Users also make the final decision as to what content they pay for, and if Netflix suddenly stops working in their browser they'll be inclined to ditch Netflix.
So Mozilla could help ensure that happens, hence preventing Netflix from growing, hence forcing Netflix to drop the whole stupid thing in the first place.
Market pressures are a two way street, Mozilla should be using them to achieve their stated mission statement, not to go against it.
Except this ruling was in Europe, where such an endowment upon corporations simply does not exist, so the GP is exactly right in relation to this case and these laws.
Google does not simply hold just a link, it holds copies of data as well, hence why it provides snippets alongside search results and that's the problem - holding that data, which is, by law, classed as personal data, means they are themselves holding the personal data, and that makes them fall foul of the law.
Of course I'm not trying to argue the rights or wrongs of that but it's outright incorrect to say they just have links to the data, and that they don't have the data - of course they do, that's how they provide snippets in search results.
The interpretation of the law wasn't poor at all, it was the standard well tested and correct interpretation that has been applied for years. You may argue the law is poor, but there was nothing wrong with it's interpretation and Google absolutely does hold (and provide) a copy of the data.
Yes, they would've ruled in the same way as the law on which this case was based on is relatively old (directive in 1995, implementations from member nations in about 1997 and onwards) and has been used many times. The difference this time was it was applied to Google on the public internet- normally it involves disputes between individuals and companies in a more private setting, such as a company sending someone junk mail because they've held onto their personal details for far too many years after they've had anything to do with them.
One of the misconceptions of the case is that this has something to do with the right to be forgotten law. The right to be forgotten law isn't yet, it's still a proposal. This ruling was based on existing data protection law that places explicit limits on the duration such data can be "processed".
This law is already used by organisations such as credit rating agencies who can only take public information such as county court judgements in the UK against people who have failed to service their debts and hold it for a maximum of 7 years (again in the UK, may vary slightly elsewhere in Europe).
It's worth reading the actual law in question (which again isn't what this ruling is based upon), a recent update is available direct from the horses mouth here:
It's quite explicit, such as one provision allowing individuals who were children at the time of posting something embarrassing on the internet to request it be deleted once in adulthood. It's not even finished yet, but it's certainly not the document people here think it is.
Incorrect. Direct from the EU's pages on the upcoming law related to this case:
"The right to be forgotten is of course not an absolute right. There are cases where there is a legitimate reason to keep data in a data base. The archives of a newspaper are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right to re-write or erase history. Neither must the right to be forgotten take precedence over freedom of expression or freedom of the media. The right to be forgotten includes an explicit provision that ensures it does not encroach on the freedom of expression and information."
"You may have a "right" to be forgotten under certain circumstances, but it shouldn't be up to Google to interpret those circumstances."
The problem arises because the following are true:
1) All companies in Europe are bound by existing data protection law
2) This ruling was based on existing data protection law, NOT the EU's proposed right to be forgotten law
3) The existing data protection law has been around for over a decade, just that until this case no one with an operation as big, complex, and so blatantly public facing as Google has had it applied to them so there's been no fuss made of it
4) The EU's proposed right to be forgotten law is actually a general update to data protection laws intended to clarify things for the mobile/social age. Again, it's a separate thing to that which was applied in this case.
So what we have is everyone getting caught with their pants down, existing law being applied to a major internet player, but just a bit too soon for the provisions of the new law that would be easier on them to be available. The actual directive that contains the right to be forgotten will actually make things better than the existing law because it actually provides clarity and answers to pretty much all of the concerns people have raised here.
It's worth reading the following if you're interested:
A choice quote, that will probably shock those who think the EU is out to re-write history because the only information they've had to date is from scaremongering sensationalists:
"The right to be forgotten is of course not an absolute right. There are cases where there is a legitimate reason to keep data in a data base. The archives of a newspaper are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right to re-write or erase history. Neither must the right to be forgotten take precedence over freedom of expression or freedom of the media. The right to be forgotten includes an explicit provision that ensures it does not encroach on the freedom of expression and information."
Hopefully this clears things up - long story short, the existing law is actually WORSE than the directive containing the right to be forgotten law. The directive also includes explicit provisions to ensure the law does not encroach on freedom of expression and that it's entirely about protecting personal data in the face of fairly legitimate concerns.
It's easy to forget in the face of summaries that cherry pick stuff like paedophiles, and dodgy doctors that this law was as much influenced by the NSA's mass surveillance that we were all upset about what feels like only 5 minutes ago. It's as much to ensure that the US (and UK et. al.) understands that there will be consequences to using corporations to harvest personal data and build a global surveillance network based upon that. It gives companies like Google the ammunition they need to take to the US government and say look, we can't just hand you this data because that then puts us in breach of European data law. It gives them ammunition in their arguments against the US government's excessive over reach and abuse of secret courts and so forth.
Ideally people would read the link above before commenting further, but I wont count on it. Some people are too interested in feigning outrage to give a shit about the facts of the ruling and the law in question.
"If you wouldn't post strawmen arguments, I wouldn't have to waste my time calling them as such."
Strawman.
"I refuted them in that I showed they misrepresented my argument. You haven't shown otherwise."
Strawman.
"Well duh, of course the index is to allow for searches. That Google allows searches of the public Web isn't in dispute. That they are a commercial entity also isn't in dispute. The newspaper that is allowed to publish the so-called public record is also a commercial entity that I presume sells ads and does all the nefarious-sounding things that you make profit sound like. The difference is that one is allowed to publish this so-called public information, and another is not allowed to index to it. We've been over this."
Strawman.
"I didn't avoid it. I correctly labeled it as a strawman, and I explicitly told you that what's under concern here is not a secret, but a matter of public record. Try reading the responses and responding to the actual argument. You can't argue this is a secret when one site is allowed to publish it on the Web. It is then absurd to compare this to any unpublished, private secrets that I may hold."
Strawman.
"Since you can't make a cogent argument, and I'm repeating myself a lot, I'm done here."
As I said before, this word isn't a get out clause for situations of "Shit, I can't rationally refute that point". You don't get to just shout it and it makes everything that's wrong about your understanding better. It's not a get out of jail free card when you realise you've backed yourself into a corner and can no longer justify your point.
"It's simply being indexed. Your claim is that because the information is about a person, even though it is "public" it shouldn't be allowed to be indexed."
But it's not simply being indexed is it? It's being made searchable, it's being used for analytics, it's being used to sell ads. You really think Google exists purely for the public good? Of course not, it's a profit making organisation and this is it's profit bread and butter.
You've avoided my question as to why someone should not retrospectively be afforded the right to privacy if someone has had their information publicised against their will even though you presumably believe you have the right to keep stuff secret. I'd genuinely like to know your justification as that's all this law enforces - affording privacy equally and not allowing Google to be a tool used to bypass privacy protections that everyone else is afforded. It's a bit like saying burglary is illegal, but if you've already had your stuff stolen, well, tough shit, you don't get to have it back.
