Defending the Right to Be Forgotten

http://jacquesmattheij.com/defending-the-right-to-be-forgotten

by pilif • 11 years ago

54 136 11 years ago

seren5• 11 years ago

I also agree with the right to be forgotten principle.

However regarding its current implementation, I don't necessarily agree with the fact that private entities are the one judging the requests (and they never asked for it!). If it is some sort of legal requirement, in my opinion, it should be reviewed by some kind of judge, administrative body or peers, that would apply consistently the rules.

Finally regarding the EU vs Global application of the rule, I have to side with Google : you can't comply globally with every specific request from every country or sensibility, because it would mean banning a lot of things (from blasphemy, homosexuality to various disputed historical events, or territories...). I can't see that working practically.

icebraining13• 11 years ago

The EU isn't asking Google to block it globally, it's asking Google to block it to all of the EU, regardless of domain.

The fact that Google is unable or unwilling to filter Google.com results for particular countries is not the EU's problem.

toyg2• 11 years ago

That's not how the internet work, and you know it. If the only thing standing between me and an uncensored google is a cheap vpn, then the French Courts are meaningless.

grp• 11 years ago

It's working pratically in the case of DMCA... Am I not the owner of my privacy? My digital life isn't copyrighted? It's weird.

kuschku2• 11 years ago

That’s an interesting idea.

Just claim copyright on your name and then DMCA the fuck out of all these sites, including Google.

You get the same effect as the right to be forgotten (probably even more disruptive, as this solution also works for companies) but Google has to apply it internationally.

And, the worst thing, many companies actually use DMCA to ban bad reviews already.

nthcolumn3• 11 years ago

QUESTION: Why should you have 'the right to be forgotten'?

icebraining13• 11 years ago

Technically, because the EU countries are sovereign and can decide what rights their own citizens should have.

*EDIT: wrong word

tremon4• 11 years ago

Because all your ancestors had it. It's a natural right, which stems from the abundance of new information generated every minute (and the brain's incapacity to contain all of it) and the inability to keep detailed records immediately accessible.

That situation has changed with the combination of web 2.0 and search engines, so now we need laws to enforce the old, natural situation while we (as a society) work out in which direction we want to go.

johnsea• 11 years ago

Why wouldn't you (Google) be able to comply globally?

And as I understand it, it wouldn't mean banning, as you mentioned, blasphemy, homosexuality etc. but it's the right to be forgotten for a natural person. E.g. ask to remove certain statements about oneself (in case you are an 'unremarkable' person).

Of course this all is not black and white and details have to be discussed / fighted about.

jamiemchale2• 11 years ago

At what point are you remarkable enough to lose the right to be forgotten? What counts as being in the public eye? Do you have to desire to be in the public eye?

How do you manage the case of an unremarkable person removing something, then becoming remarkable enough to lose that right?

minot• 11 years ago

Is the woman (who I shall keep unnamed) who tweeted about the people in front of her making jokes remarkable? Are the people she tweeted about remarkable? Could the woman ask to take down all articles surrounding the issue? Could the people she tweeted pictures of get the tweet taken down (assuming she hasn't already done so)? Could the people have every single website that has presumably scrape or screenshot twitter delete their archives?

To me, the simplest way to fix this is to throw out the right to be forgotten. Nobody has a right to be forgotten. The simplest implementation may not be the best but at least this is achievable.

ominous2• 11 years ago

There is no right to be forgotten in the real world. If anything, damnatio memoriae[0] was a punishment, not a privilege. Just as well, you can't ask for world population to forget a nursery rhyme, or me to forget I saw you riding a Segway. The internet is part of the real world. Everything happens in the real world, 'IRL' has been deprecated.

People (and the sub class 'legislators') should accept that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae

marrs8• 11 years ago

This is why we have courts, to answer these sorts of questions on a case by case basis.

qznc2• 11 years ago

Exactly. It is similar to "what is 'fair use' of copyrighted material?"

jamiemchale2• 11 years ago

I agree with the other commenters here - it can be a bit 'fuzzy', which is disagreeable to people who like definite answers. Case by case is probably a good way of tackling it. The cases, however, do need to be held in reference to the law, and those laws need to be appropriate for the scope and scale of our communication technology.

