Does the tone and shear stupidty of Dejan's comments make anyone else just want to slap him? This whole ruling was just bad to start with and is only going to get worse. I am inclined to put up a site that documents every removale and figure out some scripted method to slip links into EU country websites in an effort to make it impossible to keep up with the removal request. Yes, I know it sounds a bit spammy. I am only thinking out loud because I am so taken aback by the idiocy on the situation.
Am I the only one who actually likes the right to be forgotten? I can understand that it's a PITA for search providers, but I honestly think that your shit just shouldn't stay with you forever.
It would be highly problematic if it could be used by public people like politicians to carefully manage their SERPs, but that is not the case, even if people like this pianist go to court with ridiculous cases.
My main objection to the "right to be forgotten" is that censorship of non-defamatory information helps unsavory people more than nicer ones.
People may Google my name and find things I don't want them to see.[1] Fortunately, I can do the same to them. Even though most people are nice most of the time, this fact incentivizes everyone to be nicer than they otherwise would be.
If we allowed people to take down results they deemed undesirable, it would give bad people fewer reasons to behave nicely. After all, they can just make search engines remove the entries they dislike.
And there's the problem inherent in all censorship: Who do you trust to determine what you're allowed to read or say?
1. Actually they might think I've been murdered, but that was a different Geoff Greer (may he rest in peace). Should I be able to get those results removed? After all, the late Geoff Greer won't mind.
The ruling also states that if the article itself is in the public interest (such as an important person being unsavoury), it cannot be removed.
Also, no, you cannot have the late Geoff Greer's article removed, because it's not you. As I understanding the ruling, you can cannot act on behalf of someone else. Particularly not one who is dead.
However, I do agree with you on the problems with implementing such a system, which is why I at least think the EU should be handling the requests and not Google. But even so, while I agree with the principle, there will always be someone abusing the system.
The definition of public interest then becomes key. I also worry that information that does not seem to be in the public interest at present could become so in the future, but will be lost instead.
First, if you think that is the case, you aren't aware of persuasive arguments for surveillance. The best arguments have to do with ensuring public safety, not creating incentives to be nice.
Second, even if that were true, so what? The costs and benefits are totally different. To use an analogy: There are arguments for organ donation that also apply to organ theft. "One person's organs can be used to save a dozen lives." That does not mean organ theft should be allowed or that organ donation should be prevented.
I think maybe it should be binary. If you want to be forgotten, then sure: you don't appear in any search results, period. You don't get to pick and choose what does and doesn't appear.
If someone has published libelous statements about you, there are legal remedies for that. If they're insufficient, those laws should be improved.
Your shit does stay with you forever. As it should. Because it's truth. Crafting your own image by using legal means to remove things you don't like presents you as someone who you are not. I find the thought of doing that to be incredibly unethical.
I've certainly posted things on mailing lists (that are likely still publicly searchable) that I regret. I was younger then, and now I'm maybe, hopefully, a little wiser. I would hope that someone seeing something from me posted in the 90s (for example) would think "oh, he was a teenager then, and he's probably a very different person now". And if not... well, I tend not to care about the opinions of people who lack critical thinking skills.
On human civilization scales, the internet is barely an infant. People aren't used to having such easy access to a variety of things about other people's lives. Once we (as a society) gain more perspective on what that means, we'll be much better equipped to make rational decisions about others based on that body of data. Everyone has things that embarrass them. Only very recently was it so easy for others to find out about a lot of those things.
> I tend not to care about the opinions of people who lack critical thinking skills.
Some of those people might be HR people, divorce judges, immigration officials, dispute arbitrators, loan authorizers, etc etc. It's hard to live off the grid when you have a family.
I do agree that we often can't control the fact that a certain person might be in a position to greatly affect our destiny. And the idea that that person may, as I put it, lack critical thinking skills in a way that really hurts us.
