BBC Curates The "Right To Be Forgotten" Links That Google Can't 146
An anonymous reader writes, quoting the BBC's Internet Blog: "Since a European Court of Justice ruling last year, individuals have the right to request that search engines remove certain web pages from their search results. Those pages usually contain personal information about individuals."
The BBC, however, is not obligated to completely censor the results, and so has taken an approach that other media outlets would do well to emulate: they're keeping a list of those pages delisted by the search engines, and making them easy to find through the BBC itself. Why?
The BBC has decided to make clear to licence fee payers which pages have been removed from Google's search results by publishing this list of links. Each month, we'll republish this list with new removals added at the top.
We are doing this primarily as a contribution to public policy. We think it is important that those with an interest in the “right to be forgotten” can ascertain which articles have been affected by the ruling. We hope it will contribute to the debate about this issue. We also think the integrity of the BBC's online archive is important and, although the pages concerned remain published on BBC Online, removal from Google searches makes parts of that archive harder to find.
That's good (Score:3)
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Re:That's good (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's discuss this article that was the subject of a removal request: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-sco... [bbc.com]
It's about a rape. The only people mentioned are the criminal, the police inspector in charge of the case and the criminal's friend. The criminal wouldn't have been able to make the request (it's relevant), and there is little reason for the inspector to want to, so it was almost certainly the friend. Or probably ex-friend now.
There is no suggestion that the friend did anything wrong. None at all. He was just caught up in someone else's crime, and the media decided to name him because they can. Is it reasonable to have reports of this incident immediately served up when any potential employer googles his name? It's not really relevant, but it is very embarrassing. It talks about his private sex life, and associates him with someone who committed a horrible crime. I'm sure a lot of employers would think twice about hiring someone like that, especially in a role where they deal with customers who might google their name. It sucks but it's also true.
Re:That's good (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it reasonable to have reports of this incident immediately served up when any potential employer googles his name?
Yes. Google's job is to index the context of web pages. Google is NOT responsible for the content or truthfulness of those pages. If web pages out there have his name on them Google should return those pages when someone searches for that string. If this man has a problem with the content of a page he should take it up with the people who published the page.
At least in a sane world, this is how things would operate.
Re:That's good (Score:4, Insightful)
You could argue that it's a credit reference agency's job to report anything that might give a potential lender concern, but the law says otherwise because society decided that mistakes should eventually be forgiven and people should be allowed to reform.
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I would say that. I would say it's not the government's business to tell me what should give me concern. Would you employee an accountant that had been previously convicted for stealing money from clients? Would you want the government to hide that record so they have a second chance? No.
I agree society isn't quick enough to grant second chance, but I also understand why many people (even those who preach second chances) aren't so quick to give them when it's their kids/money/property etc. in danger. But we
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"Would you want the government to hide that record so they have a second chance? No."
You realise that's exactly what happens right? You know that in the UK such convictions only have to be disclosed for a certain amount of time afterwards yes?
"But simply hiding someone's history won't make me change what I would think about their history if I were to know it - it won't address the true problem, at best it might relieve the symptoms a bit."
Right, but that's a big if. If you weren't to know it then you're adm
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You realise that's exactly what happens right? You know that in the UK such convictions only have to be disclosed for a certain amount of time afterwards yes?
Is/aught. And yes, I am aware of that fact.
If you weren't to know it then you're admitting that you will view them differently, which is kind of the point.
No, I'm suggesting that trying to invoke the Streisand effect will neither effectively hide the past nor effect social change. Since we can't hide the past we should go for social change instead. Which is exactly what I said in the later part of that paragraph.
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People aren't invoking the Streisand effect though, the amount of people whose names are more publicised relative to those who have personal data illegally held by data removed are negligible. This is working well for most people because if they came to you for a job interview and you Googled their name, you would find fuck all on them, which is kind of the point.
