So it should only be a very short time before someone makes a "diffing" search engine that queries both the european versions and other versions and shows you the difference, thus revealing all the most controversial content about any individual you happen to be interested in, not least, the very fact they have tried to suppress the information. (I suggest it be called streisand.com). I am curious what the next step will be after that - ever more draconian laws? Canada style laws that try for world wide censorship? How far will it go?
Something along the lines of http://www.monzy.org/unsafesearch/, but for "forgotten" Euro-junk would be just the thing to send up these crazy "rights".
I find it fascinating to see the division of this topic being along seemingly national lines, i.e. European commenters seem in favor, while American commenters seem vehemently against the EU court ruling. This is somewhat of a generalization, but it does highlight an interesting phenomenon. It appears the overwhelming (?) majority of young American internet users, who have come of age in the post 9/11 USA are disturbingly willing to relinquish as many freedoms and rights, as is demanded of them. In fact, they take it one step further, in a form of self-perpetuating pseudo-cultural hegemony, they try to impose this "If you're innocent you have nothing to hide!" mentality on Americans and non-Americans alike.
The fact that global search engines often can have extremely negative implications vis-a-vis personal data retention, is one that more easily escapes those who were born naturally into the Internet age, as opposed to those who "merely adopted it". The "adopters" are usually more sensitive to the before-and-after effects, than the "naturals", usually because the naturals often lack the firsthand context with which to make informed comparisons of said effects.
A contributing, and perhaps aggravating, factor is the tendency of many (possibly younger) HNers to fall into knee-jerk behavioral patterns of vociferously defending all that is Google, from the somewhat irrational perspective of Google being All That Is Good And Holy, simply because of the corporation's trite slogan of "Do No Evil". At the very latest, the Snowden revelations and ensuing NSA scandals have shown us Google and co. are as far from sainthood as any other multibillion dollar multinational corporation.
In summary, the European little guy has scored an important victory that gives them the tools to improve their quality of life, or at the very least avoid a degradation thereof. How this is twisted into censorship of a search giant is fascinating and very revealing of other deeper and far more worrisome underlying tendencies within the very defenders of the "Mega Corp".
> It appears the overwhelming (?) majority of young American internet users, who have come of age in the post 9/11 USA are disturbingly willing to relinquish as many freedoms and rights, as is demanded of them.
I see Google's censorship as an attack on "freedoms and rights".
> HNers to fall into knee-jerk behavioral patterns of vociferously defending all that is Google
I personally hate Google, and avoid their products whenever possible. I've used Bing for a number of years, and recently switched most of my searching to DuckDuckGo.
> European little guy has scored an important victory that gives them the tools to improve their quality of life
I don't think this is an "important victory", but rather an attack on the freedom of information.
> I see Google's censorship as an attack on "freedoms and rights".
Have I misunderstood something, but isn't this exactly about giving people a right to choose about the online visibility of their name?
If that is the case, isn't it a good thing that people get to have control over what is being shown and what is not? Or is full disclosure of personal details, the full personal transparency online the Right Thing to go with?
I thought a year ago during the NSA diclosures the consensus was that people should have the right to control the information collected, stored and shown about them. I see this paralleling that indirectly.
For what it's worth and to give someone something to grab onto, I am from Europe.
>I personally hate Google, and avoid their products whenever possible.
You took my quote out of context and ran with that. I said many HNers. Not all HNers.
There is no censorship involved here. Read the EU ruling. The ruling does not prevent Google from indexing personal information. It prevents Google from permanently indexing personal information if it is irrelevant or no longer relevant. Even after said information has been removed from Google's database, it will still be available at the source that Google previously linked too. It's fallacious to pretend that information is being surpressed.
I'm pro privacy. But the law is just stupid. Its about taking information that is meant to be public knowledge (much of it being public for good reasons, eg lawsuits) and saying that the information should still exist just be hard to find. Bassicaly instead of implementing actual privacy they just outlawed effeciency. And they didn't even do that. I'm sure any one who is interested in those search results can easily just access the us google. Hell I'm sure its about to be a chrome browser extension.
We might not agree, they do provide us a great service actually. One can never have to many different opinions to consider. It seems online American opinions about what Europe should do outnumber the European opinions 10 to 1. They told us a million times what they think about it.
What do the Russians think? And the Chinese? And the Africans? No one knows? Assuming they even have an opinion about it?
The key point: unlike the old Chinese censorship warning, this notice appears on all name queries, not just queries which have actually had data removed. Thus, for better or worse, it isn't able to subvert the purpose of the law by encouraging people to search elsewhere...
On the whim of national governments and rich individuals, Google has already been censoring the search results that appear to everyone. The only thing this law does is give the little man a chance - which is good.
The idea is that we don't want businesses distributing your personal life and we don't want a defamation industry. Imagine the 2 of those combined, it would be powerful propaganda, we would all have to invest in the negative review industry just to compensate. We already have copyrights on everything else, ownership laws that apply to everything except humans. It seems fair for your life belongs to you. It would be something if I couldn't have mickey mouse on my website but could use your face for everything?