If we are arguing that someone needs to be 'remarkable' then I'd be interested in what people think counts as remarkable. You may be remarkable in a certain community, job or geography, but not in others.

nhaehnle• 11 years ago

Such questions are messy and fuzzy, which means that technical people often get terribly hung up about them. The important thing to remember is that those questions aren't new. Laws about libel and slander, about insults, about a person's right to their image, and much more have existed for a long time. When there are disputes, court cases happen. As a result, our understanding of what is accepted and what isn't gets refined over time. It goes so far that as society changes, the interpretation of laws changes along with it.

In the end, these things mostly work, and that's good enough. Most importantly, most people feel that it is better than refusing to have such rules just because they may be fuzzy.

sergiosgc3• 11 years ago

The logic fails on this premise:

On the other hand, from the view of an individual that has done something wrong at some point in his or her life and that has through either a fine or a jail sentence paid their debt to society it is kind of annoying that they’ve been declared pretty much un-employable by google or one of their lesser competitors.

The error here is in the behaviour of the society in general. If you use the right to be forgotten as the correction mean, then you prevent society from evolving and changing this wrong behaviour.

We are entering an era of increasing information, society needs to adapt, and we must allow it to adapt, painful as it may be.

lagadu6• 11 years ago

We are entering an era of increasing information, society needs to adapt, and we must allow it to adapt, painful as it may be.

I've a nagging feeling that I've misunderstood your post somehow, if so let me apologize in advance for the remainder of my post:

That's exactly what society is doing: adapting. Previously information wasn't as accessible as it is nowadays so society adapted to the new situation, in this particular case by enacting laws that further protect people's privacy.

sergiosgc3• 11 years ago

No. The right to be forgotten law is not an adaptation, it is an attempt to cling on to the past.

In the past your personal history was difficult to dig. Nowadays it is archived on the Internet for anyone to search and read. These laws try to emulate the past environment in the new information age.

Instead, I think we should let information flow. People will adapt to having lots of information available, and the effect of negative signals, that people are so afraid of today, will probably be minor. As an example: who cares if you smoked pot in college when 60% of people also have an online record of smoking pot.

vidarh2• 11 years ago

A lot of law exist as a recognition that society in general when people are left to their own devices can behave in ways we fairly generally agree are wrong, and that we know from experience we're not showing signs of evolving away from.

sergiosgc3• 11 years ago

True. We are not, however, far along the road of having our lives exposed online for all to see. We're certainly not far enough to "(...) know from experience we're not showing signs of evolving away from [wrongful behaviours]".

stingraycharles2• 11 years ago

I would like to add a few points to the discussion:

* from my experience with the Dutch cookie law, the interpretation is that if you serve or target a Dutch audience, you need to comply; it would only make sense if the same metric is used for the Right to Be Forgotten;

* one interesting moral dilemma I have is whether this right to be forgotten should also apply to the audience in a different country (USA, for example). In other words, when someone from France requests a removal of a search result which was found on a US server, would this still be visible to people from the USA ? I think the answer to this should be yes, according to the laws that currently exist, but would allow someone who really wants to have "unfiltered" results (say, a recruiter) to simply use a VPN or proxy server to circumvent the law.

All in all, an important but difficult topic to discuss.

daurnimator• 11 years ago

* from my experience with the Dutch cookie law, the interpretation is that if you serve or target a Dutch audience, you need to comply; it would only make sense if the same metric is used for the Right to Be Forgotten;

The first question is going to be "or else what?". Outside of the USA, Ireland and the UK, firms are going to simply choose not to operate there; but due to the nature non-discriminatory nature of the internet, their services will be available there anyway. There's not much that (e.g.) the Dutch government can do, and trying to fight it with blocking will just end up turning themselves into some sort of internet backwater; which I don't think anyone wants.

stingraycharles2• 11 years ago

You're missing the point I was trying to make: Google wanted to implement the Right to be Forgotten only on the .fr domain, which seems like a cheap trick. The way legislation works around this is by simply saying "if you serve people from our country, you obey our laws", which makes sense.

Also, both this law and the cookie law are EU-wide laws, and I don't think Google will be retreating from all EU countries any time soon. That's how these things work when you're a small country, you work together with others and suddenly they take you seriously.

nthcolumn3• 11 years ago

Why should you have 'the right to be forgotten'? And why should it only be Google that has to do this?

edit:Having to click 'accept cookies on every site' is such EU nonsense too - does anyone really think you can't be tracked without cookies?

mike-cardwell• 11 years ago

BTW, if you want to get rid of all of those annoying EU cookie warnings, there is a filter list compatible with uBlock Origin and AdBlock here:

https://github.com/r4vi/block-the-eu-cookie-shit-list

V-27• 11 years ago

That's nice, but I'd be more happy if I could block people who come up with these brilliant ideas from living off my taxes...

lagadu6• 11 years ago

Why should you have 'the right to be forgotten'?