Is the law perfect? no, none ever are. But you cannot rationally dispute that there is some sense to the law in terms of genuine cases where people deserve the right to have their privacy restored without also arguing that no one should ever be allowed any secrets. It's hypocritical nonsense.
"The information is remaining in the public record. Google just can't help people find it.
Right so I'm not actually wrong then am I? You're agreeing with me that the case clearly allows public record to remain, but commercial use beyond that not to. Again, this is exactly as it's always been.
In fact, the right to be forgotten law isn't actually law yet, this particular case is exactly what I've been describing - the same law applied to everyone else now applied to internet companies anyway.
"Another terrible analogy. Google is not holding or processing financial data. Do you really not understand how an index works?"
I know exactly how indexing works on a technical level, but "data processing" is a specific term recognised in law and what Google is doing is classed as data processing. See here:
It's pretty clear that Google is taking the data and processing it to produce search results based on it. That is like it or not, a form of processing as recognised in law.
"Do you believe that it would be illegal for a library to have a catalog of newspapers with an index that references the La Vanguardia article about this guy? And that it makes sense that they would have to destroy their index so that no visitors could find the article?"
Well no, because libraries are not:
a) Processing the data b) Using the data for profit c) Are recognised as an institution for storage of public record
No combination of these is breached by libraries, whereas they are by Google, and that's the problem.
"I openly admit I am not an expert in EU data protection law."
And therein lies the problem. Look I sympathise with your argument, I really do, but I do understand European data protection law very well, I have to because I work at an organisation that does store extremely sensitive data and has long has these laws applied to it.
"Your "Internet companies don't want to be follow the law" strawman is off-base. Trying to treat an Internet search engine like a credit agency for purposes of data collection concern is illogical."
You only think this is illogical precisely because you don't understand European data protection law (or perhaps data protection law in general) and the businesses I describe. Personal data is a well defined thing in law, and so is data processing, unfortunately whatever you may or may not think of the law the fact is that the data was clearly defined as personal data, and Google clearly was processing it as defined in law, and Google clearly did not fall under any of the exemptions (e.g. law enforcement).
I actually do not think you understand how credit reference agencies work, because this is almost exactly the same thing. What they do is gather personal data in public record such as the data mentioned in this case - data on bankruptcies and so forth, and make that searchable, so that 3rd party organisations can perform a search on individuals and acquire this data to perform credit scoring and so forth. I'm sure now I've explained the way in which they work you can see the similarities no?
Effectively the differences are only legal, and in specificity. Google is a generic search engine that can find this and other data, credit reference bureaus are specific search engines that find just this type of data. Credit reference bureaus also only allow, due to legal restrictions a search to be performed at the behest of an end user (or for a handful of exceptions, again, e.g. law enforcement) and may not return (or even store) public data that is deemed to be old enough to be irrelevant. Credit reference agencies would probably love to be able to just make this available at will to anyone doing a search because there'd be far more business for them, but the law doesn't allow it, so why should Google be exempt without any official exemption in law?
Perhaps now, with an explanation and example as to existing companies that hav
"Your analogy is way off the mark. This case (and other examples that have made the news) are about citizens who wish for factual but embarrassing parts of their history to be harder to find. Facts that are considered public record. Facts that they have no standing to actually remove"
Well yes they do have standing to remove them, because that's what happened. Even without this ruling and the proposed right to be forgotten laws non-internet based companies are already held to this standard. You can hold such data for public record but you cannot make commercial use of this outside of the purpose of public record beyond a reasonable timeframe, which is what Google is doing. A credit reference agency could no longer hold the data in question because it's already past the period in which such companies can process this data.
"Seriously, you are arguing that this guy's failure to pay taxes and house repossession should remain as public data, that some businesses (newspapers) should be able to publish and index the information, but that others should have no right to index the fact that the data exists elsewhere."
Yes, exactly as it works for non-internet companies. No company can for example take this information and build a database about people who have failed to pay taxes if the indiscretion was beyond a certain time ago. That's already against the law under European data protection laws. Internet companies just believe they're a special case whom the law doesn't apply to because "it's on the internet".
People like you seem oblivious to the way data protection law already works in Europe and many other places across the globe. You're arguing against laws that have been around for almost two decades for non-internet companies. What makes internet companies special in terms of not having to play by the same rules everyone else has to?
You can criticise scientology because it's an organisation, you can criticise the leaders because they're acting as public figures in leading that organisation.
Again this is not new stuff, this sort of thing has long been established for the press already but the press have not been held back in reporting about these things.
"You can't defend one right by taking away another."
So what happens if two rights are diametrically opposed? The right to privacy is in direct conflict with the right to free speech.
This has always been the problem with rights, sometimes they do conflict and then you have to figure out a resolution. If you push towards absolute free speech and view any censorship as bad then you eliminate the right to privacy, if you push towards privacy then you cripple free speech. It's therefore a nonsense to pretend the two rights can exist absolutely intact so the suggestion you can't defend one right by taking away another is nonsense - one has to be restricted in balance with the other, there's simply no escaping that.
As I said to another guy, if you think privacy has no place if it risks infringing on absolute free speech then will you give me every single personal detail about your life? if not then why not? that's censorship. You probably agree that you would like many of your personal details to remain private. Why would you deny others that right? You seem to be suggesting that it's about whether you're unfortunate enough to get your details publicised - that's an easy argument to make, until you're the victim.
No big names are going to be able to make use of this because it'll just create the Streisand effect which will in itself make the whole thing public interest. The only thing this is useful for is some teenage kid being bullied towards suicide getting embarrassing picture of them removed and Joe Average who fucked up long ago wanting the opportunity to leave that mistake behind them and so on and so forth.
"Yet you hold that this same "public record" information cannot be indexed by a search engine."
But it's just not being indexed, unless you get the definition of data processor as in data protection law then I don't know how else I can explain to you why this is different. There's a specific legal definition, and Google falls foul of it. It's not a farce, a farce would be allowing internet companies like Google to keep being a special case that does not have to adhere to data protection law whilst everyone else in the real world does.
"And really, censorship is the one of the worst fallacies on Slashdot?"
Yes really. It's used like a word that we're automatically supposed to say "Oh well, Reanex said it was censorship so he automatically wins the argument and is right". Yes that's a fucking fallacy, and a very tired one on Slashdot.
