EU Court of Justice Paves Way For "Right To Be Forgotten" Online 199
Mark.JUK (1222360) writes "The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has today ruled that Google, Bing and others, acting as internet search engine operators, are responsible for the processing that they carry out of personal data which appears on web pages published by third parties. As a result any searches made on the basis of a person's name that returns links/descriptions for web pages containing information on the person in question can, upon request by the related individual, be removed. The decision supports calls for a so-called 'right to be forgotten' by Internet privacy advocates, which ironically the European Commission are already working to implement via new legislation. Google failed to argue that such a decision would be unfair because the information was already legally in the public domain."
We'll always have magnetic tape (Score:4, Insightful)
Paris may forget you cheri, but marketers never will.
WWSCOUTUSDO (Score:2)
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It's not about spending money. It's about not giving money.
You'd be surprised just how powerful latter is as a tool against capitalists in comparison to the former.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Re:Definitely good, but there are two sides (Score:5, Informative)
There's been a lot of FUD and confusion about this particular law on Slashdot, some people seem to think you can just somehow use your bat signal to say "I want to be forgotten on everything online ever!" but it's more simplistic than that.
What it does, is gives you the right to go to a company, that is storing information on you, and ask that they remove it. Nothing more, nothing less. That means if Google has indexed search results and their index includes information on you they simply have to remove that from their index - they do not have to go to the sites they indexed and asked them to remove the information too or any such thing, it's up to you to contact each specific company and the company must oblige.
This isn't really as big a deal as often made out, there was an argument you already had this right to an extent in many jurisdictions such as under the data protection act in the UK, which states that companies may not be passed information on you without your consent, so unless you gave it to them in the first place or consented to someone else giving it to them then they shouldn't be holding it regardless.
This law just formalises that and makes it clear that that remains true even in the age of user generated content, it simply makes it clear that companies can't shirk their data protection rules by saying "but a user gave us that content!" or "but a machine gathered that information!".
I don't believe this creates the hardship that it's claimed it creates, if companies were adhering to the likes of the UK's data protection act in the first place (which stems back to 1998) then they should've had procedures in place for over a decade and a half now to delete personal details that they had no legal right to hold.
If there are concerns about other content being deleted at the same time then that's not a problem with the law, but entirely a problem with how companies choose to go about eliminating data that should no longer be held.
If I have entered no agreement with a company, if a company is not acting as a data processor for a data controller I do have an agreement, and if I have not myself passed personal data to a company, then they never had a legal right (apart from under a handful of very specific exceptions) to hold it in the first place. The only extension this adds is that it makes it clear that you can also retroactively have information removed even if they did have the right to hold it in the past - even this existed in the likes of the DPA though, that companies shouldn't hold it for longer than necessary for the agreed purpose or when a data subject has ceased their relationship with the firm. The problem with that part it was never explicit as to exactly how long a company could hold data on you after that point so it was down to a fairly arbitrary decision by a court.
Honestly, I don't see the problem, if a company doesn't have control of the data it owns to be able to delete data it shouldn't hold on request then it's not fit to be holding any kind of data in the first place.
Re:Definitely good, but there are two sides (Score:5, Informative)
What it does, is gives you the right to go to a company, that is storing information on you, and ask that they remove it. Nothing more, nothing less. That means if Google has indexed search results and their index includes information on you they simply have to remove that from their index - they do not have to go to the sites they indexed and asked them to remove the information too or any such thing, it's up to you to contact each specific company and the company must oblige.
Oh, is that all? So the data is still there, except the most popular search engine on the planet can't list it. Wow, that's a relief. Here I thought there was censorship of public information going on, but clearly there isn't. (For the impaired, yes, this is sarcasm.)
From the article:
The case itself occurred after a Spanish man (Mario Costeja Gonzalez) complained that the detail of an auction notice for his former home, which was repossessed after he failed to pay his taxes, appeared in Google's search results.