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I would say that. I would say it's not the government's business to tell me what should give me concern. Would you employee an accountant that had been previously convicted for stealing money from clients? Would you want the government to hide that record so they have a second chance? No.
Which is why there are provisions to remove someone's right to practice for crimes affecting their profession. And it's the government's business to ensure that happens. If you think that in your jurisdiction the government isn't doing enough to disqualify fraudulent accountants, campaign for changes in the law.
I agree society isn't quick enough to grant second chance, but I also understand why many people (even those who preach second chances) aren't so quick to give them when it's their kids/money/property etc. in danger.
... which is where the government comes in. Acting on an individual level, emotions override logic, and we need someone to take a detached overview to prevent a descent into mob justice.
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And it's the government's business to ensure that happens. If you think that in your jurisdiction the government isn't doing enough to disqualify fraudulent accountants, campaign for changes in the law.
No, it's my business to decide who I think makes a suitable accountant for ME, not the governments. End of.
Acting on an individual level, emotions override logic, and we need someone to take a detached overview to prevent a descent into mob justice.
Do they really? Or is it just that the level of risk is too high for most people to stomach for themselves, despite their willingness to push it on others? I don't see what business anyone else has deciding what level of risk I want to accept into my business dealings.
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This is about history being erased from public record. Don't you see the implications?
No its not. No-one is suggesting that the officially archived court proceedings be retroactively redacted. (Or the officially archived copy of the newspaper in question be redacted either, for that matter).
The public records [wikipedia.org] are sacrosanct and still preserved.
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Of course it has effect. There's such a thing as being too easy. Now, Jan Freese, the former head of the Swedish data inspection authority wrote a very good book on the subject, many, many years ago (in the mid eighties if memory serves), which unfortunately is in Swedish, so it won't do you much good. But one of his main points was that the existence of information isn't the main problem, but that manual barriers to its processing is.
It is my opinon that its become too bloody easy to find out too much abou
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Public records are useless if you can't find them.
You can find them if you want. The point of "right to be forgotten" is that in the pre-Google days, you had to go to the library and actively hunt down historical information. It is still easier to go to the BBC website and search their news archives from the comfort of your own home than it ever was to check the 1960s archives of The Times --the information is still very easy to find if you're specifically looking for it. It just makes it harder to stumble across by accident.
Maybe you believe that no good
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Of course you can find them. What do you think libraries are for? Just a place to get free WiFi?
I swear, kids today wouldn't have survived fifteen minutes in the eighties...
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All it takes to really ruin someone's life is someone else being pissed enough at him to set up a slandering page about the first someone in a country where the police is busy fighting some real crime and can't be assed to deal with it.
Your fallacy in this context is that the laws of your country that protect you and your reputation mean jack anywhere else.
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I also think it's strange that somehow it's Google's job to remove pages.
Google is not a dumb index -- Google is a collection of cutting edge data-mining and artificial intelligence algorithms designed to provide data that is of direct relevance to the user's query. That is Google's job.
The European ruling was not about the deletion of information, it was a point about the relevance of information. A spent conviction is legally considered irrelevant, except in certain careers (particularly working with children) and therefore shouldn't be something that Google's algorithm retur
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Not true. Google's job is to make money for it's shareholders, which it does by serving targeted (and therefore, hopefully, relevant) adverts to web users. And it achieves that result by having a very large collection of information about it's users. And it achieves that by being a very popular search engine, which attracts a lot of users. And it became a very popular search engine by having a wide-ranging spider and a good relevance matcher (PigeonRank, I
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Why are we letting this hypothetical employer off the hook for basing their hiring decision on this non-issue? That's my question.
The narrative that you pose is one where people must be protected from the unreasonable views and actions of third parties as a result of finding information out efficiently. Is that feasible, practical, reasonable? And how are we to ascertain if it is worthwhile? By what metric?
