The "right to be forgotten" is a doublespeak - it is really a concept for revoking others' right to free speech. I have no idea how the EU justice system works but I hope they have the means to correct this serious error.
Anything that trumps free speech, except for the truly extreme cases (shouting fire in a theatre etc.) is a slippery slope that can erode liberty over a period of time.
How long before this moves into "right to not be offended trumps free speech" territory?
So you are saying that the exceptions to free speech that you agree with are fine, but that the exceptions other people/cultures have chosen and that you disagree with are a 'slippery slope'.
Imperialism implies some sort of actual meddling. However, as previously established, nothing said on HN is going to change the EU. Without the possibility of any sort of meddling or interference, then there can be no Imperialism.
Interestingly though, your comment is a nice example of being irrationally fearful of free political speech.
There is a tendency for some US commentators to totally ignore the European attitude around freedom of speech and to talk about the slippery slope to totalitarian states.
Sometimes those people will mix up "first ammendment" rights with what a website owner is allowed to do; or they appear to be unaware of the very many cases of people in America who lose their jobs or are arrested because they wear the wrong t-shirt or have an innocent poster on their door.
We often hear these people when there's coverage of twitter trolls going to court. They'll say that it's ridiculous to prosecute people for being mean on twitter. This is intensely frustrating because -and this should be fucking obvious- no-one is arrested for being a bit mean on social media. People are arrested for making credible repeated threats of violence. But that happens in the US.
>or they appear to be unaware of the very many cases of people in America who lose their jobs or are arrested because they wear the wrong t-shirt or have an innocent poster on their door.
Arrested and convicted of a crime are two different things. Do you have any evidence of that happening? I know of a Virginia teenager who was arrested last year because he wouldn't take off an NRA shirt, but first, he wasn't arrested for the shirt, he was arrested for obstruction, and second, charges were dropped.
As for European attitudes toward free speech, I don't say they're wrong for Europeans, I just think some of them are daft, like locking people up for racist remarks or offensive speech. That just turns harmless idiots into martyrs.
You say that as if it's hypocritical, but this seems like an almost axiomatic statement to me. It is perfectly reasonable to have opinions about exceptions to free speech which are safe and unsafe, and to advocate why to those with different opinions. Just like the USA's interpretation of "free speech" isn't sacred for the rest of the world (and might actually be wrong!), a European nation's interpretation of safe and unsafe free speech is not absolute and might be wrong.
Portions of the U.S. used to have a strong cultural affinity for human slavery, yet many within that same U.S. argued that slavery was wrong from day 1 of the current republic. Europe used to have a cultural affinity for anti-Semitism (and it hasn't completely gone away). If you believe in any sort of objective truth whatsoever, then it's possible for a 'cultural value' to still be wrong.
Shouting fire in a theater isn't an extreme case if you think about it. When was the last time you heard of a stampede in a crowded theater when someone shouted fire and there was none? I've never heard of it. Who would take off running? Would you take off running because someone else is? Honestly. The case this phrase originated from is overpraised.
The case the phrase is from was about placing limitations on blatantly political speech. It was a truly reprehensible decision.
"A unanimous Supreme Court, in a famous opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concluded that defendants who distributed leaflets to draft-age men, urging resistance to induction, could be convicted of an attempt to obstruct the draft, a criminal offense." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
From it's very inception, that phrase has been used to justify the restriction of political speech. Nothing has changed since 1917, people still use it to argue against political speech to this day.
Don't be so literal-minded. If you have been following the news you might have noticed some deliberate Ebola hoaxes in the last week, where a man on an aeroplane and another on a bus shouted out they had Ebola and threatened to deliberately infect other passengers and the bus driver, respectively. The fact that nobody was actually hurt in these two incidents doesn't alter the deontological basis for a rule against such behavior.
Reasoning by analogy is the norm in the American common-law system. If you were to maliciously cause some sort of dangerous stampede at, say, a sporting event, you would not be able to get off the hook by arguing that you were not in a theater. Once more, I urge people to consider the difference between civil and common law systems. A lot of people seem to assume the standards of one apply to the other.