"Gee, that freedom of speech, so unimportant, hardly worth consideration! "
And there you go with the fallacy again. Freedom of speech isn't unimportant, but there's not a single jurisdiction on the planet that doesn't impose restrictions on it. The problem is you're arbitrarily ignoring existing restrictions and saying any new ones are automatically wrong. Why? What makes your restrictions right and everyone else's wrong? It's not like freedom of speech has ever been an absolute and is now suddenly being altered, it's just that an existing long established restriction (i.e. limitation of speech that breaches an individuals privacy with no public interest defence) is being clarified as relevant to internet companies despite them thinking they're different, and it's not like there is some pre-existing grand dictation from some power up high about what is and isn't acceptable. It's arbitrary and no one person gets to dictate the value of it or what it should include - society does that, and that's exactly what is happening here. This law is actually very popular amongst the general public because people value privacy over and above the right to breach privacy.
So it's not even a new type of censorship, it's just clarification that yes, the law applies to everyone. Your censorship argument is pretty weak and as I said, it's populist nonsense. You're crying censorship under the pretence it's an absolute that is now only just being violated, it's not, it never has been.
"See, now this is one of the worst arguments on Slashdot. Your classic strawman."
So I guess you can't actually justify it then given that you're dodging the bullet with another classic cry of "strawman" without apparently understanding what that even means? If you knew what it meant then you'd spot the almost comical irony in your use of it - your strawman is a strawman, designed to distract from the fact that you couldn't answer the question. If it wasn't born of stupidity it'd be comic genius.
Your argument thus far boils down to the idea that freedom of speech trumps all, your view must therefore logically be that no one should have a secret card pin, password, non-public finances, private sexuality, private contact details and so on. If I ask you for all these things will you post them? if not then why are you engaging in censorship? If you think that censorship is okay for you in this case, in refusing to make every detail I have asked for about your life public then why is it not okay for someone else who has had those details posted against their will publicly to similarly censor?
I really don't think you've thought your argument through unless you can justify why your details should remain secret, but others should not also enjoy that right if it's been taken away from them against their will.
Okay, maybe I wasn't explicit enough so I'll rephrase the point I was intending to make.
The original copy in public record is not altered, not changed, not removed, it stays the same. The copy Google takes is not public record because it is using the information in a manner that involves further processing and functionality that stretches beyond merely acting as a public record (taking a snippet, making it searchable, selling ads against it, doing analytics etc.).
Well it's tricky, as I've said to others who have represented such cases it ultimately would have to come down to a decision in the courts as to whether the public interest in the information is more important than the individuals right to privacy.
If you have continuing evidence of the issue and you're reporting on it then you could claim a public interest defence, but if it's something that happened 10 years ago then there's a question as to whether you should be able to keep trying to ruin her life when she may well have changed. I don't know the intricacies of your case so I can't comment on it, but you can see my point I hope?
Also it depends what information you include about her and whether it falls under the definition of personal information. If you're naming her along with her personal address and so forth you may fall fowl of it being personal information and have to fall back on the public interest defence. If she's acting as a business though in her referrals then you'd be perfectly safe anyway because you'd be commenting on her business and only providing her business details.
There's always going to be some tricky cases, and there's always going to be straightforward ones that don't need court resolution, but as I say, for those that do, that's what the court is for (the real court, not the court of Slashdot:)).
I'm not a judge so I can't pass judgement on that, but I'd wager a judge would disagree with you based on the argument that it's in the interests of the welfare and wellbeing of the public to know if someone has killed multiple people in the past.
It's about balancing the rights of the individual against the rights of the public - is it more important for the individual to be given a second chance, or more important for the public to know that although the person has now been through a rehabilitation programme, they do have a history of killing multiple people? The issue is that if they do still have an urge to kill and the public isn't aware and they make a kill then obviously the public could've avoided that if they'd known about the danger of being near them. To say there's no risk to the public we'd have to be sure that rehabilitation has been successful, and there is not, as far as I'm aware, any 100% sure way of knowing whether that's the case.
I agree it's not simple but again, this is what the judiciary are for, certainly we, here, on Slashdot, can only give personal opinions which is ultimately meaningless, especially if we disagree and start trying to argue who is right and who is wrong:)
Yep exactly. As I pointed out in another post credit reference agencies are the perfect example as they've long been living by the standards Google is now being asked to because they were historically one of those with a data protection act exemption.
The problem is a new one because historically most businesses have had absolutely fuck all reason to gather people's embarrassing data and the data protection act made it clear they had no right to as well. The law hasn't played catch up on the internet, but credit reference agencies have long been able to gather personal data without the permission of the data subject however, as you point out, they can still only hold public data like CCJs and pass it on to their clients (i.e. banks doing credit checks) for I believe 7 years in the UK, even though it'll be in public record forever.
As I've been saying all along this isn't a new thing, the only thing that's new is that the law has been clarified to make it clear to companies like Google who think they're special and above the law that they're not. They've been riding a wave of "user generated content" and "automatically generated content" to try and pretend that as a company that somehow exempts them from data protection law, which is a complete farce.
If I'm honest I've really tried to avoid mobile development. I worked at a company for a while that did a lot of it and the bandwagon jumping hipster types on that side of the industry just drove me mad. It's a section of the development world that is still undergoing a lot of upheaval even now in terms of toolchains and so forth and there's a lot of fly-by-night types who have no idea what they're doing making a mess of things. I suspect it'll calm down eventually, but honestly I've never been too hung up on insisting on a one solution fits all type scenario unless the offerings are really really good. Maybe Mono is a decent option for mobile now, I've not been following it, but without evaluating it going on my now a couple of years out of date knowledge of the mobile world I'd probably just be inclined to write portable C/C++ libraries with the shared functionality it and then write a specific UI to consume that for each device. I've just not seen many successful toolchains that manage to pull off writing cross platform UIs particularly well, especially when the standard UI varies so much.
Swing and JavaFX and so forth vs. WPF comes to mind for example. As great as cross platform Java is, it just can't compete with writing a native Windows UI using WPF for example. I believe Qt is a counter-example of this sort of thing though that is actually pretty decent, but it's been many years since I touched it. In fact, it looks like Qt has a specific mobile version also, so maybe C++ with Qt would be an equally good or better answer to Mono on mobile? I don't know, I'm out of my depth without further research:)
You're missing the subtle difference - newspapers make money by establishing public record. Google makes money off of re-use of public record.
If Google was establishing public record it would be protected, but it's not, it's merely re-using it.
Fundamentally newspapers produce a historic log as time goes by - Google doesn't do this, it represents a pretty much live state of the internet.
It does beg the question whether Google could work round the problem by, rather than deleting links, creating a separate list of links at the bottom of the page saying something like "These are historic search records, and may no longer represent uptodate or relevant information" for sure, but I don't know what use that would be. Perhaps that would at least keep the cry censorship crowd happy whilst also making it clear that the information is not in any way current though and shouldn't be taken as such. I have no idea if it would satisfy the courts though because as I say this is mostly to try and align things with the various data protection acts around which themselves make it illegal to hold personal data longer than necessary (unless it falls under one of the exceptions).