Re:That's good (Score:5, Insightful)
Because you'll have a hard time proving he based his decision on it. And unless the rapists (ex) friend is some rare and unique specialist in a hotly contested field, the employer will just toss him and move on to the next applicant who has generally the same level of experience and training but one less "bad thing" lurking about. Real or not, relevant or not, the employer will not bother to double check. Why should he? To him, hiring A or B doesn't make a difference.
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The man in the link above may well be embarrassed by the story, but there's no suggestion he had done anything illegal, so if he objects, he should be able to go to the publisher of the site.
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Flip side. What if someone who had the history of crime obtained de-listing from search results. Another person used search to make sure that person was safe, you know idle quick search. They appeared safe, so they established a relationship. The person with the hidden history then committed the same crime again, who does the victim sue, if they are still living from information that would have saved them from becoming a victim. Who has the greater right of protection, the criminal (with regard to publishe
Re:That's good (Score:4, Informative)
Flip side. What if someone who had the history of crime obtained de-listing from search results.
The rules state that such people could not obtain a de-listing.
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Who has the greater right of protection, the criminal (with regard to published unchallenged news stories) or potential victims.
That's a question for the law of the land and is based on the severity of the crime and bakancing the desire for rehabilitation of offenders against fear of recedivism. Every country has its own laws on the disclosure of criminal offences, and these laws are carefully considered to achieve balance.
Now imagine if you googled your name, and you found that 6 years ago, someone from your hometown, who shares your name and approximate age had gone on a spree of sexual violence and murder fueled by illicit drugs
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So you could demand clarification in the article and request an image of the person described be included. What you are really asking for is the exact opposite of the right to be forgotten ie the right for others to ensure the individual is accurately identified and not confused with others.
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I would not want to work for a company that employed stupid people who could not grasp the content of the article you linked to. To me that indicates that, by hiring me, I will either be required to do the work of several people because they are stupid or that I am being hired because I, too, am stupid. None of those scenarios appeal to me.
Weird (Score:4, Funny)
There are some very nasty pieces of work on that list, rapists and murderers who presumably managed to get a removal order from within prison, but some are just weird, like "The news that lesbian couples in England and Wales who start a family through fertility treatment can now place both their names on the birth certificate has been welcomed by a gay couple with children. Eve Carlile describes the move as "practically really helpful, and ideologically great". "Why would they want that removed?
Mind you others are pretty silly, like the hacker who recorded a rude phone message after being left on hold for too long. Not sure why posterity needs that little tidbit.
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There are some very nasty pieces of work on that list, rapists and murderers who presumably managed to get a removal order from within prison
Do you have any reasons for your presumption, or are you just babbeling? Maybe they were falsely convicted as rapists and murderers, the ruling overturned and they do not want to be called rapists and murderers every time someone types their name into Google, for the rest of their lives. The fraction of falsely accused rapists is somewhere between 10-40%, and that stigma does not go away.
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Do you have any reasons for your presumption, or are you just babbeling?
Their convictions in a court of law would be the reason. I'm as against feminist rape culture bullshit as any rational person, but the fact remains that rapists do exist, do go to trial, and do get convicted. I don't stand in their corner.
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Recently in the news again was the story of someone who spent 23 years in jail for a rape that he didn't commit (the real rapist finished his sentence by dieing). It was the usual, a drifter or other low life in the wrong place at the wrong time and a police force/DA who really wanted a conviction. It happens enough that just because someone was convicted is not a guarantee that they're guilty. There's also been quite a few people on death row exonerated of their crimes, often by DNA evidence.
Re:Weird (Score:5, Informative)
There are some very nasty pieces of work on that list, rapists and murderers who presumably managed to get a removal order from within prison
No. Criminals are not able to get removals under EU law until their convictions are spent, and for serious crimes convictions are never spent.
The removals will have been for other people mentioned in those articles, and only for searches of their names. If you search for the murder on Google the article will still come up. The articles have not been removed from Google entirely, just as results when searching for the specific person who made the request.
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Maybe they had second thoughts and regret talking to the BBC.