Then what possibly could? Hegel's ghost?
The improbability of anyone being hurt. If you stand in the middle of a public park and yell 'the sky is falling!!' nobody will take you very seriously, but even if they did and decided that it was necessary to run indoors the probability of a stampede occurring is vanishingly low. But maliciously causing panic in an enclosed space significantly elevates the risk of injury to others, because the more panicked people are, the more irrationally and dangerously they may act, a phenomenon for which we have abundant evidence.
Shouting in a crowded theater is not an analogy, it's a benchmark. This seems obvious to me - if it is an analogy, then what does the theater represent?
What it says is that some line has to be set, and this concrete situation described is something that obviously should fall on the other side of the line. (Therefore, people should be imprisoned for speaking out against the war Q.E.D.)
Is it even illegal to shout "fire" in a crowded theater?
This isn't 1900. There are accessible, well-lit exit routes in every theater I've been in. Not to mention fire suppression systems, alarms, and the fact that you'd most likely see a fire before it was time to panic.
Perhaps this does not happen much in the US. However, there are "discotheque" fires [1] which harm numerous people throughout the world. Typically overcrowded with locked exit doors. It's a sad thing, but it happens.
In the US it is not an absolute right either. Ignoring the cliche fire in a theater thing, the ag-gag bills and provisions of the patriot act make it illegal to say something which could impact the profitability of perishable food production chains. Even true statements are illegal to make.
As the other comment mentions, restrictions like those may well be overturned, but it's true that free speech is not an absolute right within the U.S., considering we have laws against slander, libel, divulging personally-identifiable information and some types of medical records, espionage, etc. Free speech is an individual right that like any other right, gets balanced against others' individual rights.
No it isn't. You can still do research and publish stories like 'John Doe, running for office, was convicted of littering 20 years ago...' You just won't be able to rely on a search engine to gather all that information for you; you'll have to research your subject a more old-fashioned way, looking through all the stories from the period. The only actors constrained under this regime are search engines, and I'm not sure algorithmically generated search results rise to the level of political speech as they're not expressive of an opinion.
I have no idea how the EU justice system works
Then why not inform yourself before making grand pronouncements on what counts as error? There are other legal philosophies besides the one you adhere to, you know.
> No it isn't. You can still do research and publish stories like 'John Doe, running for office, was convicted of littering 20 years ago...' You just won't be able to rely on a search engine to gather all that information for you; you'll have to research your subject a more old-fashioned way, looking through all the stories from the period.
I don't see that that's morally different from e.g. "you have to pay a $20 fine if you do this."
What if I have a hand-crafted artisanal search engine, like Yahoo Directory. Are those exempt from this law?
It's not my intent, and I find your premise questionable. Are you suggesting that newspapers and similar organs would try to make money out of people who wanted to search their archives? If so then yes, they probably would, but so what?
No, I am suggesting that people who are not payed to search through archives will frequently lack the time to search through archives. Digging through newspaper articles at your local library to find information on the dozen politicians on the ballet is something that most people do not have the time/resources to do. For the most part, these people will have to rely on the media to do that for them.
Search engines are an equalizer, they allow people to search through massive amounts of data blazingly fast. This closes the gap between the research a professional reporter is capable of, and the research that the general public is capable of.
Again, so what? In the case of a politician running for office, the media is likely to do that research anyway; take a look at Oregon, where the governor's fiancee is mired in scandal over long-past personal relationship, which is being pushed with a barely-implicit guilt-by-association angle for the Governor's implied failure to perform due diligence on his intended wife. You're also overlooking the 'public interest' exemption to redaction of search results which has been extensively documented and would certainly apply to the case of a candidate seeking office.
Meanwhile, you're completely ignoring the actual problem, which is that now anyone can do a bang-up research job on private rather than public individuals, without being held to any ethical standards for journalistic accreditation or publication. Somewhere upthread I pointed out the example of mugshot aggregation sites, which operate a thinly-veiled extortion racket under the rubric of 'free speech'.