Why should anyone have any rights? Rights are granted by sovereign nations to their citizens. Sometimes (and this is a good example, the US "right to bear arms" is another good one) different nations give their citizens different rights. When these rights are given by democratically elected governments, it's fair to assess that the people collectively decided they wanted said rights and enacted them.

ChristianBundy2• 11 years ago

But these rights almost always have a philosophical justification – they aren't just things that we want, they're bigger than that.

rbehrends• 11 years ago

edit:Having to click 'accept cookies on every site' is such EU nonsense too - does anyone really think you can't be tracked without cookies?

The actual text of the directive refers to "the use of electronic communications networks to store information or to gain access to information stored in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user". This includes, but is not limited to cookies.

I'll also add that the use of the annoying "implied consent" mechanic that many member states tolerate (probably in order to not scare away advertising money) is not generally sufficient to implement the "right to refuse" demanded by the directive.

avar2• 11 years ago

The article brushes aside the major issue with how the French are trying to enforce this, which is that the French government is asserting that its law should apply to all global properties of an international corporation simply because it has a subsidiary operating in France.

A quote from Google on the matter:

    "we respectfully disagree with the idea that a national data
    protection authority can assert global authority to control the
    content that people can access around the world."

The author brushes this aside with the assertion that:

    "search engine results aren’t ‘free speech’ to begin with in my
    opinion, they’re re-hashings of someone else’s speech."

And doesn't address the inherent problem with a global company being subject to the combination of the censorship regulation of all the countries in which it operates.

What is Saudi Arabia decides to start punishing Google because its image search shows "revealing" images of women, is that just fine because search engine results aren't free speech anyway, and any nation on earth should be able to make laws about search results that apply globally?

icebraining13• 11 years ago

I don't think that France wants to block the results globally, they just want Google to block the results from French connections. The problem is that Google doesn't block those results if the French user goes to Google.com instead of Google.fr.

Besides, the ruling only applies to information about EU citizens, so a better analogy would be if Saudi Arabia wanted to block revealing images of Saudi women.

tremon4• 11 years ago

Why shouldn't the results be blocked/removed globally? If the data subject is a french citizen and the publication is from a french newspaper, why shouldn't the effect be global?

mattmanser• 11 years ago

Google collect this data on French soil, and then export it abroad.

Why is it so hard to understand that the condition to allowing them to collect the data in the first place is that they respect the local law about that data?

jbob2000• 11 years ago

Interesting thought about data being exported, I had never looked at it that way. From the French perspective, data is like a new "resource", and Google is the mighty data baron, in the era of the "data rush".

marrs8• 11 years ago

I don't understand the problem. What would be wrong with a country punishing Google for breaking the law in that country?

ChristianBundy2• 11 years ago

Because the malicious server that's publishing revealing photos of women isn't in Saudi Arabia, it just happens to be connected to Saudi Arabia.

belorn• 11 years ago

People who owns or works at a global company should be treated as everyone else with no special treatment or consideration. If you break the law outside the boundaries of a countrey, there are rules defined in treaties on how to proceed. France could for example issue a international arrest warrant and demand extradition of the site operator, in the same way that US is doing to the owner of MegaUpload. Alternative, they could do as many other nations and ignore the people who operate a website they find illegal, but then block the offending website like nations has done with the pirate bay.

The question is then, what do you do with people who puts up drive-by malware on websites. Is that something for a international arrest warrant, even if you normally deal with illegal websites by blocking? Is operating such site different from operating some other kind of illegal website? Should we just give computer criminals a free pass from arrest warrants in order to avoid putting global companies under the combined law of every country in the world?

Personally I find that this to be such a complex issues that it would be better if there was new treaties that addressed which kind of crimes should be enforced globally, and in what ways.

planetjones• 11 years ago

I know of many contractors in the UK who registered a LTD Company. Since then they have taken permanent jobs so dissolved the company. What's left on the internet if you google their name is their personal details and home addresses. Companies House say there is nothing they can do because the company has been dissolved. However, companies house have sold the data to hundreds of other companies who splatter this private information all over the Internet. These other companies have no processes in place for hiding private information.