Maybe they decided it wasn't such a great idea that their children go through their early years labelled as the gay fertility child by anyone who googled Mum's name.
Maybe they decided that their medical history is like anyone else's; personal and private.
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There are some very nasty pieces of work on that list, rapists and murderers who presumably managed to get a removal order from within prison, but some are just weird, like "The news that lesbian couples in England and Wales who start a family through fertility treatment can now place both their names on the birth certificate has been welcomed by a gay couple with children. Eve Carlile describes the move as "practically really helpful, and ideologically great". "Why would they want that removed?
Probably something to do with children. Like maybe they gave up on fertility treatment and adopted, and don't want the kid to think he/she was "second choice".
Mind you others are pretty silly, like the hacker who recorded a rude phone message after being left on hold for too long. Not sure why posterity needs that little tidbit.
That's exactly what right-to-be-forgotten should be about -- stopping little embarassing moments defining you in other people's eyes.
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Even weirder I just googled the name "Eve Carlile" and google turned up the BBC news story just fine - and I'm in Europe.
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Nope that comes up just fine too. Try it for yourself? This list of redacted pages do not appear to have been redacted, every one I try comes up on google search results.
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This may be pushing us all into either keeping all convinced rapists etc in public housing also after they served their sentence or we would have to offer them some way of hiding their real ID which would make finding them difficult enough for an average Joe. With progress of technology the late option will be less
Take a moment to remember... (Score:5, Funny)
,,,those who have been forgotten.
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can someone from Europe please explain (Score:5, Interesting)
why anyone thought forced delinking will ever work?
it just draws more attention to what you are trying to delink
it seems so absurd. i can't imagine a group of adults believing in or supporting such a ridiculous concept
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i can't imagine a group of adults believing in or supporting such a ridiculous concept
Watch CSPAN and you'll see just what kind of ridiculous things adults can believe in and support - what kind of serious things they won't.
Because job outfit only look for links in google (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep in mind that until end of the 90ies we HAD a way to be forgotten : nobody would go into paper clip from 10 years before and check what you did. But with google even the most minor stuff stays forever. As I mentioned here, a society which do not forget, is a society which (on average) do not forgive. And that make rehabilitation far harder. You want to live in a society which do not forget even the slightiest transgression ? Well good luck with that. I certainly do not want. Not because I am a law breaking human, but because freedom lies at the edge of the road, not in the middle. And that is not even counting what children/teenager/young adult can do stupid legal stuff which can mark them forever, like partying drunk and being in the news. Well before the 90ies unless you want into archive journal you would never know as an employer. Nowadays if somebody catch you you have no recourse google remember forever. Heck just being outted as gay, lesbian or even transsexual can bring you a lot of problem, even in western democracy like the US. Thus the right to be forgotten. BBC should really be the first to understand that. But I am guessing they would rather fuck up people than admit it. And yes I am aware that some bad people will try to abuse it. That is why normally the court should be the one deciding whether a right to be forgotten is there , or not.
Re:Because job outfit only look for links in googl (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't want to work for a company who judged me for the stupid shit I did as a teenager or if I were a homosexual.
You are entitled to a private life, but if you make something public, it's public, period. No take backs. Not because I said so but because of the nature of public information.
There is no technological fix for that and Europeans, and yourself, have a deluded "solution" to a reality and a fact of life which is not actually a problem and does not go away, ever.
Own who you are, be ashamed of nothing, including your mistakes. Anyone who would bully you into submission with sensitive areas of your life is no one you should want to associate with and merely an announcement of your own insecurity and weakness.
Re:Because job outfit only look for links in googl (Score:5, Insightful)
You are entitled to a private life, but if you make something public, it's public, period. No take backs. Not because I said so but because of the nature of public information.
For the sake of argument, what if someone with a twitter feed decides it's newsworthy and does it for you?
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Umm, for someone with a twitter feed to decide some part of your private life is newsworthy, you had to have told him about that part of your private life.