An iteration on the European court's decision might require operators to amend their robots.txt files. It's not hard to conceive of multiple approaches to the same end. In any case, your objection is not responsive to my point that free speech remains uninfringed.
As I said earlier, I'm not sure algorithmically generated search results rise to the level of political speech as they're not expressive of an opinion.
You are still allowed to find and read the original article under this EU law. You are just not entitled to have it pre-emptively collected and indexed for you if the subject of the article has a colorable wish to preserve their privacy.
I don't think it's that clear cut, there are some inherent challenges related to privacy and internet, a persons past that may influence future opportunities in a way that's not really fair. In fact, Eric Schmidt has expressed that same sentiment publicly.
I think one of the issues with the ECHR is that to be a judge on the court, you don't actually have to have worked as a judge. You just need good moral character and law qualifications [1]
So you'd rather trust someone who rubber-stamped traffic infractions at a low-level court for 20 years than a professor of law to decide on highly abstract and generic cases?
Non-judges are a rather common thing among high European courts. And what would be wrong about putting someone whose publications have laid the groundwork for other judges' descisions in the past in such a position? It's not like the academic track is any less qualified.
I'd rather trust someone that has worked as a judge at the highest level in their own national court, rather than academics that are long on theory but have never tried a case.
The European Courts aren't really a higher courts than the national high courts, just ask the German one. Which, yes, does include academics and even civil servants with extensive background in law. And unlike say in America, the academic qualification you need to be a judge is higher than the one you need to be a lawyer, in the first place: Whether your professional choice then is to become a judge or something else changes nothing about your qualification.
They seem to think they are higher courts, given that people can appeal to them after exhausting the process in their own country.
It seems strange that people can become judges without actually practising the law or working as a judge in a lower court first. If I was being operated on, I'd want a surgeon that has operated before, not an academic expert on surgery.
"They included a link to a blog post by Economics Editor Robert Peston. The request was believed to have been made by a person who had left a comment underneath the article."
Now that's a good example of a feature fighting the product. Disable article commenting: you might miss out on engagement and subsequent pageviews. Enable commenting: you might get the article de-listed from Google. Allow anonymous commenting: you invite trolls (such as jezabel/violent GIF swarm). Require (partially) verified identities: you risk takedown requests.
I think you're glossing over the simplest option: allow commenters to remove their comments. This puts the responsibility where it belongs. If you want content removed, actually have it removed, don't involve some third party search engine index.
I don't really have a huge problem with "right to be forgotten". I think, as a society, we might eventually discover the down side of having everything anyone (including oneself) posts about everyone permanently archived, linked to their real identities, and searchable forever. This will probably start to happen once those who grew up as kids posting to the internet start wanting respectable jobs or running for office. They'll realize the person they were as a kid is completely different from the person they are as a 50 year old, and not want to be judged by some troll post they wrote 35 years ago.
The problem in this context is that this right is not being used to allow youthful indiscretions to fade from memory, but to suppress speech that may be in the public interest to protect.
Hysteria surrounding the ruling is not completely warranted from what I can see. Google's own page one would use to submit such a request specifically says it isn't going to do that.
> "When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information — for example, we may decline to remove certain information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials."
There is a legitimate problem with Google's search results listing harassing links to persons. Revenge porn would be a terrific example.
If there is something on the internet about you that you don't want there. It isn't possible to remove it, that would be absurd but your public facing name on the internet shouldn't be clouded by unwarranted defamation material.
They do at least promise not to remove professional malpractices and the like. I doubt for instance they would not return reviews about your business on yelp or similar.
A much larger issue that needs to be tackled is DMCA, which is being abused today. We have tried DMCA and it needs some reform. We haven't really tried right to be forgotten yet, and I just don't see that the downsides outweigh the potential benefits.
BBC publishing links that have been deemed by persons who are the subject of the links to be bad; paints a giant bullseye on those links.
