisdiction; there is no law which requires them to follow that law outside the jurisdiction. That the citizens of country A can see the board at the border if they choose to look at it doesn't change anything to that. The billboard is still outside their jurisdiction.

Re:Google's reasoning makes no sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize they are complying with local law on a local level. If you are in a country where kidnapping is legal, then no, the other country can not do anything to you unless you step foot back into their country or they get the other country to extradite your ass back to them.

Forcing Google to comply on all their domains which are designed to serve other countries goes against all precedent for laws dealing with international companies . There are simply too many laws from various countries, many conflicting, to where an international simply could not exist at all if laws was forced upon the company even for sections that did not serve said country. What if the country had a stupid law that said women faces cant be shown online. While google may have to comply on a local level where it serves that country if they want to do business there, they certainly don't have to on other levels which do not serve that country. Sure, it is easy to bypass the local level, but that is just how the internet works.

Re:Google's reasoning makes no sense.

[thegarbz]

The law is NOT being enforced externally at all.

Sure it does. The right to be forgotten is done and dusted in European countries. Anyone from Europe who goes to www.google.com will be redirected to their own site like www.google.fr and be given search results that comply with the local laws.

Now why should that same law apply to someone who gets redirected to www.google.com.au? It's not like the Australians have a right to be forgotten, or the country where Google is headquartered.

Incidentally your criminal example is part right. People are obliged to obey the laws of the country in which they currently reside, and I'm reminded of the case of an Australian couple that were arrested and imprisoned in Dubai for being lewd on the beach, something that is not at all against Australian law. By your logic They should be protected right? Or by your logic Arab people should not be kissing drinking on the street in Germany because back at their homes that was against the law too.

Re:Google's reasoning makes no sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

For users in France Google.com serve french-tailored search results with ads from french businesses sold by Google France. It is highly unlikely that Google is actually serving all of this in France from US servers only, but even if -- they are selling and serving this product in France to french users, and must follow french/EU laws.

If a US company ship products of any kind to french users they have to follow local law, even if they have another offering they consider even more localized.

Re:Google's reasoning makes no sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

By Google's reasoning, if you kidnap somebody and take them to a country where kidnapping is legal - you cannot be prosecuted ? ... I see no reasonable reason why a person's data should be any different.

A person is tangible but information about a person is not. It's as if you can't tell the difference between killing a person and writing the words "kill a person" on a piece of paper.

In fact, the EU in its demands is more akin to a kidnapper than Google. Eurocrats are ultimately threatening violence against those peacefully storing and sharing certain strings of 0s and 1s.

Re:Google's reasoning makes no sense.

[windwalkr]

Anyone from Europe who goes to www.google.com will be redirected to their own site like www.google.fr and be given search results that comply with the local laws.

Now why should that same law apply to someone who gets redirected to www.google.com.au?

To play the devil's advocate:

A child walks into a bar somewhere in the U.S.A. The bartender refuses to sell her alcohol, because she's clearly underage. The child walks to the other end of the bar, which has an Australian flag and promotes Fosters. The bartender there is happy to serve her, because clearly she's no longer subject to the local laws? The kid is still in the same country. Everybody knows it, nobody is fooled because she's standing under a different flag.

So it is with internet traffic, unless you're going through a VPN or similar. Something so trivial as accessing the site through a different domain name should not be considered sufficient grounds to excuse ignoring the local law.

If the user was actually located in Australia at the time, fair enough. But that doesn't appear to be what's going on here.

Re:Google's reasoning makes no sense.

[thegarbz]

The Australian flag doesn't mean local laws don't apply, and your example breaks down because a domain name is not all that's separate. Google provides local hosting with local data, local results from local domains.

To help your contrived example:
A child walks into a bar to buy a beer but is refused because they are underage. So they go home and mail order a beer from a country where it's not illegal to sell alcohol to a minor. Now who's in trouble? The company which was complying with all it's local laws in another country? Are they expected to follow all laws from all counties? We may as well shutdown internet shopping if that's the case.