And once you tell someone something, it's no longer "private".
Remember:
Re:Because job outfit only look for links in googl (Score:4, Insightful)
So basically you are saying don't trust anyone with anything you wouldn't want made public.
In Europe, we don't want to live in a society like that, where we all distrust each other at a fundamental level and there is absolutely no expectation of privacy or ability to leave your past mistakes behind you.
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You aren't fighting the evil government or evil gossipmongers.
You're fighting the basic facts of how information works.
Europe has produced many great literary works. Such as Cervantes' Don Quixote jousting at windmills. Same absurd effort at containing information that is public. You're an absurd character fighting reality in the name of a dead era and losing.
I mean I'm sad I am going to die someday and I think it's unfair. Should I pass a law against dying and that solves the problem? Same thing with this
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then you should stop hanging around douchebags and/ or stop telling private stuff to douchebags
for once that douchebag makes your private details public, it's public
i mean an asshole can throw you out a window too. that's wrong. but just because it's wrong doesn't mean you magically didn't get thrown out a window and magically didn't die. you can't take that back
likewise, information that has been made public, stays public. if it got public by nefarious means, so what? punish the nefarious piece of shit tha
copyright and inviduals vs corporations (Score:2)
for once that douchebag makes your private details public, it's public
Same can be said for copyrighted work that is released to selected members of public, say for a fee. Despite the difficulty to enforce it since the "digital revolution", society is persisting with copyright. There is no reason to believe it will not persist with some illusion of "return to privacy" too, despite it being difficult to enforce.
Is it difficult to implement? Yes. Is it valuable? Definitely more than centuries old copyright.
It is also individuals fight against corporations. Corporations are typic
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It's nice that there are a lot of job offers where you live. In other places unemployment is high so you have a choice of either working for that company or starving. And if the company won't hire you because of what you did 15 years ago...
Before search engines, there was a natural decay of public information. While there are archives of newspapers and such, it takes a lot of effort to go through it to find whether somebody was mentioned there, unless the event in question was recent and people still rememb
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so people should be judged for stupid shit they did as teenagers and should be ashamed of that their entire life? out of fear of remaining employed by narrow minded douchebags? that's your vision of life? you're a weak piece of shit aren't you
but you are right: before the internet this info decayed. and? so what
welcome to a new age
technology changes things. life before nuclear power, the gun, the printing press: all very different
society was, is, and will be dramatically altered by new technology. i'm certa
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I agree, there is no way to undo the technology, the "right to be forgotten" cannot be enforced without really clamping down on the internet, and we don't want that.
Technology changes society, however, society always lags behind usually by decades (until the people who had the technology as children grow old). At some point in the future, the boss will disregard a 20 year old page about what the candidate did when he was 15, because there probably is a similar page about the boss himself. However, currently
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you're acting as if an asshole bigot of a boss is some new invention the internet has given vast power to. this type of person always existed, and instead leveled his moronic judgments against you based on gossip or your appearance
the real solution is not to work for asshole bigots, or go after them if you have something actionable. what is never the solution is make believing you can censor the internet just for the sake of escaping the judgment of narrow minded assholes you don't want in your life anyway.
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but certainly not a dumb law like "we can magically make public info private in the age of the internet"
That would be a dumb law, but that's not what this is. You really need to understand it before you start criticising it.
Libraries keep archives of newspapers, often on microfiche. Any articles about you are recorded there indefinitely, but they are not easy to find. Someone has to go there, have some idea of what they are looking for and where and when it find it, and then spend considerable time manually searching.
Then credit reference agencies came along and started collecting data about people and sellin
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Do you think a credit agency would really have a problem getting around your dumb law? Another search engine? A proxy? Heck: it's a big business, they can write their own damn spider that simply looks for financial personal info on the web.
So if the problem really bothers you, you pass a law: "credit agencies can't keep records past 10 years"
That's actually effective.
