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Google Loses 'Right To Be Forgotten' Case (bbc.com)
A businessman fighting for the "right to be forgotten" has won a High Court action against Google. BBC reports: The man, who has not been named due to reporting restrictions surrounding the case, wanted search results about a past crime he had committed removed from the search engine. The judge, Mr Justice Mark Warby, ruled in his favour on Friday. But he rejected a separate claim made by another businessman who had committed a more serious crime. The businessman who won his case was convicted 10 years ago of conspiring to intercept communications. He spent six months in jail.
The other businessman, who lost his case, was convicted more than 10 years ago of conspiring to account falsely. He spent four years in jail.
Poor sumbitch did time for intercepting communications, yet I don't see anybody from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Doubleclick or CloudFlare in the slammer...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It gets worse. Sheriff's departments and police stations in the US often post arrest records to the Internet en masse, complete with mugshots. True, they often warn that arrest doesn't imply guilt, but the fact is that those records are likely indexed and sucked up by third party criminal record aggregators. Meaning that an arrest, even if someone is innocent, could mark someone for life on an employment background check.
Cops tend not to be too bright with an extra helping of vindictiveness -- giving them the power to punish and mark people without trial is a terrible idea. If Google was a good public citizen, it would de-list any law enforcement that show arrest records prior to conviction and also pull ads/listings from any aggregators that scrape the same.
Under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, in the UK lesser offences are indeed 'forgotten' in many important respects after a period of time (they become 'spent'). For example, it's illegal for most employers to ask about spent offences, and the offenders have the support of the law in lying about them if they are asked anyway. I don't see that this is particularly out of step with that principle.
... that in the UK, there is a law on the Statute, the "Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, 1974", which allows for past crimes to be "forgotten" when the convicted criminal has both served time adjudged and shown - through a period of time in which no relapses have taken place - that they have put their criminal past behind them.
Although I don't know the specifics of the case in question, the argument offered by the former convict seems quite compelling: they have served their time, paid their debt to society, and even have a law of the land there to back them up... only to have this undermined by a web search engine.
This doesn't in any way suggest that Google or Bing or Duck Duck Go would be deliberately flouting such laws, merely that the internet has a long memory.
However, there are some interesting aspects to this. For example, Google is just an indexing system; it's possible that a search will merely find references to old newspaper articles covering the story of a conviction and sentencing for a crime long past. This takes us back on to the circular treadmill of the argument used when discussing things like bittorrent and P2P file sharing sites - is a search engine breaking the law for pointing at pirated content? Is a search engine breaking the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act for pointing to articles covering long-paid-for crimes?
One of the most difficult adjustments that we're having to make as an "internet society" is the fact that the internet never forgets. As aspects of the digital realm form such embedded parts of our lives, the way that the internet functions [with things like data retention] is going to become only more important, only more sensitive.
In this particular case I wonder if the plaintiff - the former criminal - was interested merely in removing the conviction from search engines, or in reminding content publishers of their obligations under the same law? It's obvious why the plaintiff would target Google - the engine acts like a gateway and aggregator to the content, but Google will only spider and index what is already there. What about the ultimate publishers?
No easy answers here...