I hesitate to say "that's the price of social progress", because it's very easy to do so when you're not in that situation, but... to some extent I think it is. If you're that worried that your presence on something like the internet could be of great future detriment to your life, then it behooves you to be a lurker, leaving as little trace as you can, and to carefully consider what traces you do decide to leave.
And I guess part of the point I'm trying to make is that these people exist regardless. Maybe you smoked pot all the time in college. In 1970 there wouldn't be an online record of that. In 2014 a careless friend might post a picture of you smoking up. Our hypothetical person who wouldn't hire someone who ever used marijuana still exists regardless of whether or not he knows that you've smoked. 45 years ago you got lucky and there was no way for him to know. Nowadays you either don't engage in behaviors that you think might be objectionable to other people, or you just say screw it, and accept that there may be consequences.
So perhaps the question is whether we need legislation to protect us while the new internet social norms are in their infancy, or is it better to be unprotected, so that the norms change more quickly?
It's a good question, and my opinion is it's better to be mostly unprotected. There might be areas where protections make sense, say, if there's great possibility of physical (and perhaps emotional) harm. But I think these have to be pretty narrow: if it's possible to use these protections to get a negative review of your art suppressed, then it's a bad protection.
>
If someone has published libelous statements about you, there are legal remedies for that. If they're insufficient, those laws should be improved.
There are plenty of cases where someone who has a grudge ignores the law and pollutes the search results, and then persistantly ignores attempts to enforce the law. Libel and slander are not criminal offences; the police are never going to get involved and there's no chance of prison.
In that narrowly defined situation it's reasonable for search engines to respond to requests to delist. They need to protect the quality of their search results. When I search for Fred Bloggs I don't want to know what one vexatious person with a vendetta thinks.
I'm not arguing with that. But the interest here is that the search engine wants to provide quality results. The government should not be in the business of deciding what "quality results" means, at least not in the general sense. A government passing a blanket law that allows an artist to suppress honest, legal criticism is a bad law.
While libel is not a criminal offense, if you make it too expensive for someone to commit it, they will stop. Maybe there's an extreme outlier here and there who might bankrupt himself with this sort of behavior, but that's not what the law should be optimizing for.
This means that the government is not operating in accordance with its obligation to enforce the law.
This is neither an issue with the law, nor an issue with the concept behind it - posting libelous content causes financial and personal harm, and this harm must be corrected in the civil court of law.
>I honestly think that your shit just shouldn't stay with you forever.
Why does that justify compelling people to forget something under threat of fine or imprisonment?
This is not to mention the fact that this notion of a "right to be forgotten" will mostly be abused by people and groups who can afford PR agencies, not random average Joes who want to hide their shady past.
This is understandable, you don't like people to think bad things about you. But what if they don't comply and still do? What if they somehow would still remember "ah, this is the guy who 2 years ago... etc."? What if they keep records, archives, talk to each other, share their views, memories, write books, memoirs, etc.? That would be a problem. The only solution I see is to ban the concept of recording of the past, the records and the memory altogether, at least where it concerns matters that can upset somebody. If you want everybody to forget you got drunk and embarrassed yourself 2 years ago, they must do so. If they have photos, they must delete them. If they have recorded it in their journals, they must destroy them. If they talked about it - they must stop talking. If they have memories, they must forget - or at least never speak about it again. Understandable, this could be a bit of a PITA to organize and keep track of, but isn't it a worthy goal - everybody then would be able to do shit and no long-term consequences would ever follow!
How is it pragmatic? You don't hide the info, so it is still available to anyone interested, and if the interest is enough, there would be services allowing to retrieve the same info. If the interest is so low it can not support such services, there's no practical point in this system anyway, since it would be targeting a problem that barely exists. So you'd have to either ban any access to such information or engage in pointless regulation for the sake of "doing something", while achieving no result. Not that governments are strangers to such modus operandi - a lot of regulations, from War on Drugs to numerous others are proven completely useless for the purpose they are trying to achieve yet persist for decades under the guise of "if we only try a bit harder, this time surely it will work!". It won't.