Not this bulshit "the info is still there but you have to use a proxy or another search engine to find it." You really think someone committed
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Agreed, if *you* make something public. Unfortunately people can and do get caught up in things they have no control over. There are some things it is impossible to prevent becoming public knowledge too, such as your previous gender or matters of public record like bankruptcies or criminal convictions. The law does however limit reporting of those things in certain ways - for example credit agencies can't report bankruptcies past a certain time limit, and employers can't ask about and don't have to be told
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if i push you out a window that's not fair. but you can't take it back either just because it's not fair. you can and should prosecute me for pushing you out a window. but you can't magically snap your fingers and magically you never fell out a window. same if i divulged your private info publicly
uhhh...
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Can you say how it is failing? Sure, the information is there
uhhh...
Keep reading...
"but it doesn't come up on Google when you search for that person's name. That's what they wanted"
So please explain how the law has failed to have the desired effect (the article is not associated with that person's name by Google).
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That's the thing that drive me nuts about this.
If something is legitimately libelous or defamatory, pretty much every country has a mechanism to have said content removed at the source. Remove the false content, and the next time Google spiders the site, it's gone from Google too. All the "right to be forgotten" is, is a method to censor the truth.
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exactly. it's not effective, at best it's a weak lame censorship that will be abused
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hey, i'd much rather have a job than not dying of black lung
hey, i'd much rather have a job than not be sexually harassed
hey, i'd much rather have a job than ever see my family and have a life
pretty moronic game you;re playing, no? a job doesn't justify abuse. if an employer is abusive piece of shit, someone should do something about the asshole employer. not roll over and take it up the ass. suit yourself, but not all of us are completely spineless
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you're not going to stay employed long with that moronic level of hotheadedness friend
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In the short term, we're still struggling with embarrassing things that we did 5, 10, even 20 years ago. But as time goes by, there is slowly growing acceptance that people do things in private that are publicly considered to be taboo, in bad taste, or crude. One of the interesting things I observed when the Fappening was in the news is that the subjects of the hacking were, by and large, not blamed. The blame was placed on whomever stole the pictures, and few calls for apologies from the various victims
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The biggest worry about people judging you because of stupid stuff on the Internet is individual private decisions, such as employers or potential dates looking you up. Public blame is not the same thing as private blame, especially in this case, where the social justice warriors are for once on the right side but their influence is limited to preventing public blame--they can't keep someone from not hiring, or dating, or renting to, a victim.
I'd also expect that the effects of the Fappening are unusually
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It wasn't that long ago that celebrities were blamed for making the sex tapes in the first place. That seems to be changing now, and for the better.
This will expand as people look around and see that we have foibles. Some people are still going to be jerks about it by not hiring someone because there's a picture of them from 20 years ago holding a joint or by hiring someone because they found the nudies posted a couple of years back and want the chance at seeing it for themselves. But past drug use isn't
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I am sorry, but this is BS. This charitable idea unfortunately rests on the false premise that Internet works the same way as press does (and thus one can control and censor it using the same means).
This is not about kids being drunk and getting a photo of them sleeping in a garbage bin posted on some news website - that sort of stuff will pretty much disappear after few years by itself, because it is expensive to maintain all this crap accessible and its publicity value has been zero few hours after it was
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well said
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Heck just being outted as gay, lesbian or even transsexual can bring you a lot of problem, even in western democracy like the US.
Or it can get you on the front page of every magazine, and revive your seriously fading celebrity.
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In fact, why not get a judgement to get the original data removed from the original web page? It would vanish from Google.
Or why not get Google to downrate web pages deemed illegal by a judgement?
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exactly
it's just such a moronic and absurd concept, forced content delinking
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Because the original content may be on a server that is outside the jurisdiction of the court. The same reason is why MPAA wants Google to remove links to torrents.
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Except in this case it's the BBC. Is it that hard to get a judgement in the UK?
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humam rights means fuck all to any but the Government apologists who think Britain should stay in Europe and pay the EC seven million pounds a day for the privilege of being told how to run itself.