This is very bad. Google should be telling Europeans the truth about what their governments are doing. "Some results may have been removed due to EU censorship policy" would be a truthful and informative disclaimer.
Including the message only on pages that have actually been censored would be much better because then you'd know when the government has required Google to lie to you.
I like that individuals have the ability to have things that are no longer relevant forgotten about them so that their ability to have social mobility isn't compromised. I like that young people who make mistakes are now given the chance to move on, mature and change.
The opposite to this law is a view that a person can never change, and must always be held accountable for their past in their future.
No, I'm really happy this exists.
"To err is human", otherwise translated as "everyone make mistakes". Life and potential shouldn't halt when it happens.
Except this only makes information disappear from Google, not from the web. If a news site has an articule about that time you were arrested for drug dealing, it will be there and you have no right to make it disappear.
This is true for very many things, the act of making it searchable is to make it follow you into the future.
The example I used in the other conversation about this when it first emerged is a real one, I know a girl who was the victim of an attack and chose to contact the police. The attacker was young and the court scrubbed his name from public record, but the local newspaper reported the victim's name and profession. Now you have a victim with a permanent smear against her created by an easily accessible record of fact (the newspaper, not the court record). The problem with the patriarchy and an unequal society being that woman who are victims of attacks are frequently met with doubt and victim blaming, "Was it something she wore?", "Did she act in any way as to provoke it?"... and so a victim is punished by the availability of information. Her peers have remarked how they've seen it on Google, because in her profession researching your peers is what you do.
The courts aren't wrong to record things.
The newspapers aren't wrong to report things.
But neither action was intended to be a permanent cross for the person to carry.
The girl in question? Her view is that if she knew it would end up on the front page of Google for her name, she would never have gone to the police.
Now ask yourself, is that the world you want to live in? I'm very glad the EU legal system agrees that it isn't, and that the EU politicians enshrined that it isn't. It makes me glad to be European.
Is there such an EU country, where newspaper is permitted to disclose identity protected victims by officials?
> Now ask yourself, is that the world you want to live in?
I want to live in a world, where search engines do what they are supposed to do - search the internet. For the hamrful information available, authors shall be accounted responsible.
Shall we pass any law by giving colourful examples? Yes, censorship can be positive, if it protects the girl you knew, I agree, but it does not stop being censorship.
No worries, it seems such a divisive topic it's almost entertaining watching the upvotes and downvotes aggressively cancel out each other.
I didn't realise just how extreme the opinion on this is. Shame HN doesn't show this in how the votes are displayed... I get that they're not displayed... but black text vs shaded implies only positive or negative, and hovering around 1 vote with lots of up and down votes is interesting in itself.
Which is how things are in the non-digital world: you have, say, a police record, but it doesn't follow you wherever you go, attached in big flashing letters to your picture for anyone who asks "who is that?" If someone does a record check, they'll still find out--but it doesn't haunt you as "the most relevant detail to know about X."
And think about it in the longer term (talking from a Brit perspective here). In ye olden times, when everything was made of wood, people could still go down to their library and look through newspaper archives and find out stuff about what you'd done, however 'spent' the conviction. (OK, the UI wasn't great, but those were the days when local papers would reliably have loads of reports of magistrates courts, so the content was probably better. My brother and his friends, who often made an appearance, called it "Stars In Their Eyes".)
It is not illegal for newspapers to report past, spent convictions if you should make your way back into the public eye. There has never been a right to 'privacy' in this way. There still isn't, except for Google's search index.
In general, privacy laws of this kind - which we know all too much about in this country - help the powerful. (I don't notice any blacklisted trade unionists taking out superinjunctions - just Trafigura[0] covering up an ecological atrocity and rich men concealing their infidelity[1][2].)
Doesn't this match the real life societies have learned to deal with over the centuries? Your stupid mistake 20 years ago will probably be remembered by someone. Someone might even have a picture of it. But it will not be the first thing a stranger will learn about you.
Some asshole might be screwing lots of businesses, suing them, being a patent troll, etc. Let's call him - made a fortune on loopholes and f other businesses, dodgy/illegal deals, and so on.
And you will never know whom you face, because apparantly that he has a right to prohibit others learning about his wrong-doings.
That's the same "think of the children" kind of logic that governments use to justify PRISM et al.
So the real question is, do we want our private lives permanently documented for all to see; or do we deserve some level of privacy knowing there's a legitimate risk that a very small number of people will abuse those rights?
Personally I have the opinion that bad people will always find ways to do bad things; so I'd rather not punish the majority of good people out there just on the off chance that we can catch a couple of extra bad people.
I agree mostly for the same reasons. I also think it is a pretty pessimistic view on humanity that this ruling will overwhelmingly used for "evil" and not for "good". I'd rather let a few people go undetected, than punish the majority.
It sometimes sounds like in pre-Google time we were living in a dark age of lawlessness where we were not able to scrutinized everyone thanks to the magic panopticon.
> "… because apparantly that he has a right to prohibit others learning about his wrong-doings."
That's not what the ruling was about. If we are to discuss this ruling it would help if people tried to understand it a little better, rather than claiming 'censorship' at every turn.