Newspapers report on and record current events, they're a record of facts based on the perspective of the paper in question, and they can be sued for libel if they get it wrong and forced to print corrections.
In contrast, Google has none of this. Would your preference instead be that Google's search facilities are declared public record but it can be sued for libel for everything wrong it indexes about someone? How else do you suggest dealing with incorrect or irrelevant information that is harmful to an individual that is prominent enough to cause them real actual problems?
Okay there is censorship going on, but there's always censorship going on. Using censorship as a go to argument against everything is one of the worst fallacies Slashdot is prone to. There isn't a society on earth that is censorship free, not even the US. As much as some people like to scream this fantasy that they live in a censorship free world and the world would be perfect without censorship it's a nonsense, sometimes it's a necessary evil. The problem with censorship isn't that it exists, it's how it's used. Saying something is censorship doesn't automatically make it bad, being able to censor your troops ability to blab their tactics and positions to the enemy via Twitter is a good thing. So you don't get to magically win an argument by saying "OMG CENSORSHIP" you need to explain why this particular instance of censorship is bad. You need to explain, given an understanding of the law in question - such as the intricacies of the public interest defence and so forth what the problem is exactly with it.
Unless you can come back and tell me why Google should be able to profit from spreading false information and have no obligation to correct or remove then you don't have an argument. What is exceptional about internet companies? everyone else is bound by such law in one way or another, what makes a company like Google special that it should be above the law on issues like this? Again, would you prefer that Google is instead just subject to libel laws like print media and so forth? I know I wouldn't. This law is far far better.
We don't, but we're also not erasing all information from the internet, it'll still be available in papers as public record.
This isn't really even a new problem as the internet is a new thing - plenty of politicians have had their life history dug up and plastered over the papers long before it was ever recorded on the internet or the internet was ever available.
It doesn't matter what my personal morals are or aren't, public interest is a thing that has been defined over the years, and that is an example that would fit into the existing legal definition.
So if you're trying to enter a debate about "Who am I to dictate public interest" or whatever, then you're out of luck. See here for more information:
All I ever really took issue with was your suggestion that 4.0 applications don't work with 4.5 and the implication that you could run into problems with compatibility issues. I was merely pointing out that they share the same runtime anyway, and it's merely the library versions that differ.
I think if there's one thing.NET handles well it's versioning, much of that is because it was built from the outset with the issues of the earlier DLL hell problems that plagued many older Windows technologies. The framework was design from the outset to cope with this and that's why I took issue with the suggestions that it has versioning problems.
I agree things get more complicated with mono, but it's quite hard to break things on Windows unless you specifically go out to do so and as a primarily Java/C++/.NET developer I've actually seen more compatibility issues (though still rare in the grand scheme of things of course) with Java over the years, with C++ obviously being the worst out the lot for the simple reason you have to do pretty much everything yourself.
The biggest changes with 4.5 were simply additions, and the things that actually changed tended to be parallel implementations of some LINQ tasks - so for example, if you execute a lambda against every entry in a collection with 1000 elements using a LINQ method it used to just do them sequentially, now it'll automatically parallelise it if the collection is big enough. This is why the 4.5 libraries can retain backwards compatibility with 4.0 - the changes, rather than additions simply optimise what is already there, rather than change it and this is why you shouldn't really see any incompatibility issues between 4.5 and 4.0. The only exception would be if you wrote some 4.0 code that required something broken in 4.0 to be broken that was then fixed in 4.5 but that's bad practice anyway, and it's something Java has suffered in the past too (well, I'd be surprised if there's a major language framework out there that hasn't suffered this at some point).
I wont lie, I do like.NET a lot, but I wasn't having a pop at Java, I have a lot of respect for Java and it's my go to choice for cross-platform projects. I've never used Mono precisely for the reason that I figure if you're going cross platform then you should probably have just used Java (or gone native with C++) in the first place. But if you're using just Windows with no requirement for portability then I think.NET is unquestionably a superior option - you can get more done in less time and better.
I hope that clears up what I was getting at and where I was coming from, as I say I really wasn't gunning for an argument.
They've done a decent job of writing the law so it essentially comes down to a question of weighing public interest against the right to privacy. In difficult cases this would have to be decided in court, but most of the time it's going to be clear cut. There's clearly no public interest in keeping some pictures of a drunken teenager doing something stupid up so that she can be bullied into suicide, but there is clear public interest in recording and reporting on the crimes of serial killers.
A lot of people are claiming this will be used for censorship, it will be used for the great and powerful, but that's really not the case - that sort of person is actually at a distinct disadvantage because once you're famous, then all your misdoings become public interest.
Corporations also have no protection whatsoever, because it's entirely aimed at personal data and that similar covers people slagging each other off on forums - if someone says something about you then it's not personal data (unless it explicitly is of course - i.e. unless you post their address or something).
I'm not directing this at you specifically, but the amount of misunderstanding about this law and case on Slashdot is astounding. Yet it's actually one of the more sanely written technology laws we've had in a long long time - it's far better than the EU's cookie law for example. I think it actually does a great job of fairly balancing privacy against freedom of information.
The problem is a lot of people are assuming none of this has been thought through but it's false. It's easy to ask "what if this", "what if that" but if you actually read the proposals and ruling you'll probably be pleasantly surprised to see that all your concerns have been pretty decently covered. The proposed laws went through a pretty hefty consultation and all of this was addressed when that happens. What we have now is legal direction and remaining proposals that take all this into account and reasonably deal with it.
How is it censorship for use by powerful people? The law doesn't even protect powerful people - the law as it stands weighs the right to privacy against the public interest and politicians are at an inherent disadvantage because the public interest weighs more heavily against them than it does your average Joe on the street.
You'll have a hard time arguing that it's in the public interest that Joe's drug snorting photos from 20 years ago when he was young and stupid should stay up for all to see, but in contrast it's very much in the public interest to keep photos of a politician snorting drugs when they're meant to be enacting policy on drugs and narcotics policing for example.
I'll be clear here - this is explicit in the law, this isn't just my interpretation or speculation, the law is written specifically so this is the case, therefore you're wrong to say it's only for powerful people, on the contrary, it's designed explicitly for the little guy, so that mistakes they made some time ago don't have to ruin their life, whilst making it impossible for dodgy politicians to also take advantage of it. This isn't your typical badly written and easily abused law, it's actually pretty decent. It's one of those rare exceptions.
"The only issue is how the info is used"
That's actually what the law does - it doesn't allow removal of say, newspaper articles. It does however allow the removal of links to such articles. The articles themselves are public record, the links to such articles are just Google making use of public record to make money pointing to the articles.
I'm anti-censorship, but I'm also pro-privacy. This is one of those cases where they've actually got the balance right.
Slashdot Mirror
Users also make the final decision as to what content they pay for, and if Netflix suddenly stops working in their browser they'll be inclined to ditch Netflix.