It's about time we got back to talking about INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS, which trumps CORPORATE RIGHTS, trumps STATE RIGHTS and is INVIOLABLE and NOT FOR YOU TO GIVE AWAY AND NOT FOR ME TO TAKE.
Remember the maxim: anything given is worth nothing.
Also remember this one: anything given can also be taken away.
At best, human r
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why anyone thought forced delinking will ever work?
it just draws more attention to what you are trying to delink
it seems so absurd. i can't imagine a group of adults believing in or supporting such a ridiculous concept
I'm from Europe and I think this is absurd. It's not like we're one homogeneous mind that agrees on everything.
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it just draws more attention to what you are trying to delink
Name one of the people who requested de-linking. You can't, because you don't have that information. It could have been anyone mentioned in the articles. At best you can make an educated guess, but who cares? There is no list, potential employers or lenders won't get that result when searching for a particular name, so it seems to have worked pretty well.
Apart from the first guy who made the first request, can you name a single person who has done so?
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the information is still there
you think it's hard to use another search engine or use a proxy and search from an IP address in another country without the moronic law?
the law purports to make public info magically not exist. why don't we pass laws against gravity while we're at it?
so fucking stupid
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the subject we are talking about is info being censored. the subject is not who is doing the censoring. you don't make any valid points by changing the subject
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"can someone from Europe please explain"
No of course we fucking can't. It's not us who pull these ideas out of our arses.
It's not even the people we duly elected to the European parliament who pull them out of their arses.
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why anyone thought forced delinking will ever work?
it just draws more attention to what you are trying to delink
Only in a handful of cases. I'm sure I said some things on Usenet way back when that would really embarass me if they ever bubbled up to the top of the search results. I'm sure I used some very un-PC terminology about homosexuals in my younger years, and while I am ashamed of my younger intolerance, there really would be nothing to gain from publically shaming me now. I am reformed. I am no longer homophobic. So yeah... If any such comments ever started appearing at the top of the search results, I'd certai
Holy buckets! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Holy buckets! (Score:4, Informative)
How does this affect the freedom of the press? Keep in mind that the article is still on the site and findable with Google, just not for the one specific name that requested the removal. The person making the request will have to have reasonable grounds, e.g. criminals with unspent convictions can't cover up their past this way.
How exactly does this affect the freedom of the press to publish what they like on their own web sites?
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What nonsense, so historical news might as well have not existed before the internet?
How do you think journalists used to dig up past stories and such? Requiring someone to get off their fat ass to find something does not mean it does not exist. It just means you have to put some effort in, and if the digging is worth the effort? well that's your call.
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Here's the first link I found related to a politician. [bbc.co.uk]
And guess what: if you search either for the politician or his son, the article is still found (first hit on the BBC site, in fact):
* https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
* https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
So neither the politician nor his son had the search results removed. Although if it had been removed when searching for the son's name, I would understand it. While politicians are public figures and cannot have such search results removed under the ruling (because there is a public interest in those results
BBC's motto (Score:2)
Please forget history (Score:3)
My question is at what point does the right to be forgotten interfere with the need for historical record. For example, the British asking Google to forget about that wholeb Boston Tea Party thing which made them look bad. Sure this is not about an individual, but where is that line drawn?
Keep kids out of it (Score:3)
A number of the BBC stories amount to publicity-seeking parents violating the privacy of their non-censenting children by allowing them to be named as subjects in, particularly health-related, stories.
Note for parents: Children are not your property. Even if you think that publishing self-serving stories about them in the media or on the web is your prerogative they will eventually grow up and decide that you had no f***ing business so to do.
Payment (Score:2)
This is clever of BBC (Score:2)
These stories hosted at BBC will be indexed and ... require another request under Right To Be Forgotten.
Kind of a cheeky end run around the spirit (at least) of the law, it seems to me.
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https://chillingeffects.org/ [chillingeffects.org]