No there is a clear break in liability here which is customs. Someone checks to see if goods traversing a national border comply with the local regulations, and the child doesn't get his alcohol, and the country doesn't get in trouble. The same can not be said if the company has a local wear house in the country in which case they need to comply with all local distribution laws because they have a presence there, but only when selling to locals.

If France wants to chuck a hissy fit then the answer is easy and completely obvious: block all Google TLDs except www.google.fr. After all it's their citizens which are effectively skirting around the rules by accessing content that is not intended for them from a server outside of France. The topic of goods and services traversing national borders are insanely complicated and can't just be trivialised with Google should comply with EU law over the entire world because someone can access their stuff.

Microsoft does business in China. How compatible are EU data privacy laws with the bing.cn domain name?

Re:Google's reasoning makes no sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

Forcing Google to comply on all their domains which are designed to serve other countries goes against all precedent for laws dealing with international companies .

But nobody are asking Google to do this. This law is only about what Google serves to users in France.

When you are in an European country Google.com is serving obviously locally tailored search results, with local ads from local businesses sold by the local Google office.

It would be trivially easy for Google to implement right to be forgotten on .com results served in EU only, and have no impact on what Google serves outside EU.

Re:Google's reasoning makes no sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure it does. The right to be forgotten is done and dusted in European countries. Anyone from Europe who goes to www.google.com will be redirected to their own site like www.google.fr and be given search results that comply with the local laws.

No. There is a first visit soft redirect to local domain, but if you then go to Google.com anyway (there is even a link on the page for this) this stays your default (I'm in an European country and just tested this again). And the search result served by Google.com is obviously locally tailored and contains local ads (sold by local Google office).

Now why should that same law apply to someone who gets redirected to www.google.com.au?

It doesn't.

Re:Google's reasoning makes no sense.

[N3wsByt3]

Whether it's trivial and easy or not is not the point. It's the principle of the matter that counts.

Take the parent posters' example of a country which had a stupid law that said women faces cant be shown online. Now imagine there is a program that can do that automatically, in a very, very cheap and easy way.

Would that change in anything the essence of the issue here?

It's not whether it's trivial or easy or not, it's whether another country has the right to demand that its laws are being followed by a company that is outside their jurisdiction.

And the answer is and should be: no.

Because going the other route, means countries like China have the right to impose THEIR laws on EU-institutions too. That's what it boils down to, really. So imagine Saudi-Arabia and Afghanistan, etc. forbids any cartoons of Mohamed to be shown, nor any women without a niqab. Are you now *really* going to argue that EU-sites should censor themselves and have the obligation to not show cartoons nor any women without a niqab to any user of those countries? *WE* should police ourselves and censor ourselves for *their* convenience? We should create our own 'Great Firewall' for them so *they* don't have to do it anymore?

Are you daft?

We have no reason to comply with such demands, whether those governments like that or not. And whether it's their citizens searching for the cartoons and women's faces or not. And neither does the US has to do so with our EU-laws.

Re:Google's reasoning makes no sense.

[N3wsByt3]

You are completely correct.

Some people use any contrived analogy just to try to make a point, but it's obvious that backfires most of the times.

"A flag on the other side of the bar" does not mean you're in another country. It's implied that it is (otherwise the flag-mentioning has no value whatsoever), yet it is then as much implied that there is no different jurisdiction, since it's 'the same bar'.

But one can't have it both ways.

If the bar-side with the other flag *REALLY* fell under another jurisdiction with other laws, where beer could be served to a minor, then the answer would clearly be: no, they are NOT in the same country anymore. It would have constituted a 'micro-nation' of half a bar long. And in that case, the whole reasoning breaks down.