So Mozilla could help ensure that happens, hence preventing Netflix from growing, hence forcing Netflix to drop the whole stupid thing in the first place.
Market pressures are a two way street, Mozilla should be using them to achieve their stated mission statement, not to go against it.
Except this ruling was in Europe, where such an endowment upon corporations simply does not exist, so the GP is exactly right in relation to this case and these laws.
Google does not simply hold just a link, it holds copies of data as well, hence why it provides snippets alongside search results and that's the problem - holding that data, which is, by law, classed as personal data, means they are themselves holding the personal data, and that makes them fall foul of the law.
Of course I'm not trying to argue the rights or wrongs of that but it's outright incorrect to say they just have links to the data, and that they don't have the data - of course they do, that's how they provide snippets in search results.
The interpretation of the law wasn't poor at all, it was the standard well tested and correct interpretation that has been applied for years. You may argue the law is poor, but there was nothing wrong with it's interpretation and Google absolutely does hold (and provide) a copy of the data.
Well, the BBC listed some examples (some good, some shit) the other day in answer to that very question as to who would want this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/maga...
Yes, they would've ruled in the same way as the law on which this case was based on is relatively old (directive in 1995, implementations from member nations in about 1997 and onwards) and has been used many times. The difference this time was it was applied to Google on the public internet- normally it involves disputes between individuals and companies in a more private setting, such as a company sending someone junk mail because they've held onto their personal details for far too many years after they've had anything to do with them.
One of the misconceptions of the case is that this has something to do with the right to be forgotten law. The right to be forgotten law isn't yet, it's still a proposal. This ruling was based on existing data protection law that places explicit limits on the duration such data can be "processed".
This law is already used by organisations such as credit rating agencies who can only take public information such as county court judgements in the UK against people who have failed to service their debts and hold it for a maximum of 7 years (again in the UK, may vary slightly elsewhere in Europe).
It's worth reading the actual law in question (which again isn't what this ruling is based upon), a recent update is available direct from the horses mouth here:
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-r...
It's quite explicit, such as one provision allowing individuals who were children at the time of posting something embarrassing on the internet to request it be deleted once in adulthood. It's not even finished yet, but it's certainly not the document people here think it is.
Incorrect. Direct from the EU's pages on the upcoming law related to this case:
"The right to be forgotten is of course not an absolute right. There are cases where there is a legitimate reason to keep data in a data base. The archives of a newspaper are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right to re-write or erase history. Neither must the right to be forgotten take precedence over freedom of expression or freedom of the media. The right to be forgotten includes an explicit provision that ensures it does not encroach on the freedom of expression and information."
"You may have a "right" to be forgotten under certain circumstances, but it shouldn't be up to Google to interpret those circumstances."
The problem arises because the following are true:
1) All companies in Europe are bound by existing data protection law
2) This ruling was based on existing data protection law, NOT the EU's proposed right to be forgotten law
3) The existing data protection law has been around for over a decade, just that until this case no one with an operation as big, complex, and so blatantly public facing as Google has had it applied to them so there's been no fuss made of it
4) The EU's proposed right to be forgotten law is actually a general update to data protection laws intended to clarify things for the mobile/social age. Again, it's a separate thing to that which was applied in this case.
So what we have is everyone getting caught with their pants down, existing law being applied to a major internet player, but just a bit too soon for the provisions of the new law that would be easier on them to be available. The actual directive that contains the right to be forgotten will actually make things better than the existing law because it actually provides clarity and answers to pretty much all of the concerns people have raised here.
It's worth reading the following if you're interested:
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-r...
A choice quote, that will probably shock those who think the EU is out to re-write history because the only information they've had to date is from scaremongering sensationalists:
"The right to be forgotten is of course not an absolute right. There are cases where there is a legitimate reason to keep data in a data base. The archives of a newspaper are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right to re-write or erase history. Neither must the right to be forgotten take precedence over freedom of expression or freedom of the media. The right to be forgotten includes an explicit provision that ensures it does not encroach on the freedom of expression and information."
Hopefully this clears things up - long story short, the existing law is actually WORSE than the directive containing the right to be forgotten law. The directive also includes explicit provisions to ensure the law does not encroach on freedom of expression and that it's entirely about protecting personal data in the face of fairly legitimate concerns.
It's easy to forget in the face of summaries that cherry pick stuff like paedophiles, and dodgy doctors that this law was as much influenced by the NSA's mass surveillance that we were all upset about what feels like only 5 minutes ago. It's as much to ensure that the US (and UK et. al.) understands that there will be consequences to using corporations to harvest personal data and build a global surveillance network based upon that. It gives companies like Google the ammunition they need to take to the US government and say look, we can't just hand you this data because that then puts us in breach of European data law. It gives them ammunition in their arguments against the US government's excessive over reach and abuse of secret courts and so forth.
Ideally people would read the link above before commenting further, but I wont count on it. Some people are too interested in feigning outrage to give a shit about the facts of the ruling and the law in question.
"If you wouldn't post strawmen arguments, I wouldn't have to waste my time calling them as such."
Strawman.
"I refuted them in that I showed they misrepresented my argument. You haven't shown otherwise."
Strawman.
"Well duh, of course the index is to allow for searches. That Google allows searches of the public Web isn't in dispute. That they are a commercial entity also isn't in dispute. The newspaper that is allowed to publish the so-called public record is also a commercial entity that I presume sells ads and does all the nefarious-sounding things that you make profit sound like. The difference is that one is allowed to publish this so-called public information, and another is not allowed to index to it. We've been over this."
Strawman.
"I didn't avoid it. I correctly labeled it as a strawman, and I explicitly told you that what's under concern here is not a secret, but a matter of public record. Try reading the responses and responding to the actual argument. You can't argue this is a secret when one site is allowed to publish it on the Web. It is then absurd to compare this to any unpublished, private secrets that I may hold."
Strawman.
"Since you can't make a cogent argument, and I'm repeating myself a lot, I'm done here."
Strawman.
Yay, I win.
"Strawman strawman strawman!"
As I said before, this word isn't a get out clause for situations of "Shit, I can't rationally refute that point". You don't get to just shout it and it makes everything that's wrong about your understanding better. It's not a get out of jail free card when you realise you've backed yourself into a corner and can no longer justify your point.
"It's simply being indexed. Your claim is that because the information is about a person, even though it is "public" it shouldn't be allowed to be indexed."
But it's not simply being indexed is it? It's being made searchable, it's being used for analytics, it's being used to sell ads. You really think Google exists purely for the public good? Of course not, it's a profit making organisation and this is it's profit bread and butter.
You've avoided my question as to why someone should not retrospectively be afforded the right to privacy if someone has had their information publicised against their will even though you presumably believe you have the right to keep stuff secret. I'd genuinely like to know your justification as that's all this law enforces - affording privacy equally and not allowing Google to be a tool used to bypass privacy protections that everyone else is afforded. It's a bit like saying burglary is illegal, but if you've already had your stuff stolen, well, tough shit, you don't get to have it back.