IMO this is not acceptable and a good application of the right to be forgotten principle. If companies house were not so greedy in selling the data to companies which employ heavy SEO tactics to get hits, the problem would not exist.

ebbv4• 11 years ago

The problem with the "right to be forgotten" is it's like a "right to have a nice day." It sounds great in principle and certainly nobody will say that people shouldn't have nice days, but any actual implementation requires the elevation of one person's rights over another. And that's not acceptable.

lagadu6• 11 years ago

requires the elevation of one person's rights over another. And that's not acceptable.

I'm sorry but that is senseless. Elevating certain rights over others is effectively the basis of any society. To use a crass example: it's widely accepted that your right to not be assaulted is elevated over another's right to assault you.

nailer2• 11 years ago

Does the person who assaulted the other person in your scenario have a right for any record of it to be removed from the internet?

ebbv4• 11 years ago

What the hell are you talking about? There is no right to assault people. Talk about senseless...

I'm talking about actual rights, not fictitious insane rights like a right to punch people.

Tomte3• 11 years ago

Most laws and regulations "elevate one person's rights over another". Most basic and human rights conflict with other basic and human rights. That's inherent.

We call one solution "practical concordance" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practical_concordance).

The problem is that Americans in discussions with people from other countries usually take "free speech trumps everything" for granted, which is a local peculiarity that no other legal tradition I know of is sharing.

ebbv4• 11 years ago

Most laws and regulations "elevate one person's rights over another". Most basic and human rights conflict with other basic and human rights. That's inherent.

This just simply isn't true. Most rights do not violate anyone else's rights. My right to privacy, right to fair trial, etc. all do not require any violation of your rights. Similarly my to free speech doesn't violate any of your rights. I cannot violate your right to privacy using my right to free speech unless either you have already violated it yourself by releasing your information, OR I have committed a crime, in which case the crime has violated your rights, not the free speech.

But a right to be forgotten for me necessitates that if you have information on me publicly accessible on the web, your site has to be hidden or removed. That's elevating my right to be forgotten over your right to free speech.

medecau• 11 years ago

The Right to be Forgotten if enforced globally will create a blackmarket for this type of information.

Downloading copyrighted material is illegal. Technical solutions exist and individuals are making money off of it. Buying drugs is illegal too. Solutions exist and individuals are making money off of it.

Do not fool yourselves, you won't be forgotten.

icebraining13• 11 years ago

Just like any law that prohibits stuff that isn't easily enforced.

seren5• 11 years ago

Practically, the right to be forgotten will only diminish the ease of access to information, but won't remove them altogether.

For example, a landlord can quickly Google a potential tenant. But I don't think he would try to go to a dark web black market, where he would have to pay in bitcoin some shady people, just to dig something in its past.

It is probably sufficient to "protect" people in most of their everyday interactions.

marrs8• 11 years ago

Not if you have a stalker who is willing to pay money to find dirt on you, anyway.

vidarh2• 11 years ago

The point is not to actually be forgotten, but to create a limited barrier against casual discovery.

In Norway basic income tax information is publicly accessible, and have been "forever" at the tax offices. This was considered important for accountability, while the limited access was considered to make it an acceptable loss of privacy. With the advent of the internet this information was suddenly available online, and "everyone" looked up their friends and neighbours. Suddenly the privacy impact was drastically different, and recently there has been new restrictions added to find a balance more in line with the original.

This is what the right to be forgotten is about too: Practices that previously had little privacy impact, and public benefits, now have vastly different privacy impact due to the internet. As a result we need to find new balances. In some cases the benefit of the information will outweigh privacy considerations. In others they won't.

Even then, so far EU courts have made it clear that the original publication is protected: Nobody has been given the right to have information wiped from newspaper archives, for example. But indexing and making that information extremely easily available is a separate issue.

There's no reason for a black market: The information is still there and easily accessible for those specifically looking for that information. It is just not pushed in front of someone "just" doing a regular search for someones name.

nthcolumn3• 11 years ago

Being downvoted just for asking a question is not cool. Can somebody please tell me the/your argument(s) for a 'right to be forgotten' or state the 'right to be forgotten principle.'?

nevinera2• 11 years ago

This whole concept is ludicrous.