The promises you list and your guesses about what google is or isn't going to do are just empty words - the original article itself gives a real example where a news story about convictions of IRA members was blocked, so the expected risks are not only possible, but have already happened and happening right now.
Please note that this is not so much about the basic principle of the 'right to be forgotten', but the way in which Google is deliberately turning it into a bloodbath.
Google is constantly looking to create controversy and undermine any kind of privacy rights enforcement rather than being constructive in finding solutions.
Google has every right to ignore all but the most obviously justified removal requests and only remove results after a court order. They are deliberately taking an axe to the search results in an attempt to make EU privacy protection look like censorship.
Because it is censorship, to the definition. It's no different than requiring the removal of newspaper archives from public libraries to articles from the past.
Besides, at the volume at which the requests have poured in, even Google has limited time and resources to fight each request in court. It's unrealistic to expect them to actually fight any takedown individually when the entire idea is absurd.
>> "It's no different than requiring the removal of newspaper archives from public libraries to articles from the past"
I think the difference is that newspapers probably never would have printed half the stuff people want removed in the first place. You would also be able to sue a newspaper and have corrections printed. Probably not as easy with online content if posted anonymously.
I think a big part of the problem is the different attitudes to free speech around the world. In the US it is top priority. In the UK people are legally punished for posting harassing or threatening messages on social media. In France/Germany there are laws are speech on the holocaust and anti-Semitism. I think free speech is important but I also think we can regulate it to a point and that's not an attitude that would fly in some countries, particularly the US (my opinion is changing slightly as it become more and more obvious we can't trust our governments). The internet being a global thing we are going to face these problems more and more.
Actually, the whole legal issue started with a case of mr. Mario Costeja González wanting to remove a google search that returned news that was printed in a newspaper, and after suing the newspaper no corrections were printed and the article wasn't recalled as it was truthful, non-anonymous, etc. The newspaper article is still available in the archives, but Google has been given an order to hide it from people.
It's not a hypothetical issue - the "anonymous online speech" is a red herring as the very first censored link was removing a link to a truthful newspaper article, and the BBC removed links are again censoring undisputed respectable news article history.
> It's no different than requiring the removal of newspaper archives from public libraries to articles from the past.
Except that before the Internet was a thing, in general, if you did something that got you in the newspaper five years ago, nobody would remember it when you're applying for a job or networking or somehow get in the news again, doubly so if you moved town.
These days, it's likely that if you were in the news once, that baggage is likely to be attached to you forever; it can quite literally ruin your life.
So what's the end game where everyone has that level of "dirt" on them? Doesn't it become a lot less extraordinary (and therefore, a lot less "life ruining") if everyone's publicly-documented bad behavior is accessible?
I get what you're saying, but privacy is a huge issue, and figuring out how to protect peoples' historical expectation of privacy and a 'clean slate' by most standards is something the EU is grappling with. It isn't evil, though its implementation may be misguided.
I do not want to live in a world where everything I've done, and every mistake I've made, is indexed and shared across the world. Not everything about the Internet revolution has made the world a better place.
Your comment assumes several things. First, that everyone has a similar level of things to be embarrassed about. Second, that wealthy and powerful people won't simply sue or bribe publishers to withhold or delete the embarrassing material. Third, that living in a panopticon is a good thing.
I'm a little perplexed at how people who find NSA surveillance utterly unacceptable and wish to be able to shield private information from even lawful (warranted) scrutiny nonetheless seem fine with surveillance and publication by private sector, whether that's more-or-less universal publication via search engines or fee-based as in the case of data brokers like Acxiom.
> seem fine with surveillance and publication by private sector
Remember, the private sector can't enforce their laws and taxes by force like the state can. After all, it's not like Mafia rackets were able to enforce their "protection" rules on small businesses, or drug cartels were able to assassinate the families of informers. The state is the one and only risk to the private citizen, and by definition must be opposed at every step.
First, I asked what the endgame is, not what it is right now.
First, that everyone has a similar level of things to be embarrassed about.