Is the law perfect? no, none ever are. But you cannot rationally dispute that there is some sense to the law in terms of genuine cases where people deserve the right to have their privacy restored without also arguing that no one should ever be allowed any secrets. It's hypocritical nonsense.
"The information is remaining in the public record. Google just can't help people find it.
Right so I'm not actually wrong then am I? You're agreeing with me that the case clearly allows public record to remain, but commercial use beyond that not to. Again, this is exactly as it's always been.
In fact, the right to be forgotten law isn't actually law yet, this particular case is exactly what I've been describing - the same law applied to everyone else now applied to internet companies anyway.
"Another terrible analogy. Google is not holding or processing financial data. Do you really not understand how an index works?"
I know exactly how indexing works on a technical level, but "data processing" is a specific term recognised in law and what Google is doing is classed as data processing. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
It's pretty clear that Google is taking the data and processing it to produce search results based on it. That is like it or not, a form of processing as recognised in law.
"Do you believe that it would be illegal for a library to have a catalog of newspapers with an index that references the La Vanguardia article about this guy? And that it makes sense that they would have to destroy their index so that no visitors could find the article?"
Well no, because libraries are not:
a) Processing the data
b) Using the data for profit
c) Are recognised as an institution for storage of public record
No combination of these is breached by libraries, whereas they are by Google, and that's the problem.
"I openly admit I am not an expert in EU data protection law."
And therein lies the problem. Look I sympathise with your argument, I really do, but I do understand European data protection law very well, I have to because I work at an organisation that does store extremely sensitive data and has long has these laws applied to it.
"Your "Internet companies don't want to be follow the law" strawman is off-base. Trying to treat an Internet search engine like a credit agency for purposes of data collection concern is illogical."
You only think this is illogical precisely because you don't understand European data protection law (or perhaps data protection law in general) and the businesses I describe. Personal data is a well defined thing in law, and so is data processing, unfortunately whatever you may or may not think of the law the fact is that the data was clearly defined as personal data, and Google clearly was processing it as defined in law, and Google clearly did not fall under any of the exemptions (e.g. law enforcement).
I actually do not think you understand how credit reference agencies work, because this is almost exactly the same thing. What they do is gather personal data in public record such as the data mentioned in this case - data on bankruptcies and so forth, and make that searchable, so that 3rd party organisations can perform a search on individuals and acquire this data to perform credit scoring and so forth. I'm sure now I've explained the way in which they work you can see the similarities no?
Effectively the differences are only legal, and in specificity. Google is a generic search engine that can find this and other data, credit reference bureaus are specific search engines that find just this type of data. Credit reference bureaus also only allow, due to legal restrictions a search to be performed at the behest of an end user (or for a handful of exceptions, again, e.g. law enforcement) and may not return (or even store) public data that is deemed to be old enough to be irrelevant. Credit reference agencies would probably love to be able to just make this available at will to anyone doing a search because there'd be far more business for them, but the law doesn't allow it, so why should Google be exempt without any official exemption in law?
Perhaps now, with an explanation and example as to existing companies that hav
"Your analogy is way off the mark. This case (and other examples that have made the news) are about citizens who wish for factual but embarrassing parts of their history to be harder to find. Facts that are considered public record. Facts that they have no standing to actually remove"
Well yes they do have standing to remove them, because that's what happened. Even without this ruling and the proposed right to be forgotten laws non-internet based companies are already held to this standard. You can hold such data for public record but you cannot make commercial use of this outside of the purpose of public record beyond a reasonable timeframe, which is what Google is doing. A credit reference agency could no longer hold the data in question because it's already past the period in which such companies can process this data.
"Seriously, you are arguing that this guy's failure to pay taxes and house repossession should remain as public data, that some businesses (newspapers) should be able to publish and index the information, but that others should have no right to index the fact that the data exists elsewhere."
Yes, exactly as it works for non-internet companies. No company can for example take this information and build a database about people who have failed to pay taxes if the indiscretion was beyond a certain time ago. That's already against the law under European data protection laws. Internet companies just believe they're a special case whom the law doesn't apply to because "it's on the internet".
People like you seem oblivious to the way data protection law already works in Europe and many other places across the globe. You're arguing against laws that have been around for almost two decades for non-internet companies. What makes internet companies special in terms of not having to play by the same rules everyone else has to?
You can criticise scientology because it's an organisation, you can criticise the leaders because they're acting as public figures in leading that organisation.
Again this is not new stuff, this sort of thing has long been established for the press already but the press have not been held back in reporting about these things.
"You can't defend one right by taking away another."
So what happens if two rights are diametrically opposed? The right to privacy is in direct conflict with the right to free speech.
This has always been the problem with rights, sometimes they do conflict and then you have to figure out a resolution. If you push towards absolute free speech and view any censorship as bad then you eliminate the right to privacy, if you push towards privacy then you cripple free speech. It's therefore a nonsense to pretend the two rights can exist absolutely intact so the suggestion you can't defend one right by taking away another is nonsense - one has to be restricted in balance with the other, there's simply no escaping that.
As I said to another guy, if you think privacy has no place if it risks infringing on absolute free speech then will you give me every single personal detail about your life? if not then why not? that's censorship. You probably agree that you would like many of your personal details to remain private. Why would you deny others that right? You seem to be suggesting that it's about whether you're unfortunate enough to get your details publicised - that's an easy argument to make, until you're the victim.
No big names are going to be able to make use of this because it'll just create the Streisand effect which will in itself make the whole thing public interest. The only thing this is useful for is some teenage kid being bullied towards suicide getting embarrassing picture of them removed and Joe Average who fucked up long ago wanting the opportunity to leave that mistake behind them and so on and so forth.
"Yet you hold that this same "public record" information cannot be indexed by a search engine."
But it's just not being indexed, unless you get the definition of data processor as in data protection law then I don't know how else I can explain to you why this is different. There's a specific legal definition, and Google falls foul of it. It's not a farce, a farce would be allowing internet companies like Google to keep being a special case that does not have to adhere to data protection law whilst everyone else in the real world does.
"And really, censorship is the one of the worst fallacies on Slashdot?"
Yes really. It's used like a word that we're automatically supposed to say "Oh well, Reanex said it was censorship so he automatically wins the argument and is right". Yes that's a fucking fallacy, and a very tired one on Slashdot.