The notice itself was made public on the third-party website (twice via a newspaper called La Vanguardia) and Mr Gonzalez wanted the source material edited and the Google result removed because the proceedings concerning him had been fully resolved for a number of years, thus he felt as though the reference to them was now "entirely irrelevant".
Mercifully the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) rejected the complaint against La Vanguardia, which correctly ruled that the information in question had been lawfully published by it. But the AEPD then ruled that Google should still delete the related references to the page, which Google perhaps understandably viewed as unfair because the information was already in the public domain, and so began the court battle until today's ECJ verdict.
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I'm not entirely sure what you're being sarcastic about or what point you were actually trying to make with your quote?
Newspapers have long been deemed to be public record, and so of course it shouldn't be censored. Public record can comfortably sit behind the public interest defence. But Google is a business that makes money providing services based on public record, that does not in itself make it public record, and so it becomes difficult for it to make a case for public interest - it's tried to make thi
Re:Definitely good, but there are two sides (Score:5, Insightful)
Newspapers have long been deemed to be public record, and so of course it shouldn't be censored. Public record can comfortably sit behind the public interest defence. But Google is a business that makes money providing services based on public record, that does not in itself make it public record, and so it becomes difficult for it to make a case for public interest - it's tried to make this case and failed, hence the ruling.
This argument is absurd. Newspapers (when not state run) are also commercial interests. One entity publishes things in the public record, and another makes those things searchable. To argue that what Google does is so different and doesn't deserve protection is preposterous, even more so to claim that there isn't censorship going on.
Re:Definitely good, but there are two sides (Score:4, Informative)
In the EU simply because some information is public does not mean it's free for all commercial entities to use. For example, if a crime is considered spent (usually some time after punishment ends the guilty party no longer has to declare it to employers) then an employer can't just go looking back through the newspaper archives for the stories reporting it. You can't set up an agency that records crimes and reports them to employers for a fee, even if they are considered legally spent. The information is public, anyone who kept a copy or who can be bothered to visit the library and scan through microfiche can find it, but that doesn't give them a right to use it commercially without that person's consent.
You have to remember that in the EU corporations are not people. They don't get the same freedoms and rights that people do.
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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 cr
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The information is public, anyone who kept a copy or who can be bothered to visit the library and scan through microfiche can find it, but that doesn't give them a right to use it commercially without that person's consent.
It's public but it isn't. Right.
You have to remember that in the EU corporations are not people. They don't get the same freedoms and rights that people do.
A completely irrelevant point, as point the newspaper in question and Google are commercial entities. It's just that one was allowed to keep their page up as a matter of public record, and was disallowed to index it, which is absurd.
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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 in
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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?
For this case, it is irrelevant. The information is true, not libel, and already ruled and acknowledged by you to be public record, and the newspaper can leave the page online. Yet you hold that this same "public record" information cannot be indexed by a search engine. That's a farce.
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.
At least now you admit there is censorship occurring. And really, censorship is the one of the worst fallacies on Slashdot? Gee, that freedom of speech, so unimportant, hardly worth consideration! Let's just brush the issue un
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"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 e
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Do you think Newspapers are doing it for the free hugs or something?
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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 li
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I think part of the problem is that some of us still remember the two German Killers who tried to get Wikipedia to remove the entries listing them and the crimes they committed as part of a "right to be forgotten." http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13wiki.html?_r=0 [nytimes.com]
Thankfully, it looks like Wikipedia is still listing the names [wikipedia.org]. If this "right to be forgotten" is upheld, how long until it is used to erase past misdeeds from online sources? What is the limit to the power to erase bad things about you onli
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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
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Based on what principle did you make that distinction?
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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... [wikipedia.org]
Currently, I do not see a problem with the definition of public interest. It's not unreasonable.
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By that definition, the serial killers would be elligible to have the news of their past crime supressed. A representative member of the public would be neither harmed nor benefitted by being aware of that information.
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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 program
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They've been paroled so there's a legal presumption they're not likely to kill again. That being the case, how is the fact they killed people decades ago at all relelvant to your life, other than morbid curiousity?