The decision does not require revisionist history - you are free to include whatever details you want in articles or books. The decision is limited to allowing an individual to have material that is not of sufficient public interest to be delinked from Google to reduce it's exposure.
Presumably if you're of sufficient public interest to be the subject of works of history, you'd not even get it delinked.
Not necessarily. The estate would happily sue and prove that the descendants would suffer if certain unsavory details would come out, so they must never do. Just like copyrights and such are extended way past the life of the creator, so can be other privileges. As soon as we accept the premise that you own and can control what others think and tell about you, it does not have to stop with your death, just as any other things you own do not become unowned after you die - they just become part of your estate and then can be owned by whoever inherits it.
>Am I the only one who actually likes the right to be forgotten?
No, I like it too.
I hate letting technology (being able to do something, e.g keep tabs on everyone forever) dictate policy (we therefore should do it, let's bend over to what's possible). I also dislike internet commenters using stuff from people's 20 and 30+ year old past (or even older), as some kind of infernal unforgiving machine. Even the law, in most countries, has the statute of limitations.
We had this thing that whatever stupidity one did in its youth it was erased, and only remembered 10-20-30 years on by his parents and/or close friends at most. That might have been by accident (no ways to record and keep everything then) but it was also liberating and humane.
How do we determine whether it is 'your shit' and not someone else's? Do you have a right to erase my past if it intersects with yours? Would you have the right to erase memories from my brain if they referenced your past? Where is the line?
My right to free speech allows me to say whatever I want about anybody. There is absolutely no guarantee that I be nice or understanding or that I take into account their personal wishes.
When the government tells me that people have a right to remove embarrassing content, it's actually telling me that people have a right to restrict the speech of others.
The right to be forgotten and the right to free speech cannot coexist, because the implementation of one requires the override of another. You must choose one, but choosing both undermines the legal foundations of the modern democratic republic.
Do you believe in libel laws? Should I be allowed to publicly claim that you're a murderer unpunished?
If you answer that I should not, then you support censorship.
Every legal system in the world puts limits on free speech. Not just for defamation, but also generally for various degrees of incitement, etc.
Because we have always accepted that some speech can cause substantial harm to people without sufficient public interest to always justify it.
And this decision does not take away or infringe your ability say what you want about anybody (and you are wrong: you are not allowed to say whatever you want; depending on where you are the government is merely prevented from exercising prior restraint. The speech can still be illegal, and cause you to be punished accordingly after the fact).
What it does, is prevent a certain, limited class of non-expressive publication of pointers to expressive speech in situations where the court found that the restrictions placed on Google was outweighed by the privacy rights of individuals. The decision made clear that the original speech was not affected.
> You must choose one, but choosing both undermines the legal foundations of the modern democratic republic.
The legal foundations of no European states grants the kind of supremacy to unlimited free speech that you seem to want. And a substantial number of these republics are younger than the US. And even the US does not have the extent of free speech you seem to advocate.
Just because you are permitted to say whatever you want doesn't mean you are free from responsibility for the content of your words. Words precede action, and as such uttering words entails some share of the responsibility for the action.
My meaning is, with regards to libel, that in a theoretical sense, claiming I'm a murderer would be acceptable under free speech. The reason it is problematic is that claiming I'm a murderer will cause other people to do harm to me, that is, you share in responsibility for loss on my part.
As a result, libel laws allow me to level the field - it's not that you aren't allowed to call me a murderer, but rather that you are responsible for the unjust damage you caused me by doing so. That is why it's ok to call someone a murderer if they actually killed someone - the damage is not unjust. That is also why libel laws (at least in accordance with my ideology) should be entirely restricted to the civil court of law and not the criminal one.
