Google Search Results: Dictator Not Found

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/05/dictator-not-found.html

by danso • 12 years ago

61 40 12 years ago

newyorker.com

jrockway• 12 years ago

http://www.bonkersworld.net/forgetting/

lightyrs3• 12 years ago

Godwin

Edit: There is a huge gulf between Hitler and a juvenile crime or since-paid debt.

Crito2• 12 years ago

Since you are adverse to references to the 1940s, suppose we were talking about ex-Google engineer David Barksdale instead.

Does he have the "right to be forgotten"?

r12e• 12 years ago

Clear public interest, request denied. The EU ruling works.

whoismua• 12 years ago

Resorting to Hitler right away? How about a person who cannot a job because of a certain stupid act from 30 years ago that keeps showing up on Google search?

Even credit reports are barred from reporting older than x years acts.

axanoeychron4• 12 years ago

For the EU requirement to check if information is in the public interest, we have to have guards against the system being abused, such as wealthy people removing information about themselves.

This implies some sort of public record - to provide transparency of the requests and check for abuse. This could not be indexed either because it would reveal the information that people were trying to stop being revealed.

Dilemma.

Crito2• 12 years ago

Are these guards against abuse anything like the "guards against abuse" that the English presumably have to prevent abuse of super-injunctions by multi-millionare footballers?

turbohz• 12 years ago

The proper way to handle such mess would be a "right to be forgiven", not a "right no be forgotten". But then, some things are easier to forget than to forgive.

Tombone5• 12 years ago

The NSA doesn't want to know everything you do because they suspect you of anything, but because they can't be sure the will never suspect you.

bowlofpetunias2• 12 years ago

The only connection with "such a mess" and the EU court ruling are the word "forgotten" and a Spaniard.

The rest of the article is just manipulative association that would make Godwin blush.

The EU court does not disagree with you, no matter how hard the anti-privacy lobby tries to make it look that way.

smsm425• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure if the government had a way to force people to forgive, they'd try to. But so far they can only find way to control the information, not thought. I guess something is better than nothing for them.

axanoeychron4• 12 years ago

This is a strawman argument.

It's blatantly obvious that a historically significant event such as a dictator needs to be kept as part of the history books because of the impact it had on many different people.

At the end - the argument that anything that is published and is true as a reason why we should not allow people to delete things about themselves is deeply disturbing and sets a dangerous precedent. Just because something is true does not mean it should be broadcast for everyone to hear and see. If you go to the toilet and leave a big dump - not everyone needs to know this, when you did it, its mass.

Lossless public record is something that people do not understand the full implications. I am predicting a collision course with the precedence from this case with anonymous gossip sharing applications like Secret. No good comes from allowing people to publish things about others with the intention to harm and no recourse for victims.

What the forgetting laws is for is to help a young person delete embarrassing content from the modern day equivalent of Geocities or Bebo. People are screened for employment online - why should a child whose transgressions in a previous generation would have been transient be stored for eternity? What utility does that provide?

EDIT: If you disagree - use the reply button.

smsm425• 12 years ago

It's blatantly obvious to you. It may not be blatantly obvious to a nationalistic charismatic leader who thinks Franco wasn't too bad and actually needs only a bit of better PR and some long tongues silenced, and it would be for the best of public interest to do this. Look at what's going on in Russia. You think it can't happen in Spain or Germany? It already happened before and very well can happen again. Anytime and anywhere. The layer protecting the rights of people from oppression - including popular and widely supported oppression - is very thin. EU rule made it even thinner. Now anybody can memory-hole any information they don't like - and this would especially true for powerful and connected people who want to suppress information about their wrongdoings. You worry about teenage shenanigans - but this can - and will - be used to hide very adult shenanigans with very important consequences too. And you will have no say in if it's "public interest" or not.

ritchiea• 12 years ago

Did you read the entire article? The author uses Spain's legal treatment of those accused of torture in the Spanish civil war to make a very cogent argument that laws mandating we censor the past can have effects as broad as lossless public record. To say this is a strawman argument you would have to provide some evidence the author is ignoring/hiding the fact that the EU has clear criteria for scrubbing search.

abdullahkhalids• 12 years ago

I agree with your conclusions. However, you make the argument that what was possible in previous generations not possible today is a bad thing. This is not a good argument. Actions should be judged to be good or bad irrespective of historical precendent/non-precedent.

gph• 12 years ago

My main problem is how completely vague this ruling is. Yes this article takes the point to an extreme that no one who supports the ruling agrees with. But that's because no one has given any concrete outline of how the rule is supposed to work, so the media is going to run with their wildest imaginings.

If Europe wants to have a right to forget they need to create a specific legal framework that tells companies what they need to do. They can't just say "People have the right to be forgotten, lol you deal with it google et. al." Is Google and every other indexing website now meant to either comply or face a legal battle for every single request they get? That's ludicrous.

smsm425• 12 years ago

Vagueness is power. Power to decide which information can and can not be published. It is a vast power - with one wave of a hand and saying "public interest" you can completely disappear one piece of knowledge (e.g. that government official X did illegally wiretaps and practiced torture) and retain another (e.g. that vocal opposition activist is accused by X in some heinous deeds - while simultaneously wiping the information that X himself is a liar and a criminal that can not be trusted). Of course whoever is engineering this system would not want to give up this enormous power by strictly defining the bounds - why would they give up power voluntarily?