So the question comes down to: is it just placing a flag without any meaning in that bar, or does the flag actually brings you into another jurisdiction? And since the servers *and* the legal entity (google.com) is on US soil, it clearly is subjected to another jurisdiction, as you correctly surmised.

To argue differently, would also mean the US *and* the EU would have to adhere to laws from China or Saudi-Arabia, and, in fact, every country would need to comply with laws of any other country, since it would all be "meaningless flags placed in 'the same' bar".

The argument is ludicrous, and I don't understand how so many people still try to defend it. Or maybe there are even more trolls then usual on slashdot on this topic.

Re:Google's reasoning makes no sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

> wear house

Dumbass.

But America loves the EU?

[Going_Digital]

Ha! America doesn't like being told what to do by the EU but thinks the UK should be subjected to rule by the unelected EU overlords.

Unfirst post

[wonkey_monkey]

I demand that this failure to get first post be forgotten.

Re:Unfirst post

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you should stop getting up on a soap box and demanding in public that we forget about what we didn't know until it was brought to our attention by those who don't want the info spread.

Re:Unfirst post

[Errol backfiring]

In all probability it was probably someone else than the victim on the soapbox. And a foreign company should have no right to that information whatsoever. I know the company cannot be expected to check all the information for such issues, which is why the right to be forgotten actually exists. Google should stop whining about it.

Re:Unfirst post

[wonkey_monkey]

http://imgur.com/3Gpey

Re: Unfirst post

[Anonymous Coward]

Once again, eat a dick.

Wouldn't that undermine any IP or espionage laws

[Kevin by the Beach]

If Alphabet wins.. they are saying that "information" taken from one nation and stored in another deserves no protection once outside it's boarders.

Assange couldn't be prosecuted if this prevails (yes, I know that it's only a secret grand jury at the moment) because https://wikileaks.com/ is physically outside of the US and US laws don't apply? In that case wikileaks would only need to install a region filter to demonstrate "token" compliance. Now, if he was somehow kidnapped and found himself on US soil he would be in trouble.

Lets hope in this case the mega corporation wins... which could be a limited victory for everybody.

it's been rainy here by the Beach

Slashdot Google

[tinkerton]

Almost half of the items in my /. feed are related to Google. That's a bit much.

Serious question

[jwymanm]

Does the same law apply to books? Do we go and hunt down books that recorded the events of people and throw them away? Or is search an easy target because they just have to email a request..

Re:Serious question

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the same law apply to books?

No it doesn't because that would have no relevance for the actual intent of this law. Most of Slashdot is debating misconceptions of the law and its intent and what France is requiring of Google, not the actual law and actual intent and what France is actually requiring of Google. It's like Donald Trump style debating has taken over Slashdot.

Re:Serious question

[N3wsByt3]

Always claiming other opinions are equal to Trump-style-debating is a bit too easy, and a form of mental laziness of your part as well - as Trump would do it. ;-)

The *intent* of the law doesn't matter. Whether it is 'well-intended' or not does not matter. Why do you not get that? Apart from the fact that the highway to hell is paved with good intentions, the essence of the matter is, that one country can not demand compliance of its laws outside its jurisdiction.

Now, it might be, like you always claim, that they 'only ask to comply within their borders' but they ask it FROM an entity (google.com, not google.fr) which is a US based entity, with its servers on US-based soil. THEREFORE it has no jurisdiction over it, and google.com DOES NOT have to abide by it, EVEN if French citizens are asking for the info. And even if google.com is delivering the data to them. If you do not get this, let's take a correct analogy, and say booze.com is an US booze-delivery-service situated in the US. Saudi-Arabia forbids buying, selling and drinking booze. However, citizens of their nation order booze from booze.com, and to counter that, the government demands that booze.com stops sending booze to their citizens.

I ask you: why the F- should the US company booze.com have to comply with what the Saudi government asks? If it's legal to send booze in the US, than it doesn't matter one iota what another country wants, and that company DOES NOT have to comply. No, not even if Saudi-arabia does it with the utmost of well-intended thoughts, like..ermm... combating drunkenness.