"Gee, that freedom of speech, so unimportant, hardly worth consideration! "
And there you go with the fallacy again. Freedom of speech isn't unimportant, but there's not a single jurisdiction on the planet that doesn't impose restrictions on it. The problem is you're arbitrarily ignoring existing restrictions and saying any new ones are automatically wrong. Why? What makes your restrictions right and everyone else's wrong? It's not like freedom of speech has ever been an absolute and is now suddenly being altered, it's just that an existing long established restriction (i.e. limitation of speech that breaches an individuals privacy with no public interest defence) is being clarified as relevant to internet companies despite them thinking they're different, and it's not like there is some pre-existing grand dictation from some power up high about what is and isn't acceptable. It's arbitrary and no one person gets to dictate the value of it or what it should include - society does that, and that's exactly what is happening here. This law is actually very popular amongst the general public because people value privacy over and above the right to breach privacy.
So it's not even a new type of censorship, it's just clarification that yes, the law applies to everyone. Your censorship argument is pretty weak and as I said, it's populist nonsense. You're crying censorship under the pretence it's an absolute that is now only just being violated, it's not, it never has been.
"See, now this is one of the worst arguments on Slashdot. Your classic strawman."
So I guess you can't actually justify it then given that you're dodging the bullet with another classic cry of "strawman" without apparently understanding what that even means? If you knew what it meant then you'd spot the almost comical irony in your use of it - your strawman is a strawman, designed to distract from the fact that you couldn't answer the question. If it wasn't born of stupidity it'd be comic genius.
Your argument thus far boils down to the idea that freedom of speech trumps all, your view must therefore logically be that no one should have a secret card pin, password, non-public finances, private sexuality, private contact details and so on. If I ask you for all these things will you post them? if not then why are you engaging in censorship? If you think that censorship is okay for you in this case, in refusing to make every detail I have asked for about your life public then why is it not okay for someone else who has had those details posted against their will publicly to similarly censor?
I really don't think you've thought your argument through unless you can justify why your details should remain secret, but others should not also enjoy that right if it's been taken away from them against their will.
Okay, maybe I wasn't explicit enough so I'll rephrase the point I was intending to make.
The original copy in public record is not altered, not changed, not removed, it stays the same. The copy Google takes is not public record because it is using the information in a manner that involves further processing and functionality that stretches beyond merely acting as a public record (taking a snippet, making it searchable, selling ads against it, doing analytics etc.).
Hope that makes more sense now.
Well it's tricky, as I've said to others who have represented such cases it ultimately would have to come down to a decision in the courts as to whether the public interest in the information is more important than the individuals right to privacy.
If you have continuing evidence of the issue and you're reporting on it then you could claim a public interest defence, but if it's something that happened 10 years ago then there's a question as to whether you should be able to keep trying to ruin her life when she may well have changed. I don't know the intricacies of your case so I can't comment on it, but you can see my point I hope?
Also it depends what information you include about her and whether it falls under the definition of personal information. If you're naming her along with her personal address and so forth you may fall fowl of it being personal information and have to fall back on the public interest defence. If she's acting as a business though in her referrals then you'd be perfectly safe anyway because you'd be commenting on her business and only providing her business details.
There's always going to be some tricky cases, and there's always going to be straightforward ones that don't need court resolution, but as I say, for those that do, that's what the court is for (the real court, not the court of Slashdot :)).
I'm not a judge so I can't pass judgement on that, but I'd wager a judge would disagree with you based on the argument that it's in the interests of the welfare and wellbeing of the public to know if someone has killed multiple people in the past.
It's about balancing the rights of the individual against the rights of the public - is it more important for the individual to be given a second chance, or more important for the public to know that although the person has now been through a rehabilitation programme, they do have a history of killing multiple people? The issue is that if they do still have an urge to kill and the public isn't aware and they make a kill then obviously the public could've avoided that if they'd known about the danger of being near them. To say there's no risk to the public we'd have to be sure that rehabilitation has been successful, and there is not, as far as I'm aware, any 100% sure way of knowing whether that's the case.
I agree it's not simple but again, this is what the judiciary are for, certainly we, here, on Slashdot, can only give personal opinions which is ultimately meaningless, especially if we disagree and start trying to argue who is right and who is wrong :)
Yep exactly. As I pointed out in another post credit reference agencies are the perfect example as they've long been living by the standards Google is now being asked to because they were historically one of those with a data protection act exemption.
The problem is a new one because historically most businesses have had absolutely fuck all reason to gather people's embarrassing data and the data protection act made it clear they had no right to as well. The law hasn't played catch up on the internet, but credit reference agencies have long been able to gather personal data without the permission of the data subject however, as you point out, they can still only hold public data like CCJs and pass it on to their clients (i.e. banks doing credit checks) for I believe 7 years in the UK, even though it'll be in public record forever.
As I've been saying all along this isn't a new thing, the only thing that's new is that the law has been clarified to make it clear to companies like Google who think they're special and above the law that they're not. They've been riding a wave of "user generated content" and "automatically generated content" to try and pretend that as a company that somehow exempts them from data protection law, which is a complete farce.
If I'm honest I've really tried to avoid mobile development. I worked at a company for a while that did a lot of it and the bandwagon jumping hipster types on that side of the industry just drove me mad. It's a section of the development world that is still undergoing a lot of upheaval even now in terms of toolchains and so forth and there's a lot of fly-by-night types who have no idea what they're doing making a mess of things. I suspect it'll calm down eventually, but honestly I've never been too hung up on insisting on a one solution fits all type scenario unless the offerings are really really good. Maybe Mono is a decent option for mobile now, I've not been following it, but without evaluating it going on my now a couple of years out of date knowledge of the mobile world I'd probably just be inclined to write portable C/C++ libraries with the shared functionality it and then write a specific UI to consume that for each device. I've just not seen many successful toolchains that manage to pull off writing cross platform UIs particularly well, especially when the standard UI varies so much.
Swing and JavaFX and so forth vs. WPF comes to mind for example. As great as cross platform Java is, it just can't compete with writing a native Windows UI using WPF for example. I believe Qt is a counter-example of this sort of thing though that is actually pretty decent, but it's been many years since I touched it. In fact, it looks like Qt has a specific mobile version also, so maybe C++ with Qt would be an equally good or better answer to Mono on mobile? I don't know, I'm out of my depth without further research :)
You're missing the subtle difference - newspapers make money by establishing public record. Google makes money off of re-use of public record.
If Google was establishing public record it would be protected, but it's not, it's merely re-using it.
Fundamentally newspapers produce a historic log as time goes by - Google doesn't do this, it represents a pretty much live state of the internet.
It does beg the question whether Google could work round the problem by, rather than deleting links, creating a separate list of links at the bottom of the page saying something like "These are historic search records, and may no longer represent uptodate or relevant information" for sure, but I don't know what use that would be. Perhaps that would at least keep the cry censorship crowd happy whilst also making it clear that the information is not in any way current though and shouldn't be taken as such. I have no idea if it would satisfy the courts though because as I say this is mostly to try and align things with the various data protection acts around which themselves make it illegal to hold personal data longer than necessary (unless it falls under one of the exceptions).