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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 s
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It seems like this provides a haven for cult leaders and tho
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What if I write an article discussing X event about Y person and due to the nature of X event it is for the best interest of the reader to know Z personal information about Y? Can Y then ask to google to stop linking to my article? Can I fight it? Can I get payment for any lost revenue due to loss of traffic (if applicable)? Do I, as the author of the article, even get notified about this?
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The wayback machine could reasonably argue the public interest exception.
Search engines don't have to do anything fanciful other than adhere to take down requests when they receive them.
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Except the wayback machine ALREADY responds to requests to delete pages (via robots.txt), and when it gets one it deletes the entire history of that page as well.
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Google already do much of this with DMCA notices, child porn sites and so forth anyway so it's not exactly a new problem contrary to your claims that it can't work. Obviously it can, because it does. Google can already prevent re-indexing.
But regardless it's a manual process, Google just have to remove it when you request, that's all, nothing more, nothing less. I suspect if they keep reindexing it in the exact same way after it's been removed then sure they may face a contempt of court charge then, but fun
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It can just be a manual process, that's how it works in most companies that already adhere to data protection laws.
God only knows it's not as if Google doesn't have the resources to staff an operation like this or invest in research into trying to automate it if it doesn't want to staff it.
It's entirely upto Google how it wants to go about it but ultimately it's got the resources and the talent.
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I don't think they are, but it achieves the goal for all intents and purposes.
Though the fact that it would be a breach of the law if they didn't actually delete is probably enough of a deterrent in most cases. One leak or whistleblower and they're on the hook for damages.
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Your name by itself isn't classed as personally sensitive information.
Besides, if you post it then you're implicitly giving permission for them to hold that information so it's obviously not then held by them without your permission is it? So even if you extend your idea of posting some of your personal details along with your name in a comments section then that's still your own fault.
Really, it doesn't require much thought. You're either stupid or... no nevermind, you're just stupid.
Bad cases make bad law (Score:2, Insightful)
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Appeal to who? According to this, the court making this decision is the highest in Europe:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/... [usatoday.com]
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pure political bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)
so by the wave of legislator's arms, all information about us online is simply going to disappear?
i call shenanigans.
i mean really...do these people surf the same web as i do?
Re:pure political bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
You could try reading TFS, if not TFA.
They specifically point out that even if Site X has a legitimate reason to have that personal information online, it does not automatically mean that Service Y (in this case, Google), has a legitimate reason to process that data in the ways they do.
Site X will still be available. It might not be easy to find it, of course, but cue the "the internet routes around censorship" mantra.
Re:pure political bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
so legislators are going to start deciding what public information search companies are able to aggregate?
uhhh....no thanks...ill opt out of that reality.
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Yes - and while it's terribly cliché, I need only point to child pornography materials to show that this is already happening, and generally opted into (by both the general populace, and by businesses themselves, voluntarily).
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please tell me you are not equating child pornography to publicly available information....please???
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Okay, bomb making materials, then. (various governments)
Or Nazi propaganda materials. (Germany)
Or anything that tends to tick people of a certain religion off (various governments)
Or anything that offends a certain king (various governments).
I'm sure we can find something along the scale of publicly available material (and yes, child pornography is also publicly available, even if not 'a matter of official public record') where we can both contemplate whether that material not being easily found through ser
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its all just government censorship....don't you see that??
the promise of the internet has always been information wants to free.
man, slashdot is changing nowadays...i can't believe that i am even debating this point on this particular forum...wow.
Re:pure political bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot has always supported the idea that information wants to be free, but it's also supported the idea that privacy matters.
It's also true that not all information should be free, most people don't want their password, debit card pin, or private conversations to be "free".
I mean, what is your argument, that everything the NSA and GCHQ did is fine, and of course they should be able to follow your every conversation, because of course, information wants to be free? I mean why shouldn't GCHQ and the NSA hold all your information, information wants to be free, it wants them to know everything about us!