"Oh", you say, "but they aren't asking to not sell booze to anyone, they just ask they would sell it to citizens of Saudi-arabia"!

Well... THAT DOES NOT MATTER. They are STILL not compelled to go in to those demands. In practise, what you get is wht you get in r/l now: it's for *CUSTOMS* of Saudi-Arabia to control and seize things that they consider illegal. It's NOT for a foreign company to comply with their laws and to not send it anymore. And that's why, in effect, you see a lot of things being ordered abroad, even illegal (in the customers' country) things, and yet companies will send it anyway, since it's legal to send it where they send it, and then it's for the customs of the country who has made the object illegal to stop it. Either by seizing the goods, and/or by putting the customer in their own country behind bars.

I'm not sure why you do not understand this, or you act as if people with a different viewpoint on the matter are some ass-twits and Trump-alikes.

It's perfectly logical and easy to understand for any logically minded person, I would think.

Re:Wouldn't that undermine any IP or espionage law

[ooloorie]

If Alphabet wins.. they are saying that "information" taken from one nation and stored in another deserves no protection once outside it's boarders.

The protection information receives outside its borders is determined by jurisdiction and international agreements. There are agreements on copyrights and extradition. There is no general law or principle about "protection of information". Furthermore, Google search results don't "take information", they merely link to a source in whatever country the information resides in.

Assange couldn't be prosecuted if this prevails (yes, I know that it's only a secret grand jury at the moment) because https://wikileaks.com/ is physically outside of the US

Assange can be prosecuted in the US if he violated a US law, and if his offense is an extraditable offense under a treaty with a nation that he happens to reside in, then that nation would extradite him.

Right to be forgotten....

[mark-t]

... is nothing but censorship. Plain and simple.

The biggest problem with censorship is that at its fundamental level, it is an attempt to control what people will know or believe, (since what information they are being allowed to access in the first place is controlled), and is an attempt to try and legislate what kinds of things people are even allowed to *THINK* about.

Nobody, no agency, no authority, no government, absolutely no power absolutely anywhere has any right to decide what any other human being should be allowed to think. Period.

While it certainly may suck if somebody makes an unfair decision about you because you did something spectacularly stupid or wrong a long time ago when that person is too narrow minded to consider how much time has actually elapsed since it occurred, but in the end that decision is still on them. Unfair shit happens to everybody in this world... heck, half of the people in this world are starving to death, and somebody living in a privileged nation thinks its unfair that an employer won't hire them because of some stupid shit that went down over a decade ago? It doesn't fucking matter whose fault it is when bad stuff happens to any us, it is still that person's individual responsibility to deal with it... and to continue to be the best person that they know how to be, and blaming past mistakes or blaming the fact that other people might not forgive us for them to justify why we aren't being better is just acting like a fucking crybaby. People who do so need to grow the hell up, act like adults, and and take responsibility for their OWN lives in the here and the now, instead of letting what people might believe about them dictate what choices they make.

(huff, puff, huff, puff, huff, puff.. Well, that turned into more of a rant than I first thought it would).

Where is the service provided ?

[Jimpqfly]

Since google.com is a service that is available in France, then it is also under French regulations
If google only want to apply the constraint on google.fr , ok , then they have to deactivated access to google.com
This is not censorship, people, this is only personal data protection.

Ummmm, no.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

We didn't whip the ass of dictatorship to let anything but the first amendment set the rules of the digital high seas, any more than we let local thugs send out pirate ships to international waters to harass trade there.

From the halls of Montezuma
To the shores of Normandeeeeeeee
We will fight our country's battles
On the land or in the tubes!

Change the name!

[Cajun Hell]

"The right to be forgotten" desperately needs a name change, since what it technically means is so radically different from what it plainly says or describes through its words. Its advocates should start calling it the "right to not be mentioned" or something like that, so that people can clearly see that it's merely about limiting speech rather than thought.