I'm aware that the model of free speech I'm advocating is in some cases unrealistic (most notably in the military intelligence community). However, the concept of absolutely free speech is something that countries should attempt to reach, and choosing to give citizens the ability to suppress speech lies in direct opposition to this. Democratic states need to provide rights to their citizens so that said rights form a minimum spanning set - internal conflict between security and privacy is why the US allowed itself to reach a state of mass NSA surveillance. I don't see why EU states should encourage a conflict between free speech and the right to be forgotten.
Even though the speech people seek to suppress may cause harm to them (as with libel laws), it is unreasonable to expect a person to free themselves of accountability for their actions by blaming those who merely report on the actions. People act with the expectation that their actions will have social repercussions, and the choice of action or inaction is more powerful than the choice of speech or silence.
I understand the sentiment but strongly disagree with the cure.
We all agree that what happens in the remote past where you possibly were a different person should not affect your present (and future) you. The better solution is to have people actually think about you and put your old actions in perspective. The proposed solution is to hide your old actions under the rug, in hope that it will not affect other people's judgements. In short, make it so that critical thinking is not needed.
And _this_ is what the law will allow: Have people believe in what they see, because it has been curated for them. Whether it's a misrepresentation (Person A has been "involved" in a murder according to newspaper, where "involved" actually means "witnessed") or just hiding opinion (like the article). People shouldn't need to think. This is a really dangerous path we're following (and I'm speaking as a EU citizen)
You say that as if we're doomed, and there is no way humans can critically think. I don't see how it can't be changed. We've gone from fearing the gods and their might to believing we can do anything (not that religion is gone, but its role in our lives has been reduced a lot). We've gone from believing what kings wanted us to believe to actually reading and looking for the truth for ourselves. Don't you think it's possible to do the same, ie look for the truth in every other aspect ?
I believe it's a matter of education. It will take time, but we'll eventually get there.
I like the principle, but I disagree with the implementation. It shouldn't be Google or Bing removing search results, it should be the EU itself in cooperation with Google and Bing. Effectively, the EU decides whether or not a search result merits removal. Google has complained they lack the contextual facts (as pointed out in the article) to make an appropriate judgement.
I also find it odd that this is a case where governments are delegating what is effectively a judicial action to private companies. Because otherwise we are going to have complaints like Lazic's, which are going to the wrong people entirely. (I am also in full disagreement with Lazic, that everyone should be able to alter their search results.)
As an aside, as far as I understand the ruling, it is only for search results on the person's name as a query, not for unrelated searches that might turn up the same results.
It's a delicate balance, you can't really censor the information. Before, you basically had the fact that the information was stored in the basement of the newspaper, so you were not always nagged about your past, but the newspaper were not censored either, people could still go there.
They found this idea of scrubbing search engines as some kind of way to add resistance like going to the basement of a newspaper was a resistance, while not actually censoring the newspaper itself, because it is information and it was published. There is also this idea that even if what you did was wrong (but I guess it's also for victims) you should not be nagged about it all the time, the idea of redemption.
What about Google's right to free speech? Censoring search results is a violation of Google's right to express itself, which is just as important and legally defensible as a newspaper's right to do the same.
Free speech is not absolute in any country in the world.
In this case, the EU is trying to balance a right to free speech with privacy rights that have a history of very strong protections in Europe, on the assumption that violation of privacy rights can be a direct harm to people, and your rights to free speech does not extend to violate my rights to privacy to the extent of potentially causing harm unless there are yet other interests that factor in (such as public interest is, say, knowing whether or not a public figure is corrupt).
Further, if Google wants to make the argument that its index is expression, then it'd open the floodgates to get sued for any defamatory material, copyright violations etc. in its index. At least in Europe I doubt Google can get away with claiming its index is expression without being in for a world of hurt.
nope, 1) Google is offered a safe harbor for a lot of crap under the premise that it is not editing what it displays in the search result, hence what it displays is not the expression of a "speech" 2) the free speech is not absolute in Europe, article 10 gives some restrictions that could be imposed to free speech.