Should Slashdot remove Anonymous Coward and make everyone post with their real names, because we should all get to know who exactly they are, because information wants to be free? Maybe you should have to publicly post your address and telephone number and e-mail and workplace details and salary too. Are you willing to put your money where you mouth is and make a start?
Yes information wants to be free, except when we're talking about privacy, and privacy concerns should trump that.
Yes. (Score:2)
I don't post as an anonymous coward to hide my identity. I've posted when I was clearly in the minority, but I still post, and I've taken some crazy karma hits for it too. My karma is pretty good, so I don't mind the occasional hit because I'm not in the majority opinion, but I don't write inflammatory or troll posts either.
I'm pretty sure a lot of the commentary would be better off without AC posts as well.
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Of course I see that - the debate would be about whether that is always undesirable.
To which I would suggest that yes, you always find it undesirable.
Unfortunately, that's not the reality we live in. Though there's always darknets.
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And we need only point out that it's being incompetently ran, has tons of false positives (and therefore false negatives), and frequently leads to stupid scenarios like sex education [cnet.com] and other legitimate stuff being blocked while the stuff it's supposed to block still gets through.
These kinds of filters simply don't work at a technical level without blocking legitimate stuff.
Hell, at a company I used to work for their int
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I think when he referred to CP he wasn't talking about filter, but the fact that sites like Google already remove links to such sites from their indexes as soon as it's been pointed out to them.
And that does work 100% of the time. Because it's not hard to check an index is what someone is claiming it is and hit 'remove' on it once that confirmation has occured.
This is not the same thing as filtering, which I agree is a broken non-workable idea.
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so legislators are going to start deciding what public information search companies are able to aggregate?
Yes. In the past if you had a criminal conviction it might have been written about in the paper. Years later you have served your time and the conviction is spent, do you don't have to tell employers about it. That helps reformed criminals who have not re-offended to re-integrate into society. The only way and employer could find out is to go to a library and scan through tens of thousands of microfiche looking for your name by hand.
Now Google will pull up that news site article from 1998 in a few clicks. T
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By the same merit, some people want a similar sweep of the legislators arm to stop tracking on the internet, and as many of those people post here I'm pretty sure they surf the same web as we do.
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"so by the wave of legislator's arms, all information about us online is simply going to disappear?"
No, but upon receipt of a formal request it's not unreasonable to expect that companies have control of the data they display on the internet and can hence delete it from their services. Because this is what it's actually about, not some fanciful idea of being able to declare in some unspecified place that all information about you on the internet should vanish, an idea that seems to have been magicked up in
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Honestly, if companies can make a profit off of harvesting and displaying personal details, often against the will of the person in question, then it's really not too much to ask that when the subject asks for it to be removed that they do so. If someone breaks into your house and steals your personal photos, financial records, and whatever else and posts it all online and Google harvests it up with it's automated systems and makes a bit of money from ad impressions for people that stumble across it I don't think it's really a lot to ask that you also have the right to tell them to delete it the fuck off their servers when you find it too.
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, but this ruling says they can shutdown someone who helps make this public information accessible. Instead, you offer a hypothetical example of a crime and detailed financial records illegally posted online. In your ill consider
Re:pure political bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
No, not correct. It's about personal data. This is already something that's well defined and well understood.
Your argument amounts to the idea that nothing should ever be private, which is an even more stupid idea.
cool (Score:4, Funny)
Donald Sterling's going to love this.
Multuple cases of abuse by single people (Score:3)
Not to mention numerous cases of old, bad information, such as bankruptcy, actual arrest records, etc.
Worst of all there are several companies who exist solely to blackmail individuals into paying to remove negative information. All totally legal in some jurisdictions.
This is a good law we need it.
P.S. Someone mentioned companies and/or other large organizations using it. They already get the same thing done by paying large amounts of money to lawyers to sue people for 'copyright' infringement over videos of them committing crimes.
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Companies can't use the right to be forgotten. It only applies to individuals, and in the EU companies are not people.
