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EU Court of Justice said that search engine operators must take every measure available to remove access to links to outdated or irrelevant information about a person on request.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.

Comments

The Right to Rewrite History

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:The Right to Rewrite History

[Shaitan]

Oh I support the idea we should take an honest look at ourselves and adjust our behavior but I don't agree that we should be looking at each others behavior. Society is also ruthless and unforgiving, it will always be true that many things are indefensible to those who weren't there. The only saving grace is that society has a short memory. Technology is transforming a thankfully short memory into an eternal one.

Re:The Right to Rewrite History

[AmiMoJo]

Not at all. You just tell Google your name and the information that is not relevant any more, and they remove all results containing it from searches of your name, forever. You don't have to submit individual URLs or re-submit periodically, they do it automatically.

Re:The Right to Rewrite History

[ShanghaiBill]

Those things are matters of criminal record

The EU "right to be forgotten" includes criminal records, and other public records. The UK's RTBF also includes criminal convictions.

Right to be forgotten

Re:The Right to Rewrite History

[Shaitan]

I do not see any blanket rules of that sort on the page just some offenses. But as a father and protective parent, I still have to acknowledge giving up the sex offender registry to get rid of the massive recidivism caused by effectively making offenders unemployable in any sort of real job after they get out is probably a fair trade off. You do the time, you are no longer guilty of the crime.

Re:The Right to Rewrite History

[ShanghaiBill]

One solution to the sex offender registry is MORE information, rather than less. One guy may be on the list for raping a four year old. Another guy may be on it for urinating in a public park. Perhaps we should distinguish between these.

A man in my neighborhood is on the list for having sex with his wife. At the time he was 18 and she was 15. Her parents disapproved of the relationship, and called the police. He accepted a plea bargain without understanding the consequences. They got married when she turned 18. Their son and my son are best friends. He must stay 300 yards from any school, can't go to PTA meetings, and has never met his son's teachers. Branding this guy for life is idiotic, since he is no danger to anyone, but that doesn't mean that the registry should be abolished for real predators.

Re:The Right to Rewrite History

[ShanghaiBill]

Or we could go back to the original logic of having been punished erasing the crime and people having a second chance.

We tried that. The problem is that if a bank robber robs another bank, the bank is out a bit of money. If a child rapist rapes another child, another life is destroyed.

The problem is equating child rape with public urination. That is what our current system does.

One of the dumbest laws

[jwymanm]

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.

Re:One of the dumbest laws

[grumpy-cowboy]

+1 Like the first post said : The Right to Rewrite History. Nice Orwellian future.

Re:One of the dumbest laws

[SysPig]

We do not live in a binary world. Shades of grey exist everywhere, and this is no exception. The debate should be over where to draw the line, and who gets to draw it - not whether it should exist at all.

Let's take the examples you provide. Which of them allows millions of devices, operated by billions of people or with complete autonomy, to access everything associated with your name in seconds? Even this information is not equal to your examples. The source of much of it is near impossible to determine, the accuracy far more suspect and in many cases it's impossible to change that which is in error.

You know what else has existed in nearly the entire history of man? Privacy by obscurity. The fact that information could have been accessed doesn't mean it was. There was never a need to codify such things, as the level of current intrusion couldn't possibly have been predicted by anyone until relatively recent times - after which, it was too late.

Re:One of the dumbest laws

[bill_mcgonigle]

Watch out for Orwellian language.

A right is something that requires inaction on others' parts. Don't suppress your speech, don't beat you up for your religion, etc.

A privilege is something that requires action on others' parts. Give you welfare, help you get into college, etc.

Here we have "the right to be forgotten" which requires search engines to take positive, perhaps even Herculean steps. That's clearly a privilege and when you have people calling privileges rights, you can bet that they're up to no good.

BTW, Five Eyes will still have search access - you just won't be able to also search and find what they can find. It's pretty easy to see how incentives align on this one.

Legislation with unintended side effects

[bradley13]

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...

Contrary to settled law and practice

[davecb]

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

Re:What is a "Global law"?

[rickb928]

GDPR.

If your website is accessed form the EU, expect them to demand you obey. How they enforce that will still end up hurting you, no matter who does the enforcement.

Or choose your elected officials more carefully, with an eye towards those who will defend you and not just talk about it.

Yes you have

[aepervius]

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.