This is so stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have a right to be forgotten, isn't this related to free speech? What prevents punditry from being translated to slander? This should fall in the same category as that. Public figures deserve to be made fun of and private figures deserve to not be harrassed. Every individual is in charge of their own destiny.

French logic

[ooloorie]

France doesn't have jurisdiction over Google in the US; all they have jurisdiction over is Google's French subsidiary.

So, in effect, France is trying to fine Google France for actions committed by the owner of Google France outside of France. If France wants to set that precedent, they are welcome to it; I suspect it will strongly discourage future investment in France and French companies.

Re:French logic

[Anonymous Coward]

France doesn't have jurisdiction over Google in the US; all they have jurisdiction over is Google's French subsidiary.

So, in effect, France is trying to fine Google France for actions committed by the owner of Google France outside of France. If France wants to set that precedent, they are welcome to it; I suspect it will strongly discourage future investment in France and French companies.

If you were correct that would be strange, but you are not.

France is requiring that Google follow their laws for the product they deliver within their borders. I'm in an European country, and when I go to Google.com I get locally tailored search results, with local ads from local businesses sold by the local Google office. Google should just geo-target the right to be forgotten law on EU .com results (as they already geo-target these results and ads), and it will have no impact on anyone outside EUs borders.

Re:French logic

[whocares2]

What you don't get about France is that you can't just refer to loopholes and twist words to prove you're right. If you're wrong you're wrong. Just comply to the law or get out.
We don't care about future investments, we can do our own stuff in our own country you know.
Just leave us alone and we'll be fine.

Re:French logic

[ooloorie]

We don't care about future investments, we can do our own stuff in our own country you know.

That sort of belief in autarky used to be somewhat menacing when France was still a world power; these days, it's merely comical and pathetic.

Re:French logic

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't care about future investments, we can do our own stuff in our own country you know.

That sort of belief in autarky used to be somewhat menacing when France was still a world power; these days, it's merely comical and pathetic.

It is also quite comical and pathetic that most of this Slashdot discussion is people getting riled up over something France or this law has never required of Google.

Re:French logic

[N3wsByt3]

Sigh. It's the fifth time I see you write this.

Why do you not understand that it being 'easy' to geotag it or not, is NOT the issue at all? Whether they do it with their adds or not has NOTHING to do with them being obliged to abide by another countries' law. Google...google.com, that is... should NOT just geo-target it. Not because it would be hard or easy, nor because they already voluntarily do this with ads or not, but because they DO NOT FALL under EU law. They aren't geo-tagging adds because they are obliged to do so, they do it because they WANT to do it. As a US company, they don't want to be forced to abide by laws from another country, since that would create a precedent on jurisdiction, and obviously then countries like Russia, China, Saudi-Arabia, etc. would chirp in too.

So the two things are unrelated. When is this finally going to dawn on you? No-one is saying they can't geo-tag requests, they're saying they do not want to do it, and they do not have to do it. And they're right. It would be crazy trying to abide by all laws of any country *outside* the territorial jurisdiction of those laws/countries.

That they 'only want them to comply when it involves citizens of their country', does *nothing* to counter the fact that the company itself is in the US, as is its servers, and hence, it still does not fall under their jurisdiction. Just like when those citizens order something illegal (in their country) from the US by snailmail, that country can not demand the US company sending it does not send it anymore to their citizens. Because THEY HAVE NO AUTHORITY over it. What they should (and in practise do), thus, is controlling incoming goods by customs, and apprehend and seize the goods at the border.

And THAT is exactly what France should do, if it has so much trouble with it. That they create their very own little "Great Firewall", like China, and block all info coming from google.com. That's how they should deal with it, if they're having such a problem with it. Not by claiming worldwide applicability of their own national law, nor demanding that a foreign company under another jurisdiction should comply with their laws because it's French citizens that are asking for stuff they don't like.