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Enforcement. (Score:2)
Wonder how this will be enforced when a page might consider a first and last name only, and there are many people with the same combination. Now Google will have to be the arbiter of whether a request is legitimate, and not being made by someone unconnected, but simply having the same name.
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When I read about this decision in the news, I immediately went to the Google and checked my full name (first, middle, last).
It's an unusual name.
And yet, there was someone else on the web with the same first, middle, last name as mine. Born in the same year as me, in fact....
Otherside of Right to be Forgotten (Score:3)
is the Right to be Tracked.
If I want to call up $company and tell them "delete everything you know about me from your index." This implies that without asking them, I've granted them the ability to track me.
This also puts quite a burden on me to call them up and say, "Hey, I just joined BowlingLeague.com as user StrikesAPlenty, please delete me from your index.
Also, how do you prove that a given user really is you? Your name probably isn't that unique. Which "Bob Smith" are you?
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This is the really scary aspect of this decision, and it seems to be lost on most of the commenters here -
In order for Google (or any other provider of information services) to even putatively be *able* to delete all information they have regarding you, they first have to have all information about and relating to you tagged with your identity.
This effectively means they must (by law) keep an auditable log of everything you ever do on the net.
What could possibly go wrong with that? I'm telling you, Hitler
Right to revise history (Score:2)
Hurray for Europe and it's newly inaugurated right to revise history! I'm sure the Hitlers, Mussolinis, and Francos are going to take great advantage of this ruling now that those situations have been resolved. No more embarrassment!
Just another type of take down request (Score:2)
The fact is OK, but a link to the fact is not? (Score:2)
If someone wants to escape their past, they need to get a retraction of the DATA itself, not all links to the data.
In the case oif the spaniard who wanted his bankruptcy to go unnoticed, he needs to get the owner of that factoid to remove it. If the fact remains online, then it's most certainly *not* someone else's responsibility to route others around the minefield you've laid.
This ruling is censorship, pure and ugly.
Just use Baidu or another search engine... (Score:2)
Just use Baidu or Yandex or another search engine..., it's a multipartite world, choose your poison :)
The decision is effectively unenforcable globally. For example, baidu is great for searching google-MPAA-censored content, etc.
"ironically" (Score:2)
Oh, it's timothy...
Never mind. At least this one's readable and has complete sentences.
The real use of this (Score:2)
any searches made on the basis of a person's name that returns links/descriptions for web pages containing information on the person in question can, upon request by the related individual, be removed.
SEO.
Companies are persons. This gives them more control of their name.
They certainly won't want any competitors' links to be listed in search results, or ads, when their name is searched.
Now they just need to exercise their "right" of removal.
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But why is this Google's problem? It's not their data.
This kind of shit is impossible. You're going to get all kinds of censorship as a result: clams bitching about xenu, etc.
Google should repay the EU in kind by blocking all search results pertaining to a complainant: every document mentioning the person should be removed from all indices returned to EU locations. When they discover just how stupid their ruling was, too bad.
Re:Censorship (Score:4, Funny)
I actually agree with this decision and if google removes all references to me I wouldn't mind in the least (they have very little anyway);
Are you serious? When I do a google search for "Anonymous Coward", it returns quite some hits.
Re:Censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
Does Lexis-Nexis get sued because they index libelous articles?
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Re:Censorship (Score:4, Informative)
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This isn't a new issue anyway though, if you go bankrupt it's in the public record for all eternity, and the public record is clearly the public record.
But credit reference agencies farm this data and use it in their credit references, because they're not simple public record they can only store them for a certain number of years. So whilst they stay in the clear public record, they can only be used for processing purposes for a certain period of time.
It's already pretty well established what public record
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Google takes data and makes it searchable - that's not public record, as soon as you take data from public record and make it searchable then it's not public record any more. That's why Google lost this case, and quite rightly so.
You don't "take" data from the public record, you "share" data from the public record. It doesn't stop being part of the public record just because it gets republished.