No I like it. I love the idea that an individual could put it to a corporation without putting millions. And I think there is a pure bias here from Americans. I was writing a long comment but I scrapped it, they love free speech and firearms, and there is no way to force acceptance of difference of point of view on them.
And the pianist is not going anywhere, he wrote a letter to the wrong organization (and now he's thrown under the bus). He can only scrub results on the European Google.
which is why the law asks the search engines to remove stuff from an index and not to remove the original source. They are trying to do what archival did: the information is still there, but it's not nagging you constantly.
I was being a bit snarky, apologies. But at the end of the day, we are still talking about making knowledge inaccessible. It may be necessary to protect individual privacy, but it still worries me. Each case will be about weighing the harms to the individual against the harms to the public. Powerful interests will find ways to exploit such a subtle system for their own benefit.
We are talking about protecting individual against corporations. Currently media corporation are all powerful and only big money can fight them with enough media splash to make a record straight (or do a PR white washing campaign after a crisis). This law doesn't suppress the information, it does the equivalent of forcing you to go to the basement of the newspaper to find some select personal informations concerning individual people.
Moreover the concept of free speech itself has been high-jacked by big money for bullshit (the nickname for citizen united), so I don't see how it's protecting anyone from anything, it's part of the game. Free speech was just a protection of political ideas against the government and it's mostly dead in the days of terrorism law.
The government is at least in theory acting on behalf of the people, and European countries have long had fairly strong privacy rights that actually means something.
When that right collides with the publication of information the court needs to weigh how to best protect public interest.
In this case the court decided that privacy rights for information that is not in itself in the public interest outweighs the interest of making the information easily searchable.
What exactly constitute the privacy rights for information that is already public?
I argue that an act that is reported in a newspaper does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and as a result that the right to be forgotten is distinct from the right to privacy.
More particularly, the concept of public interest is static neither in time nor is it equal across all citizens, but rights are by definition equal across all citizens. A rule that always applies except for when it doesn't is really just a venue for arbitrary decisionmaking.
I don't think most of the objections are normative (ie, free speech and firearms are good) so much as empirical (ie, the nature of the internet, or of human networking in some more abstract sense, precludes a "right to be forgotten").
Except that for most of human history, except for particularly notable events, things were forgotten relatively quickly. The number of pictures and written records was VASTLY lower, as was their accessibility.
It's a peculiarity of the current age that we can find out so much about people so easily, that trivialities are preserved in photographic quality, and that these records are preserved publicly for extended periods of time.
I think the "right to be forgotten" has always implicitly existed and that we accidentally erased it before we realized what we were doing, and only now are seeing a backlash as the effects of that choice are being felt.
I don't think that's very true. Before a few centuries ago, travel was expensive. Most people rarely strayed far from their birthplace, making them likely to interact with the same group over their lifetime. If they did something embarrassing or stupid, stories would percolate indefinitely. It cost too much to move somewhere else and start a new life.
What's worse is that back then people had difficulty discovering rumors about themselves. At least today, we can do vanity searches.
That's a terrible analogy. We're talking about the difference between a small community and digital information technology in the era of ubiquitous networks. For one, the level of detail is absurdly lopsided; we're comparing high definition audio and video with what, someone's diary at worst? The records kept are essentially incomparable. Second, there is just no comparing a small close knit community to the entire world and instantaneous access.
No one is saying that people don't have a right to their memories. Even communities have the right to remember things collectively. But imagine if you couldn't get a job in your small town because everyone whispered about you being a child molester or something. You couldn't get housing. No one would talk to you. You had to beg for food. My example is a bit extreme but it illustrates the example well because some of these things happen on a massive scale to people whose potential employers web search them.
Yeah, I think that's a good assessment. And the American part might be a belief that the internet represents a completely different age than "most of human history" (I'm not sure if people around the world think that way, but my sense is that many Americans do).
Apparently the BBC are setting up a page showing the removals. That would presumably not be indexed, but it's an interesting way to deal with it. Maybe this will become widespread if publishers keep interpreting requests as abuse.