And yet here we're discussing a law that leaves the amount of damage to be done to freedom of information up to the whims of each individual person who thinks they should be able to censor some piece of data, rather than any kind of objective test. Including the "rich and powerful".
Second, that wealthy and powerful people won't simply sue or bribe publishers to withhold or delete the embarrassing material.
That does not work in the real world. The rich and powerful have been trying to restrict information getting out for years. Snowden and Streisand are living proof of this. The continued explosions in the faces of people who try to do this are further proof.
That old saying about the internet interpreting censorship (and we can quibble about the wheretos and the whyfores all day long, but at the end of the day, this definitely fits the definition of censorship) as damage? That doesn't stop applying just because legislators want it to.
Third, that living in a panopticon is a good thing. I'm a little perplexed at how people who find NSA surveillance utterly unacceptable and wish to be able to shield private information..
In every case we're talking about here, it's not "private" information. It's information that's always been there, for free, to anyone who cares to look. Arrests are not private information, neither are blog comments, neither is anything else you do in the public eye. I find it repugnant to suggest that removing that information from one or two places makes it as if those things never happened.
Except that that isn't the case. Not nearly everyone ends up getting written about in a blog or a newspaper, as much as that might be the case in your social circle. However, some not-insignificant amount of people do.
The amount of writing and access to that writing has only gone up over time, and that's almost universally seen as a net positive.
I just don't see the positive in a world where actions don't have consequences since the collective unconscious can be selectively edited by legislative meddling.
The idea of a "right to be forgotten" is so fundamentally alien to me, as someone who fundamentally believes in the rights of freedom of speech and free access to infofrmation, as if the subject of a given piece of information somehow has ownership of it, rather than the person who created it.
OK, consider this: in the US, police departments routinely publish 'mugshots' of arrestees. If you surf the web without an ad blocker you've surely seen ads along the lines of 'who's been arrested in (your area of residence)? find out NOW' with photographs of people wearing hangdog expressions. These ads are from companies whose business model is charging people hundreds of dollars to have their mugshot removed from their database. Of course there are multiple firms engaged in this activity so that can turn into an ongoing expense, more so for people who happen to be particularly photogenic or distinctive-looking.
Now suppose you are arrested but never charged due to lack of evidence, or released because your arrest was a case of mistaken identity. Is it OK for mugshot republication firms to make lots of money out of you, or at the very least put you to the trouble of having your mugshot removed from police department websites by legal means? If you're poor and don't have the resources or the knowledge to address this situation immediately, is it OK for search engines to cache that information forever?
There's a reason for the legal concept of a 'statute of limitations'; for most criminal actions other than very serious offenses, we have agreed as a society that criminal liability must expire at some point that's more or less proportional to the sentence one might have incurred if caught and convicted. This benefits a few very astute criminals, which is a downside, but an acceptable price to pay for limiting the prosecutorial reach of the state. Why then should we give private actors free rein to commercially exploit the history of people's interactions with law enforcement, to those people's detriment?
> as if the subject of a given piece of information somehow has ownership of it
And yet the law in some places has this idea already - if somebody takes a picture of a person in some countries and in 27 US states, that person has some rights over the use of that photograph under the concept of "publicity rights" or "personality rights". There's stronger concepts of this across some of the EU. This is why model releases exist.
So the concept of the subject of a piece of information having some ownership of it is not that foreign, although rights to the extent required for the right to be forgotten is something relatively new as far as I can tell.
There is more than an element of truth to this, uncomfortable as it is for many.
Google are deliberately stonewalling on this and issues around copyright, basically with a "If it's good for us then it must be right" attitude, which is actually in danger of creating widespread economic problems much worse than Microsoft ever achieved.
It's interesting to compare the response here with the vitriol Uber receive. Google's PR machine is very good.
I think one factor is that Google is very nebulous. Facebook's and Uber's ambitions are pretty obvious and easy to understand. Google is a search company and an advertising company, but it is also a social network and a cloud storage provider and a thousand other things. And some of its products aren't even gratuitously Google-branded (e.g. YouTube -- even if it's more integrated into Google+ now).