I can understand why it appeals to people - their sense of unfairness is triggered, and that is a useful heuristic for finding unjust behavior.. but the actual implementations discussed amount to "make it like it used to be". On the surface it seems like you can design something that might work.. but the trick is, it'll involve a ton of fiddly bits of law. Those fiddly bits are things that lawyers (and therefore corporations and rich people) are very good at playing with, which will inevitably result in a evolving double-standard, just like in finance, health-care, politics, and employment law.

There is a form of the 'right to be forgotten' that makes total sense. Your creations - your journal, your twitter feed, your facebook notes and photo blog - these belong to you in a sensical way, and determining who has access to them might be a reasonable right you possess (though I'm unaware of any legal system that enforces that right).

But the conceptions of this 'right' I hear discussed all hinge on some variant of 'noteworthy' - that's because a moment's thought of the obvious approach tells you "wait, that will gag the news services!", which we've trained ourselves to think of as representative of goodness and openness. But 'noteworthy' is a context-based definition! The news that is noteworthy to one group is not to another, and that distinction is inherent in society - we can't wrap a semantic game around to solve the problem.

The reality is that the nature of accessible information is changing, and society will need to change with it. It's hardly the first time technology has forced society to change! The right to be forgotten is the right to exist in the world circa 1960 forever.

qznc2• 11 years ago

Your creations - your journal, your twitter feed, your facebook notes and photo blog - these belong to you in a sensical way, and determining who has access to them might be a reasonable right you possess (though I'm unaware of any legal system that enforces that right).

That would be "Copyright".

nevinera2• 11 years ago

Would be, if copyright were implemented that way. But it's not - you signed over the right to control the stuff you put on Facebook as soon as you wrote it.

toyg2• 11 years ago

Yeah. My thought was "RTBF is nice but it doesn't scale well". It will end up so that friends of Zimbabwean dictators can force search engines to "forget them" but shoplifting marks people for life.

Even simple parameters are not that simple. Age-based thresholds, for example, would likely ensure family connections and privilege are "forgotten". The fact that one was a stupid teenager doing a stupid thing might be forgettable; but the fact that one got out of trouble thanks to Dad's friends should remain visible. This is impossible, no matter how you slice it.

xefer• 11 years ago

What is the motivation behind his affectation of spelling "google" with a lower case "G"?

jacquesm• 11 years ago

Does there have to be a motivation? I'll update the article.

Ok, done. And it wasn't all the cases, just a couple that I missed.

Thanks for the hint!

lagadu6• 11 years ago

Completely unrelated to the article: your post made me wonder whether "to google", as a verb, was accepted by any dictionaries and if it'd be capitalized or not. According to Merriam-Webster it's indeed accepted as a verb and is not capitalized (though they say it often is)[1]

I was just curious and wanted to share :)

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/google

yummybear• 11 years ago

Even with the rules the author speaks of the entire law is still one big, stinking gray area:

- Should single owner corporations be treated as corporations or persons? A singer with his own company in his own name might want an article about him removed. - Should a low level government employee be able to have a forum rant about his handling of a case removed? What if the mishandling of a case wasn't the employees fault? - Can a corporation get (pay/threaten) another person to remove an article if that person is mentioned in the article? - What level of politician should be unable to have a link removed? Member of a political party? City counsilman in some small town? - Does the article about a politician have to be about politics? What about a personal/non-work related link about a politician? - Famoust pianists shouldn't be able to have a review removed, but what constitutes a 'review'? - What about people who don't want to be in the public eye - it's not always their choice? - So EU's laws should apply everywhere - what about Iran's? Why are they different?

This just scratches the surface.

golemotron• 11 years ago

It's really 'The Right to Pretend to Be Forgotten.'

Google isn't the only search engine or gateway to the web. Every year there are more avenues.

If the EU were serious they'd force newspapers to edit and republish back issues - but they're not.

tremon4• 11 years ago

A citizen of the EU can also ask a newspaper to remove online articles about him, and in fact the requests usually start there. Why that doesn't apply to hardcopies has also been discussed at length.

Newspapers are not required to retroactively publish their articles, because the EU directive is about data accessibility, not about rewriting history. The EU is simply codifying that the natural shelf-life of (newspaper) articles also applies to online content.

Yes, you can still find those articles if you're willing to spend the effort. Search engines removed the effort requirement, and the EU decided that this placed a disproportionate burden on their subjects' personal lives.