Yes, that means that European courts can come to any company and demand any information to be deleted as soon as "public interest" requires so. That's not the flaw - that's the whole point of it. That's control.

tantalor2• 12 years ago

People are screened for employment online

The solution here is to regulate hiring practices, not access to information.

For example, in the US, it is not legal to base a hiring decision on whether an applicant is married. Anybody can search newspaper archives for marriage announcements, but we don't ban newspapers.

croggle2• 12 years ago

You can't regulate this. How do you know why I didn't really hire you?

bowlofpetunias2• 12 years ago

Baseless scaremongering by the New Yorker. That's really a new low in American anti-privacy propaganda.

The first paragraph alone reads like the kind of paranoia I would expect from the Tea Party.

"Google has to scrub any material that a user wants taken down, as long as removing it doesn’t hurt the public interest."

It's a lot, a lot more nuanced than that.

Also, the EJC is nowhere near the equivalent of the US Supreme Court. The EU is not a federal state.

The rest of the article basically goes into a Godwinesque directions, only for this occasion we're using Franco's fascists instead of Hitler's Nazi's.

YokoZar• 12 years ago

The Spanish high court deferred to the European Court of Justice, and there's no one for them to defer to after that. That makes the Supreme Court analogy pretty apt as far as judicial rulings are concerned in this matter.

If you read the entire article, you'll note that the post-Franco era discussion is mostly backstory for how the whole issue of public forgetting is particularly relevant in Spain, and in fact why this test case came from Spain. The article itself then goes on to mention how no fascists have (yet) asked for a Google scrub, however it does imply that someone might eventually try.

And it's a good point to raise, as all this "nuance" will require some sort of system of rules and arbitration to decide what is "in the public interest" on a case by case basis. Such a system could be quite burdensome, or prone to abuse.

In contrast, countries with strong free speech protections have a rather simple set of rules for when you're allowed to force others to remove true statements from the internet: you dont.

hencq• 12 years ago

Also, the EJC is nowhere near the equivalent of the US Supreme Court. The EU is not a federal state.

Even though the EU is not a federal state, the decisions of the ECJ still overrule these of member states. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_v_ENEL

lightyrs3• 12 years ago

Just wait until the first Facebook-generation presidential candidate — the right to be forgotten will be considered a 'human right'.

dublinben• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, this likely won't be the case. Millennials I know who harbor desires to run for president some day are so boring, that they have nothing incriminating on their social media accounts to even be worried about. They will just use this kind of information against their potential and actual competitors. I suspect that it will take at least another generation before we are willing to accept a candidate whose colorful youth comes to light before they're elected.

smsm425• 12 years ago

Obama was a member of the "choom gang" and had various other shenanigans well-documented in his youth. Didn't prevent him from becoming the senator and then the president. I think you overestimating the interest of the public to Facebook. Of course if there were something more serious that a bunch of embarrassing selfies, that'd be different business, but that what we want to happen, don't we?

happyscrappy2• 12 years ago

It is bewildering that Europeans think this is a good idea or even remotely workable. Maybe some EU company would like to take a stab at operating under these kind of capricious rulings.

vacri2• 12 years ago

It is bewildering that Europeans think this is a good idea or even remotely workable.

It is bewildering that you can't see why Europeans might think that personal privacy might be a significant issue.

koepked• 12 years ago

I think personal privacy is a significant issue, but I also think this is a bad idea, and not even remotely workable.

kghose• 12 years ago

What about internet archive, then?

axanoeychron4• 12 years ago

Good question.

While the right to forget is socially beneficial for society, there are technical problems that make it inconvenient. There is the problem of whether it is censorship to force a neutral party whose mandate is merely to store historical copies of data to remove it. Or is it Google's responsibility to just 'forget' that the copy exists in the web archive?

Do defaced websites get indexed by the internet archive? Does illegal information get removed from the internet archive?

abruzzi• 12 years ago

What exactly is "illegal information"? In the US for the most part, we have a distinction between the information and how it was obtained. Daniel Ellsberg may have done something illegal when he released the Pentagon Papers, but once it was in the hands of journalists, the US could not stop its publication.

I also disagree that the "right to forget" is socially beneficial. It may benefit individuals who have negative thing about them that they want expunged, but for society as a whole, we are the worse off because if everyone can have their image cleaned of their past, predators and destructive people will have an easier time hiding and preying on others.

happyscrappy2• 12 years ago

Blocked for Europeans. They sure as hell can't afford to do backflips through hoops for this.

dllthomas• 12 years ago

I think there's a subtle difference as well between a search engine (which mostly turns up recent and relevant) and an archive, in terms of the expectations that searchers have. I don't know that this difference is significant enough to change anything here, but...

smsm425• 12 years ago

Archives are the most dangerous thing. Definitely nobody in Europe should be allowed there. God knows what forgotten terrors can be hidden there. Free information is dangerous and unpredictable. I'm sure unlicensed information retention will be a crime in EU very soon, if it isn't already. Of course, if you work for the government, it's different - then information retention would be mandatory. Just in case, you know, they suspect you being a terrorist or disclosing some facts about your government they don't want people to hear or something like that.

shiift• 12 years ago

I feel like this could be abused to remove competitors' content from Google results. Couldn't this be a problem?

Google Search Results: Dictator Not Found

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