Sure, there is a vague awareness that Google is invading your privacy and harvesting your data, but it does so for "free" and generally makes it look like a good deal. It's also a lot more subtle about it than Facebook.
Google isn't morally superior. It's just less obviously evil. And let's be honest: to the average bloke (even on HN), the problems with Uber or Airbnb are a lot easier to relate to than the much fuzzier problems with Google (privacy, media licensing, etc).
>Google is constantly looking to create controversy and undermine any kind of privacy rights enforcement rather than being constructive in finding solutions.
It's a magical "censor whatever I say" button. What kind of constructive solution do you imagine?
The original article contains an actual example from BBC of how "specific" they are - a valid news article was censored because of a complaint about a comment to that article. It's not a misinformed hypothesis of what might somehow happen, it's something that has already happened.
This is not a straw man. Either the laws aren't as specific as you expect, or they aren't applied as specifically as you expect - censoring an article if there is absolutely nothing wrong within the actual article is certainly not specific enough.
The article wasn't censored, it just doesn't show up any more when you search for the name of the commenter. It still shows up when you search for the name of the banker that was the subject of the article, the name of the bank, or any other keywords you can find it with:
All that has been eradicated is the searchable connection between the commenter's name and that article.
We didn't destroy the book! We just ruled you can't keep it on a shelf under the name of one of the reviewers - but everywhere else you want to keep it is fine.
Yes, it might be topical, and I have a strong inkling that says that it's a case google shouldn't have accepted. They seem to be taking more down than is required of them.
But it's also a far cry from "banker censors report about his malpractice": The banker most definitely would not be allowed to do that under the law in question.
The original case was a 16-year old newspaper article about a bankruptcy (but no fraud or such) that showed up as first result on a google search for a Spaniard's name, which impacted his employment prospects and such.
Hence why it's called "right to forget". People didn't have easy access to such data ten years ago, either, and the world provably didn't collapse. What this is battling is a new thing: The eternal online pillory, knowing neither restraint, remorse, nor forgiveness... nor research costs.
Just because one person can't handle shoes does not mean that they should be given a magical de-shoeing ray gun.
Just because one person cannot cope with changing technology does not mean that the rest of us should be crippled to their level. To do this through censorship is double odious.
It removes entire articles from the public consciousness. There's no "remove this section". There's not even the accountability to tell the publications what's being removed and who wants it gone.
It's power without responsibility, accountability, or sane restraints.
Based on what's been published, Google's response seems pretty rational. They are denying some reasonable percentage of requests while complying with others. I don't like the EU policy here and I'd fight it vigorously if the topic come up in the US, but Google seems to be neither simply complying with everything nor taking everything to court. It seems a rational response by a corporation whatever its execs may think of the governing law.
The problem is that Google has no incentive to be careful in choosing which links it removes. There is no penalty for removing links unnecessarily but there is the potential for EU member states to levy fines for not removing them.
>Google has every right to ignore all but the most obviously justified removal requests and only remove results after a court order.
If it wants to sink massive amounts of money, time, risk for other operations, and goodwill from powerful people in order to avoid doing something that won't affect its bottom line in the slightest way to just do.
>They are deliberately taking an axe to the search results in an attempt to make EU privacy protection look like censorship.
No, they're accepting censorship because there's no money in being freedom fighters.
The worst thing is that this law will be used by politicians and their families to cover up corruption stories.
The law that possibly profits governing bodies the most is a bad law.
Why we cannot know if our new neighbour have paedophile past, corruption or rape incidents? Such mistakes should stay public for ever. But now very specific groups of people are trying to whiten themselves up. Its somehow scary...
I wonder how this will affect the Internet Archive. I understand they're based in the US(and hopefully their servers are too), but will the EU courts take any action if a sufficiently high profile lawsuit occurs over the archive's contents?
Yes they do. They provide a link to the specific notice on Chilling Effects when search results would have returned a URL that they received a takedown request for. The notice contains exact URLs.
