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Google Wins Round in Fight Against Global Right To Be Forgotten (bloomberg.com)
Google shouldn't have to apply the so-called right to be forgotten globally, an adviser to the EU's top court said in a boost for the U.S. giant's fight with a French privacy regulator over where to draw the line between privacy and freedom of speech. From a report: While backing Google's stance, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar of the EU Court of Justice said that search engine operators must take every measure available to remove access to links to outdated or irrelevant information about a person on request. The Luxembourg-based court follows such advice in a majority of its final rulings, which normally come a few months after the opinions.
Google has been fighting efforts led by France's privacy watchdog to globalize the right to be forgotten, which was created by the EU court in a landmark ruling in 2014, without defining how, when and where search engine operators should remove links. This has triggered a wave of legal challenges. The Alphabet unit currently removes such links EU-wide and since 2016 it also restricts access to such information on non-EU Google sites when accessed from the EU country where the person concerned by the information is located -- referred to as geo-blocking. This approach was backed by Szpunar.
Google has been fighting efforts led by France's privacy watchdog to globalize the right to be forgotten, which was created by the EU court in a landmark ruling in 2014, without defining how, when and where search engine operators should remove links. This has triggered a wave of legal challenges. The Alphabet unit currently removes such links EU-wide and since 2016 it also restricts access to such information on non-EU Google sites when accessed from the EU country where the person concerned by the information is located -- referred to as geo-blocking. This approach was backed by Szpunar.
Only the wealthy can afford to employ the right to be forgotten, because it's a game of whack-a-mole. Consequently people with money will wind up looking "cleaner" than everyone else, and we won't move society forward by taking an honest look at our actual behavior and adjusting our perceptions of norms accordingly.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why people support these scum by purchasing and using shitty Android phones is beyond me, there really is no excuse for using Android in 2019 if you have even a slight pretense of being an ethical human.
I never quite understood inventing rights like this. How far does it extend? If I write something in my diary about something stupid a classmate did when he was a kid, can the classmate demand I erase it?
What about if I tell the story to my wife?
What if I write about the story in a letter to another friend?
If I write a blog post about it that my ten followers see?
If I write a memoir about it in my autobiography?
Where do you draw the line? And how do you enforce this without taking away my right to truthfully share information?
IMO, the right to be forgotten doesn't exist.
One company should not have this kind of power. The robber barons of the 19th Century only dreamed of this kind of power.
Google must be broken up. Not into two pieces but into a thousand.
Corporatism != Free Market
EU laws only apply to the EU and US laws only apply to the US.
If people in other countries want the right to be forgotten codified in their laws, they need to create those laws to apply in their jurisdictions.
I wouldn't want European gun laws to apply here in the US and I'm quite sure Europeans don't want our gun laws/protections over there.
Do you have the right to be forgotten in books? In movies? In news stories? In schools? In songs? Since the history of man.. What the hell is EU thinking. This shouldn't even be a thing.
Well I guess this means it's going to be possible to get the "forgotten" info using a VPN with a server located outside of EU and other asshole countries (my own included) that require the enforcement of this bullshit "right".
When information is shared on the Internet it's too late, you'll never be able to completely remove it. Imagine trying to tell the public to disregard say the election of a politician or something "important" that happened in history. And google is just a search engine. It's like being upset at someone and trying to force your local phone company to de-list them from the white pages. Google despite their vast size is NOT the Internet. It's one of the most powerful search engines and tools you can use to find stuff on the Internet. The sooner people understand this the better.
The "right to be forgotten" is typical of legislation where no one thought about the side effects.
First, it only applies to particular search engines. There is no general applicability. In particular, the source information remains online - it just can't be found through Google or Bing.
Second, in attempting to have this right applied globally, EU courts are setting an excellent precedent to have other countries determine what content EU citizens can see. After all, if censorship flows in one direction, it will flow in the other. Does the EU really want Saudia Arabia determining what web content is allowable in the EU?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
...worldwide for the Saudis & corporations, e.g. BP & RIAA, on selected news items, topics, people, etc.. Why are they so opposed to doing it for EU citizens?
Everyone loses.
In most of the world, if a court says to, for example, "seal" someone's juvenile records, it doesn't expect newspapers to erase them from their archives, but merely to not cite (old form of "link to") them in current publications. Changing to that would be a huge change in settled law, and would cause angry litigation over censorship.
in the original Spanish case, Mario Costeja González specifically asked for the old, obsolete articles to be added to the site's ROBOTS.TXT file, which is the modern equivalent.
As I submitted to the Canadian privacy commission, this is what sites in Canada should do, is within the powers of the commissioner to order, and has no special cost to innocent third parties such as Google.
Canadian legal sites like CanLII (the Canadian Legal Information Institute) already do this. See https://leaflessca.wordpress.c...
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
...and I demand my right to be forgotten.
FTFY.
Frankly, I keep repeating myself but here we go: until recentely, facts were not easily researchable. And so fact could be forgotten. Because to find out those facts you had to spend QUITE a bit of research. e.g. if you had a bankruptcy, and search for a job, the guy there hiring you could not find with a few keystroke you HAD that bankruptcy. If he wanted research you he had to hire somebody and pay hard cash to have that research done. Essentially baring important financial job or secret service nigh nobody did that. EFFECTIVELY society forgot by having fact hard to be found. Google changed that. All taboo, all stuff you did are never forgotten and saved forever easy to access at a keystroke. That is especially true if your name is not common. That law changed that, by having certain type of facts pertaining to normal persons (public persona do not benefit from that law) havign a right to be deindexed, forcing you (at least in the spirit of the law) into a old fashionned research. That is also WHY the law pertain to serarch engine only ! Because while you have a right to not be indexed, you have no right to bury the facts. Thus the original source are not touched.
A society which cannot forget is a merciless society , one where you can't have freedom : freedom means touching the side of the road, not the middle. But the side of the road is WHERE the taboo are and people have the most to lose. A society which do not forget is a society suppressing everybody. Think of branding/tattooing an A on your forehead so that everybody know you had adulterous relationship : this is essentially what google do in some case.
You want to live in a society where you are branded forever ? most of us do not want. And before you trot out the crime side : in EU we are strong on rehabilitation, and frankly you can change and have a second chance once you paid your debt. But this is nigh impossible if once your anmed is typed in google the first link is what your crime was. Or worst what you were accused of , but never condemened for , or even acquitted. Chance is nobody will look at the link on the second page showing your acquital.
Once you think about it, the law is not stupid, but reestablishing a status quo we had a few decade ago, and it is a good law to give people second chance. Now naturally you are into crushing people at their first fault , even if acquitted, and never allowing them to stand up again, well sure the law may sound stupid. But you better hope that you never get accused of something falsely, or never have a financial problem which stay in google or anything which may bring people to look down at you. If you do, I hope that somebody do a nelson's "HAHA" pointing finger at you.
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