WhatsName• 11 years ago

If you look at the fact, that Google CEO Eric Schmidt actually recommends to teenagers, to change their name at the age of 18 just to escape the online artefacts of their young years[1], there are actually strong arguments to have a "right to be forgotten".

As we are moving forward to a society, where everything we do is shared online, not only by us but also by our friends, we suddenly loose the control over how we are portrayed. Of course there is the argument that this has been true with classic media, but from personal experience you always have the chance to rerecord something you said on a interview if it's not live and I pre read a majority of all print articles and interviews, because newspaper have high quality standards and try hard to get everything right.

As copyright holders are (quite successfully) lobbying to enforce their rights to their content globally, we as a society should enforce our rights on how we are portrait globally. This should not be exclusive to europeans and european cyber space, everyone should enjoy the freedom to decide which parts of his past should be forgotten.

[1]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/16/google-ceo-eric-sch...

maxerickson• 11 years ago

That's not quite what he said:

Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites.

"I mean we really have to think about these things as a society," he adds. "I'm not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things," he says.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487049011045754232...

ikeboy12• 11 years ago

Honest question: why doesn't google just stop serving France for a day, with a message such as "we can't provide service to you because France is bothering us, contact your (whatever the French equivalent of Congressman is)"? Or at least do what they did with SOPA and put a link on the homepage.

Does anyone think that wouldn't work, or that the cost to Google would be too much? I don't think France would be as willing as China to part with Google.

seren5• 11 years ago

Think of the impact in term of image.

Would you be ready to use a company service that is willing to switch off its services, even temporarily, when they don't agree with the local law? Using your users as hostage, is a very bad way to create goodwill.

ikeboy12• 11 years ago

So they could just put a link on the front page, then.

icebraining13• 11 years ago

Because they'd get as much, or more popular opposition as support. SOPA was seen as a corporations vs people issue; this isn't.

And even from those who don't particularly like the Right To Be Forgotten, many would not take kindly to an American company trying to teach us how we should organize our society. Anti-capitalism, and anti-American-imperialism are still strong ideas in Europe.

ikeboy12• 11 years ago

And even from those who don't particularly like the Right To Be Forgotten, many would not take kindly to an American company trying to teach us how we should organize our society.

This isn't saying "organize your society like this", it's saying "we refuse to operate under these laws we view as restrictive, so as a society, decide whether you prefer to have these laws, or have Google". They have leverage, why not use it?

As for popular opposition, their case is that they shouldn't need to censor things around the world that are only illegal under French law. That seems likely to be well supported (especially if the alternative is "we can't use Google at all anymore").

ddoolin2• 11 years ago

Does the Right To Be Forgotten apply to those citizens (French in this case) that have done or had bad thing happen in other places, outside of their home country? What if that French citizen goes to e.g. Korea and, I don't know, bad mouths a local politician in a blog post that maybe ends up as a local scandal as well? The person is probably still "unremarkable." Citizens of other countries that haven't enacted such laws or agreed to the removal have a right to that knowledge, then.

My example isn't great but hopefully you get what I'm saying.

columbo• 11 years ago

I have a newspaper clipping from when a car hit me when I was 5 years old... the dark truth of the matter was I hit the car by bolting across the road and smacking my head into the passenger side door as it was trying to drive through an intersection. This little page 6c clipping is all that exists of that moment. No cameras, videos, blog or twitter posts.

If that happened today the driver's name might be permanently searchable and could even cause problems when looking for a job "They hit a 5 year old, that doesn't sound like the type of person we'd want to hire as a delivery driver."

Maybe we can't fix this problem, or maybe it isn't a problem at all but just something we should accept. One thing is certain, we've never been in a situation where everything was recorded so thoroughly before. Can we adapt?

llamallamallama2• 11 years ago

The EU already has laws regarding the correctness of information which protect against keeping and reporting inaccurate information. We also have laws which protect your right to a certain level of privacy.

The only valid reason for the right to be forgotten is because those existing laws are not enforced - news outlets can print falsehoods and leaked celebrity nudes, companies can publish data they know is outdated, and laws that exist to punish them for these things are not enacted.