Re:French logic

[N3wsByt3]

Nevertheless, France is in the wrong here, nd google is right to not abide by by it. As for the rational reasons why; I've placed them on my pots above.

Re:French logic

[N3wsByt3]

But he ain't wrong. That's just the point.

Well, at least, he ain't wrong if his stance is google.com (which is a legal entity based in the US, with its servers on US-soil) does not have to abide by French law. Google.fr IS complying with French law.

Chauvinism aside, it's clear they do not have jurisdiction over google.com. So demanding it would comply to French law is nonsensical. Set that precedent, and other countries would follow, EVEN towards the EU. It would be crazy trying to abide by all laws of any country *outside* the territorial jurisdiction of those laws/countries.

That France 'only want them to comply when it involves citizens of their country', does *nothing* to counter the fact that the company (google.com) itself, as a legal entity, is based in the US, as are its servers, and hence, it still does not fall under their jurisdiction. Just like when those same French citizens order something illegal (in their country) from the US by snailmail, France can not demand the US company sending it does not send it anymore to their citizens. Because THEY HAVE NO AUTHORITY over it. What they should (and in practise do), thus, is controlling incoming goods by customs, and apprehend and seize the goods at their border.

And THAT is exactly what France should do, if it has so much trouble with it. That they create their very own little "Great Firewall", like China, and block all info coming from google.com. That's how they should deal with it, if they're having such a problem with it. Not by claiming worldwide applicability of their own national law, nor demanding that a foreign company under another jurisdiction should comply with their laws because it's French citizens that are asking for the info.

Re:French logic

[whocares2]

Kind of funny comment because what you're really showing here could be called "american logic":
"This guy's attitude, requiring to be left alone in his own country, is considered menacing"

Re:French logic

[ooloorie]

In European history, a belief in autarky isn't about "being left alone", it's about nationalism, expansionism, and militarism.

Re:French logic

[whocares2]

Ever thought about why the word "cliché" is french ?

Re:So the moment a tech company has to obey EU law

[thegarbz]

Play by who's rules where? Companies like Google dodge tax all over the world equally, that doesn't magically mean they need to obey only the laws of the country in which they pay tax.

EU is making laws for Google, not for other countries. If you want to keep operating there, play by their rules.

EU is making laws full stop. What laws the EU makes should have no effect on an American company doing business in Australia for example.

Re:So the moment a tech company has to obey EU law

[Anonymous Coward]

EU is making laws full stop. What laws the EU makes should have no effect on an American company doing business in Australia for example.

And this law has no effect on an American company doing business in Australia. Absolutely none. It is about what search results Google are serving up within EU.

Re:Wouldn't that undermine any IP or espionage law

[Kevin by the Beach]

Almost fully agree with you. (your reference about links excludes knowledge of cache data provided by Time Machine)

We just appear to have problems with conceding jurisdiction as frequently as we claim it. There is a reason why the US has never agreed to fully support the ICC, the 1% who benefit from the immunity, and layered delays to prosecution will never be held accountable.

How long (based on treaties, international law, etc.. ) do cases like "megaupload.com" take to wind through the courts?

"Google search results don't "take information", they merely link to a source in whatever country the information resides in."

Isn't that what "time machine" does? It makes a copy of information and keeps it along with the original url. I just read an opinion where "time machine" cache information would be admissible as evidence in a wide variety of situations.

Re:So the moment a tech company has to obey EU law

[Anonymous Coward]

If Google doesn't want to follow EU's laws, then it shouldn't operate in EU. If an American company is doing business only in Australia, what exactly can the EU do to it?

Since Google does operate in EU by choice, and takes advantage of tax laws in foreign countries while doing it, its argument is insincere.

Think about your argument in relation to copyright infringement, or arms and tech sales, or business with countries on the state sponsor of terror list. The US does this all the time.