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Then how do you justify the statement, "as soon as you take data from public record and make it searchable then it's not public record any more." ?
I don't follow your reasoning. How does anything that becomes a part of the public record stop being public? I can understand correcting the record if there are errors, corrections add to the record. But, I don't see how subtracting data is ever a good thing.
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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.
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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 cont
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How do we know Joe isn't going to become a politician 10 years from now?
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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.
No balance here (Score:2)
Your description sounds nice, but if you RTA that is not what happened here. The guy went bankrupt. Lost his house. Newspaper reported the forced sale of said house (online). Google indexed the newspaper article. Judge says newspaper (online) can stay. Link must be remove from google.
What a slippery slope this is. If the newspaper has a search engine, does that link have to be removed? Many newspapers are part of a chain/umbrella organization. Does their search list have to change? What if it is a static
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Okay, say you set up a company that recorded all bankruptcies. The law says that after a certain time you don't have to report bankruptcy to an employer or bank looking to loan you money, and credit agencies are not allowed to hold that data either. But your company is special, because it just links to articles about bankruptcies and lets people search then instantly. You don't charge for this service, you just make money off advertising.
That's Google. Circumventing the rules that credit agencies and employ
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but it is a fact.
maybe better to learn to live with emberrassing history(like spelling a form of embarrassment wrong like I just did there..).
I mean, everything potentially is a public interest issue. what if the next guy marries him because he didn't find her previous engagement messages online? why entitled to the information, since it might be in their best interests to have it?
and what if I do a bad job? can I just ask them to remove information about it??
Re:Mario Costeja González (Score:4, Informative)
The EU does cherish freedom of speech. But it also cherishes the privacy of the individual.
The US - based on comments on this site - appears to have decided that freedom of speech trumps everything else. You can lie, cheat, shout fire in a crowded theatre, call in fake bomb scares, basically anything at all because it's all "freedom of speech."
The EU takes a much more nuanced view. Sometimes there's an overwhelming reason why freedom of speech should trump privacy. Sometimes privacy should trump freedom of speech, and sometimes it's a grey area that has to be litigated through the courts.
In this particular case, the court hasn't ruled that the information has to disappear - all they've ruled is that google (and presumably other search engines) need to give people the right to remove search results about themselves.
Most things are "allowed to be forgotten" in most circumstances. So, for example, most employers aren't allowed to ask "have you ever been made bankrupt?" although I think they can ask "are you an undischarged bankrupt". Google is allowing employers to sidestep the protective regulations that were built into bankruptcy law before the internet existed. The EU is now merely trying to reinstate them.
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Does her right to "privacy" include the right to hide her current bad actions and prevent *
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The EU does cherish freedom of speech. But it also cherishes the privacy of the individual.
The US - based on comments on this site - appears to have decided that freedom of speech trumps everything else. You can lie, cheat, shout fire in a crowded theatre, call in fake bomb scares, basically anything at all because it's all "freedom of speech."
The EU takes a much more nuanced view.
This is a canard. Nobody in his right mind, even on this site, contends that free speech ought to allow one to break laws. Punching someone in the face is undoubtedly a form of speech, insofar as it communicates a message, but one cannot defend such an assault on free speech grounds. Likewise with insider trading and any other crime involving speech.
You appear to be framing the difference between the two approaches as one of Yosemite Sam on the one side, speechifying willy nilly without regard for the balef
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Most things are "allowed to be forgotten" in most circumstances. So, for example, most employers aren't allowed to ask "have you ever been made bankrupt?" although I think they can ask "are you an undischarged bankrupt". Google is allowing employers to sidestep the protective regulations that were built into bankruptcy law before the internet existed. The EU is now merely trying to reinstate them.
You seem to have a problem understanding that there is a difference between "forgotten" and "harder to remember". Data that still exists in the public records and still exists in the newspaper's web site is not forgotten. Come talk to us when Google is caching the data after it was removed from the source site.
Protected class (Score:3)
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Hold on there, that would be getting to the root of the problem. That makes way too much sense.
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