If such laws were to be enforced, what need is there to be forgotten? Only factually true public scandals seem to remain, and we have laws to protect their existence (freedom of the press, etc.) for a reason.

icebraining13• 11 years ago

It's not about "public scandals", it's about small reports that got printed on page 34 twenty years ago on a regional newspaper, and that would have been history if Google didn't pull it out when you search for the person's name.

The landmark case for this issue was Costeja: in 1998, a guy had some debts to Social Security, which forced the sale of some of his property to get reimbursed. More than a decade later, what would have been a record in a library basement, now appears as one of the top results when you search for his name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Spain_v_AEPD_and_Mario_...

llamallamallama2• 11 years ago

I apologise, "public scandals" was poor phrasing. My point was that the right to be forgotten aims to limit/remove access to information that is legally publicly available.

In the Costeja case the court ruled that Google could be blocked from displaying the information on the grounds that it was no longer relevant (and did so under existing data protection laws, even if I believe that their application of those laws was misguided). The court also ruled that the newspaper could not be forced to remove the information.

What bothers me about the right to be forgotten is that difference. The information was accurate and legal, but Google displaying that information was not. Why the split? If the information was truly irrelevant, why not have the newspaper remove it (and solve the Google issue in the process)? Why only Google (especially in the wider right to forgotten laws)?

zimbatm2• 11 years ago

It might be naive but wouldn't it be easier for the individuals to change their name ? It's like burned HN accounts, you don't keep the karma but a new account gives you a fresh start.

_petronius• 11 years ago

Unfortunately, as a general solution, this doesn't really work. The enormous paperwork hassle aside, in some jurisdictions (like Germany), you can't change your name except in very limited circumstances (I think here the situations are marriage, naturalization, or you can demonstrate some hardship from it, like being named "Assbutt McGee" or whatever).

zimbatm2• 11 years ago

In either case some change to regulation seem to be necessary though. "can demonstrate some hardship from it" could be extended to the right to be forgotten.

1arity• 11 years ago

Before delving into a view on the case for a "right" to be "forgotten", I want to touch on some points about the article, the legal aspect, and some meta points.

Regarding the article, I disagree with the "evil corporation" test, and also disagree with the "unremarkable person" test. These test seems too specialised, and too representative of a particular worldview, to be of general applicability or usefulness.

Legally, it is an exciting and fascinating case, and really emblematic of the present. Given their history, it's cool that France is the nexus where this is going on. I'm fascinated to see what the courts adjudicate and what the enforcement results are.

At a meta level, making regard to Google's strategy, if I ran Google, I would never ever have given in to any of this, because as I will come to, this is not really about a “right to be forgotten at all.” Europe wants to censor our search results? Ignore. Europe threatens fines? Ignore. Europe makes some effective threat? Respond with a threat to shutter Google services for Europe, and market it, just to further incent the populist outrage, as adhering to principles of freedom for individuals and anti-state censorship ( as they did in China, even tho that decision was, because of different reasons, incorrect ). Then see where the regulators loyalties are, with the “cause of a lifetime” or with their soon to be rescinded tenure?

The antitrust case, and now this, it worked for Google to never have budged an inch on either of these things, but because the legal advice they listened to was all cowardice, they did. A reason contributing to the workability of an unflinching attitude for Google is that this is not really about a “right to be forgotten” for individuals at all, it is really about a “right for Europe to forget the reason their tech sector failed to produce a Google”.

Europe is bitter, that an American company has, again, taken over the world, and left “poor Europe” with the scraps. Rather than owning this, the Europeans would rather pretend that Google has done something wrong, so they can pretend that their failure was, in fact, the result of some injustice perpetrated against them by what they delude themselves is an evil corporation. Europe indulges this fantasy of victimization instead of owning their failure and creating improvements to make their tech sector work. Obviously their attitude is self-defeating and their delusion isn’t helping them create any improvements. It is giving them the fake pay off of pretending they are righteous fake victims of an “evil”, American company, that they feel in their delusion is “too successful to be moral”.

Because the antitrust case and now this is driven by Europe’s meta desire for a catharsis from owning responsibility for its economic impotence, Google should never have aided Europe in indulging their fantasy of victimization. It doesn’t help Europe, and it doesn’t help Google, because, as Ivan Vanko in Iron Man II says, “If you could make God bleed, people would cease to believe in Him. There will be blood in the water, the sharks will come. All I have to do is sit back and watch as the world consumes you.” Europe is poking the Googlebear because Europe, like Ivan, incorrectly blames Google for its own legacy of failure, and is now obsessed with fabricating a narrative that fake justifies their crusade against the American giant.