Has Dejan Lazic not heard of the Streisand Effect? (Then again, perhaps this is a deliberate bid for additional publicity.) Does he also think European laws apply to American newspapers? This seems pretty silly...
IANAL but it might still affect their distribution of the paper in Europe.
EDIT: according to response, the law does not affect newspapers, which I guess makes sense, otherwise anyone could prevent anything negative from being published about them.
The European Union's "Right to be Forgotten" legislation only applies to search engines and link aggregators. It does not apply to newspapers, so it will not affect their distribution if they do not comply.
The Streisand Effect has an upper limit on the number of people it can affect at any time. There's only so many 'scandalous reveals' the public mind can handle at once.
Imaging the library offering a girl's diary. Or the diary of some person describing in detail how he raped her.
Now, because it causes her great emotional distress to have people reading it, she asks them to remove it from their index (or even remove it completely).
I can see irony here, as defined in Merriam-Webster dictionary:
> 3 a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play —called also dramatic irony, tragic irony
If the pianist made the review more available by action supposed to hide it, it would be ironic. Just as Oedipus parents helping to fulfill the fate by trying to avoid it.
A review of a pianist is unlikely to be irrelevant and so EU search engines don't have to remove it.
All you're seeing here is someone who has a negative search result for his name who doesn't know how (or doesn't want) to use blackhat SEO to manage his search results; and a lack of services providing whitehat SEO to make more (to his mind) relevant results rank higher.
While it doesn't appear to be the case here let's not forget that it's entirely possible for a bad reviewer to write a review that is not based on any facts.
And we know that if you're searching for a person's name you use the US version of your search engine's website.
> Leaving aside the fact that Lazic’s request is misdirected, under the ruling — it applies to search engines, not publishers, and only within the E.U...
Interesting times! I'm just glad English defamation law doesn't apply to me.
Most people are simply too lazy to run their own web crawler. I'm not sure why this is (the technology is well known), but they find the convenience of public search engines irresistible.
Of course the ruling doesn't disallow crawlers, even personal ones, to access the Post's review. It doesn't even prohibit Google from displaying the links in full, as long as the search criteria does not contain Dejan's name.
Google hardly has the right to free speech anyway. DMCA can remove links willy nilly. Even fraudulent takedown requests are processed smoothly, with little to no repercussions. It's easy to be idealistic about free speech. Yet to see the balance between people claiming harm and the people's need to know, to have seen the pendulum swung before, it's hard to get upset about this.
This is either incredibly pedantic, or incredibly ignorant. While you can not be directly harmed merely by the speech itself, you can certainly be indirectly harmed by it's continued wide public dissemination, on the basis of others reactions to it.
> and you certainly can't be harmed by a piano review. The EU has ruled wrong in this case.
The EU has not ruled that you can get a piano review removed.
Most of the times when someone prominent uses the right to be forgotten, they go from 'a slight chance to be forgotten' to 'celebrity level remembrance'
sheer stupidity, it doesn't work like that. They just fluffed the news to appeal to American readers. The news is that the guy wrote to the wrong outlet and that he can't legally do what he wanted because that would violate free speech. Good luck getting an english language newspaper publish it that way.
Yet more sheer propaganda about what the right to be forgotten actually entails.
Here's hint #1: what Google takes down under the flag "the right to be forgotten" is Google's choice, not the law. And Google wages a propaganda war against any EU privacy laws, so they'll pick the most ridiculous and damaging examples possible and claim "we have to because of the EU".
The author lazily copied Google's propaganda instead of doing her homework. Which makes the sarcastic sentence "Of course, all that balancing and fact-gathering is generally outsourced to journalists." all the more ironic.
Are you claiming it's exclusively Google's choice? So the law just States Google must have a way for you to raise issues and it's completely up to them, no government interference whatsoever, whether to comply? And just to make sure it's totally their choice, there are no potential fines or other punishments anybody can enforce as a result of them declining such requests?