Newspapers report on and record current events, they're a record of facts based on the perspective of the paper in question, and they can be sued for libel if they get it wrong and forced to print corrections.
In contrast, Google has none of this. Would your preference instead be that Google's search facilities are declared public record but it can be sued for libel for everything wrong it indexes about someone? How else do you suggest dealing with incorrect or irrelevant information that is harmful to an individual that is prominent enough to cause them real actual problems?
Okay there is censorship going on, but there's always censorship going on. Using censorship as a go to argument against everything is one of the worst fallacies Slashdot is prone to. There isn't a society on earth that is censorship free, not even the US. As much as some people like to scream this fantasy that they live in a censorship free world and the world would be perfect without censorship it's a nonsense, sometimes it's a necessary evil. The problem with censorship isn't that it exists, it's how it's used. Saying something is censorship doesn't automatically make it bad, being able to censor your troops ability to blab their tactics and positions to the enemy via Twitter is a good thing. So you don't get to magically win an argument by saying "OMG CENSORSHIP" you need to explain why this particular instance of censorship is bad. You need to explain, given an understanding of the law in question - such as the intricacies of the public interest defence and so forth what the problem is exactly with it.
Unless you can come back and tell me why Google should be able to profit from spreading false information and have no obligation to correct or remove then you don't have an argument. What is exceptional about internet companies? everyone else is bound by such law in one way or another, what makes a company like Google special that it should be above the law on issues like this? Again, would you prefer that Google is instead just subject to libel laws like print media and so forth? I know I wouldn't. This law is far far better.
We don't, but we're also not erasing all information from the internet, it'll still be available in papers as public record.
This isn't really even a new problem as the internet is a new thing - plenty of politicians have had their life history dug up and plastered over the papers long before it was ever recorded on the internet or the internet was ever available.
It doesn't matter what my personal morals are or aren't, public interest is a thing that has been defined over the years, and that is an example that would fit into the existing legal definition.
So if you're trying to enter a debate about "Who am I to dictate public interest" or whatever, then you're out of luck. See here for more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Currently, I do not see a problem with the definition of public interest. It's not unreasonable.
All I ever really took issue with was your suggestion that 4.0 applications don't work with 4.5 and the implication that you could run into problems with compatibility issues. I was merely pointing out that they share the same runtime anyway, and it's merely the library versions that differ.
I think if there's one thing .NET handles well it's versioning, much of that is because it was built from the outset with the issues of the earlier DLL hell problems that plagued many older Windows technologies. The framework was design from the outset to cope with this and that's why I took issue with the suggestions that it has versioning problems.
I agree things get more complicated with mono, but it's quite hard to break things on Windows unless you specifically go out to do so and as a primarily Java/C++/.NET developer I've actually seen more compatibility issues (though still rare in the grand scheme of things of course) with Java over the years, with C++ obviously being the worst out the lot for the simple reason you have to do pretty much everything yourself.
The biggest changes with 4.5 were simply additions, and the things that actually changed tended to be parallel implementations of some LINQ tasks - so for example, if you execute a lambda against every entry in a collection with 1000 elements using a LINQ method it used to just do them sequentially, now it'll automatically parallelise it if the collection is big enough. This is why the 4.5 libraries can retain backwards compatibility with 4.0 - the changes, rather than additions simply optimise what is already there, rather than change it and this is why you shouldn't really see any incompatibility issues between 4.5 and 4.0. The only exception would be if you wrote some 4.0 code that required something broken in 4.0 to be broken that was then fixed in 4.5 but that's bad practice anyway, and it's something Java has suffered in the past too (well, I'd be surprised if there's a major language framework out there that hasn't suffered this at some point).
I wont lie, I do like .NET a lot, but I wasn't having a pop at Java, I have a lot of respect for Java and it's my go to choice for cross-platform projects. I've never used Mono precisely for the reason that I figure if you're going cross platform then you should probably have just used Java (or gone native with C++) in the first place. But if you're using just Windows with no requirement for portability then I think .NET is unquestionably a superior option - you can get more done in less time and better.
I hope that clears up what I was getting at and where I was coming from, as I say I really wasn't gunning for an argument.
They've done a decent job of writing the law so it essentially comes down to a question of weighing public interest against the right to privacy. In difficult cases this would have to be decided in court, but most of the time it's going to be clear cut. There's clearly no public interest in keeping some pictures of a drunken teenager doing something stupid up so that she can be bullied into suicide, but there is clear public interest in recording and reporting on the crimes of serial killers.
A lot of people are claiming this will be used for censorship, it will be used for the great and powerful, but that's really not the case - that sort of person is actually at a distinct disadvantage because once you're famous, then all your misdoings become public interest.
Corporations also have no protection whatsoever, because it's entirely aimed at personal data and that similar covers people slagging each other off on forums - if someone says something about you then it's not personal data (unless it explicitly is of course - i.e. unless you post their address or something).
I'm not directing this at you specifically, but the amount of misunderstanding about this law and case on Slashdot is astounding. Yet it's actually one of the more sanely written technology laws we've had in a long long time - it's far better than the EU's cookie law for example. I think it actually does a great job of fairly balancing privacy against freedom of information.
The problem is a lot of people are assuming none of this has been thought through but it's false. It's easy to ask "what if this", "what if that" but if you actually read the proposals and ruling you'll probably be pleasantly surprised to see that all your concerns have been pretty decently covered. The proposed laws went through a pretty hefty consultation and all of this was addressed when that happens. What we have now is legal direction and remaining proposals that take all this into account and reasonably deal with it.
How is it censorship for use by powerful people? The law doesn't even protect powerful people - the law as it stands weighs the right to privacy against the public interest and politicians are at an inherent disadvantage because the public interest weighs more heavily against them than it does your average Joe on the street.
You'll have a hard time arguing that it's in the public interest that Joe's drug snorting photos from 20 years ago when he was young and stupid should stay up for all to see, but in contrast it's very much in the public interest to keep photos of a politician snorting drugs when they're meant to be enacting policy on drugs and narcotics policing for example.
I'll be clear here - this is explicit in the law, this isn't just my interpretation or speculation, the law is written specifically so this is the case, therefore you're wrong to say it's only for powerful people, on the contrary, it's designed explicitly for the little guy, so that mistakes they made some time ago don't have to ruin their life, whilst making it impossible for dodgy politicians to also take advantage of it. This isn't your typical badly written and easily abused law, it's actually pretty decent. It's one of those rare exceptions.
"The only issue is how the info is used"
That's actually what the law does - it doesn't allow removal of say, newspaper articles. It does however allow the removal of links to such articles. The articles themselves are public record, the links to such articles are just Google making use of public record to make money pointing to the articles.
I'm anti-censorship, but I'm also pro-privacy. This is one of those cases where they've actually got the balance right.