To paraphrase Tony Stark, “Where will you be watching the world consume me from? Oh, that's right, economic meltdown. I'll send you a food voucher.”

Google should never have budged because there now is blood in the water, and Europe has found a weakness.

To get even more meta, Europe actually was testing Google’s strength. Is Google strong enough to be an inspiration for leadership here, to us? If Google had showed true backbone, and said, “No, this is ridiculous,” Europe would have stepped back, confident they were in the presence of something that really deterministically knew what it was doing, take off their hats, bowed, and said, “Okay, Google, show us the way.” This would have led to greater integration and European collaboration with Google, which would have been great for everybody. Unfortunately, Google caved at the crucial moment, a trend that is disappointingly common in present-day American leadership.

Moving now to the actual ethics, I think there are two basic principles under contention in a case for a “right to be forgotten” :

1) does anyone ( beside the state, which is fine ) have the right to control the contents of another's mind?

2) what information about a thing ( person, company, entity ) is it lawful to keep secret ?

The answer to the first is no, no one has a right to control the contents of anyone else’s mind beside their own. Every person has perfect mental freedom to discover, learn, think and believe whatever they choose or whatever random chance leads them to. This is obviously to say nothing of expressing those beliefs, or creating consequences from those beliefs in the world. These latter two things are ignored in this present discussion.

The answer to the second is important to define. Some things are lawful to keep secret, and laws are already being or have been introduced to protect people in these cases ( such as the privacy of clinical information, the illegality of “revenge porn”, “sealed” legal proceedings, trade secrets, financial information of private companies, information that incites terrorist violence ( in Britain, at last ), and other things ). There is a lot of scope here for creating improvements, and likely a lot of future caselaw to adjudicate what different places mores and standards are about these things.

So, in light of this, and in light of the internet being a “public space”, and in light of Google being a major gateway to access information, it’s clear that there are __some__ things which are lawful to keep private, and illegal to publish publicly, and therefore, if they have appeared on the internet, have appeared on the internet illegally, and therefore are subject to similar treatment as now effected by DMCA takedown requests. So there is a right to remove some of these things, and that is simply the normal legal apparatus also finding the expression of its effects on the Internet. These things are not legal off the internet, and eventually the law will enforce them on the internet as well. In time, the coordination to strike a balance between different jurisdictions will lead to some “enclaves of permissiveness and iniquity” and also some new cooperative legislation between different jurisdictions to work together to remove illegal content.

So the basic consideration here is that while no one can limit what an individual puts into their head, there are some things that it is not legal to publish, and so in effect, individuals will not be able to put them into their heads.

Calling it a “right to be forgotten” is really just abstruse, and incorrect. You can’t force someone to forget something particular ( unless Eternal Sunshine is real ), and you can’t really even force the internet to forget. You can make some types of information illegal, and effect their removal or prevent their display. Practically tho, just as you can not unsay something said, nor put the dropped tumbler back together in the same way, you can’t rewind thermodynamics and you can never remove information once you have unleashed it online. All you can do, is limit the fallout, and try to limit the scope of dissemination, and try to dissuade people from releasing in the first place. One of the things this difficulty of enforcement suggests is that the penalties, when they are written, will come down on the side of being exaggeratedly deterrent, since their excess must compensate for the lack of a preventative complement.

seren5• 11 years ago

I can't manage to reconcile what you are explaining here with your previous post on Turkish censorship.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005009

It sounds like you are advocating the exact opposite in both posts regarding how a global company should treat local laws and culture.

V-27• 11 years ago

If humans have a "right to be forgotten", there's no reason why it should only be enforced on Google or search engines.

Bringing the story up again in print, or on a talk show or wherever (in public) should be made illegal as well.

rstuart4133• 11 years ago

Having others forget your more embarrassing moments sounds so reasonable on the the surface.

Yet our profoundly good memories allowing us to remember almost everything we experience is one thing that separates from the rest of the animal kingdom. It makes the prisoners dilemma not a dilemma for us at all, but rather turns the history of decisions we make over time into a single fabric into which can be woven all sorts cooperative behaviour.

Fortunately a world where people can demand things they have done be forgotten has been explored by others in much greater depth than is displayed here. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)" is a good starting point.

Defending the Right to Be Forgotten

Related Stories