I'm not a fan of the ruling, but Given the nature of the ruling, I think it's unlikely that information like this would be removed from Google's index.
Nothing about the judgement denies you this (did you read it?).
If you are a European citizen then you have whatever are the rights granted you by your country and wider EU law to request information about other citizens at the moment in time that you make the enquiry.
It might be that this grants you access to past acts, and it might be that this does not grant you access to past acts. And in the vast majority of cases the person you are requesting info about doesn't determine what you can access, the law does.
The law already does dictate whether past acts are relevant to you or not.
It's the timeliness that is important here, not who says what. Time allows people to move on with their lives and put some aspects of their past behind them (where it's the right thing to do for the rest of society).
Google failed here, because they accessed information at the time they were able to do so, but then permanently stored it and made it available. The judgement tells Google not to do this (the make available step), so that the enquirer needs to go to the source of the data and ask "at that moment in time", and thus whatever laws apply to deny or grant you this access is applied. That is all... your rights are unaffected and all the person being enquired about did is say "you should go back to the source to ask this".
The EU ruling is not about publishing, so your comment is a non sequitur. The EU ruling concerns Google's search index. That's something completely different.
Is tying up sometime, stabbing him on the stomach and beating his head with a hammer past of those mistakes that young people make? Because an European Court has already decided that the murderer also has a right to be forgotten under this law.
You mustn't judge a law only by its best results, but by all of them, and particularly by its unintended consequences.
A murder or felony is never spent under rehabilitation acts and thus the status of it never changes or expires. The judgement addressed the relevancy of information according to time, and time doesn't make murder less relevant. Of course Google would be fine to continue to return this in their results. Did you read the judgement?
"Google should be telling Europeans the truth about what their governments are doing."
What does private persons being able to censor searches of their own name have to do with the different censorship policies of European countries? These censorship policies, e.g. Piratebay blockades or secret child porn lists which when uncovered often also contain porn of young-looking adults, are also widely discussed in mainstream news of the countries in question, so saying that people are not informed about it is, well, misinformed.
Or are you referring to something else, some secret censorship, of which proof is difficult to obtain so it must be true?
You are only considering the censorship aspect, and seem to be ignoring the privacy aspect. When people call this EU policy censorship, I can't help thinking that they consider all forms of privacy protection as censorship.
And I see including the message only on affected pages as a kind of circumvention of the court ruling, because then the privacy of the individual is not really protected. Seeing such a warning only on an affected individual's search page would prompt searchers who are not already aware of any issue to look deeper, and probably find the information. (Which is why you want this I guess, since you seem to dislike the court ruling, and this would effectively circumvent it.)
Google should be telling Europeans the truth about what their governments are doing.
How is the current notice not telling the truth about what the EU is doing? You mean you think they should make a value judgment, which is a different thing.
Personally, I don't mind calling it censorship - I'm wary about this law too - but it would be hypocrisy after allowing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pages to be censored by just sending a DMCA takedown, without calling it the same.
> "... when the government has required Google to lie to you."
Google already decides what to show you and we have little visibility as to how that decision is made (there's even an entire industry that tries to game it). To imply that that those search results are somehow 'pure' or better represent 'the truth', is completely ridiculous.
No one is making the claims you're refuting. If you don't like Google's results then you can use a different search engine. The issue is that the government is censoring information. You can't fix that by using a different search engine because the other search engine is presumably subject to the same law.
The government is not censoring information. The information is still available at the source. The government is preventing Google and other search engines from permanently indexing personal irrelevant or no longer relevant information. I am beginning to get the impression, most commenters who are against the ruling barely bothered to even read it properly before forming an opinion.
Information is not being censored. An expiration date is being put on private, irrelevant/no longer relevant information. Your failure to recognize this simple fact, does indicate two things: you either didn't read the EU ruling, or you read and fail to grasp its meaning.
Who the heck defines what is relevant or for how much time a search engine can index some information available? When they are forcing to hide them they are censoring the information.
Your failure to recognize the simple fact does indicate two things: you either didn't read the EU ruling or you read and fail to grasp its meaning.
The government isn't censoring information here, citizens are.
Any explicit mention of "there is censored information" would mean Google are back in court.
I honestly doubt any big scandal can be hidden by removing it from Google. Scandals spread virally, ear to ear (i.e. social networks, digital or not). This is more useful so embarrassing or false information can't prevent normal folks from getting a job and so on.
The government is absolutely the force of censorship here. These requests to be forgotten only have any teeth because the government backs them with its ability to punish Google if they fail to comply with them.
Yes, and the government has teeth because it is backed by its citizens. You could probably argue that the main force from governments comes from police and other armed force, but this is not what found their legitimacy. And most people in Europe, for historical and deep-rooted cultural reasons, seem to be in favor of the ruling. So all is well!
The government has teeth because it ultimately has the threat of violence over the governed. That's what "law enforcement" is.
A government's legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed, but its power comes from the threat of force. If that wasn't true, then there would be no need for government, since people could just ask nicely for what they want and receive it without any need to coerce others into doing it under threat of forced deprivation of assets or liberty.
