EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/02/eu-right-to-be-forgotten-guardian-google

by lotsofmangos • 12 years ago

233 73 12 years ago

theguardian.com

lucb1e• 12 years ago

Well I never thought it would take more than a few days for this to happen...

tobias3• 12 years ago

It is just annoying that google has to put in so much work just to prove an obvious point. So inefficient...

pertinhower• 12 years ago

This is, among other things, a terribly confusing situation. Who's to blame? The person who asks to have results expunged? The law that requires Google to comply? Google for complying? Or no one—is the right thing being done, the "pen" of the Internet being dulled back into a pencil?

munificent2• 12 years ago

The person who asks to have results expunged?

Yes.

The law that requires Google to comply?

Yes.

Google for complying?

No! How can you blame a company for doing something they are legally compelled to do?

Or no one—is the right thing being done, the "pen" of the Internet being dulled back into a pencil?

The Internet has always been written in pencil. Pages stop being served all the time. The only difference is that now the index of the Internet is written in pencil, and every EU citizen has been given an eraser.

zorbo• 12 years ago

How can you blame a company for doing something they are legally compelled to do?

They're not legally compelled to take action on every request they get. It's just that it's too expensive to look at each request individually.

patio112• 12 years ago

The interesting part of this, for me, is that the Guardian believes that a) Google has the power to put the genie back in the bottle (dubious, but reflective of Google's massive control of Internet navigation) and b) the Guardian would have the power to put the genie back in the bottle (absurd).

vilhelm_s• 12 years ago

What do you mean by "putting the genie back into the bottle"?

patio112• 12 years ago

The Guardian believes it has the capacity to make the editorial decision to unpublish an article (true) and by consequence make "the Internet" forget about facts in the article (false).

peterkelly• 12 years ago

This law is a very serious threat to freedom of the press, and freedom of speech in general. While it was (allegedly) introduced for reasons that seem quite reasonable - avoiding unfair reputations in search results - it could quite validly be termed as "Right to censor criticism or true facts about yourself".

Let's take high-profile person X who is found guilty of some serious crime, like sex offences. They have the money to hire a professional "reputation management" firm to find all stories in the press about them, and send takedown requests to Google, who is legally compelled to comply with those requests. The result is that information that is out there in the public domain, and that the public arguably has a right to know, is censored.

There's a balance here between an individual's right to be protected against defamation, and the public's right to know. I don't think this law strikes the right balance. Furthermore, it ignores the technical and social nature of how the Internet works - the so called "Streisand effect" that repeatedly gets invoked whenever someone tries to suppress information. And as technology evolves and there's even more ways for information to become replicated (think peer-to-peer search engines and the like), it's like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

mattmanser• 12 years ago

There's no threat at all to either freedom of speech or the press.

If the guardian publishes something, it will have its day in the sun.

It just will eventually get removed, years afterwards. No press freedoms impinged, years after you've had your expressive speech.

Whatever freedom that is, freedom of historical reports?, it's nothing to do with speech or press. If you want to re-report the information, you could, but it then would likely no longer be for the public good or interest, it would merely be vindictive.

Unless, of course, you don't believe in redemption or rehabilitation.

joeguilmette• 12 years ago

It is most definitely censorship, even if delayed. For example, book burning is pretty hard to defend, and the books burned were likely written many months and years before they were burned.

Afforess• 12 years ago

It reminds me of 1984, where the party is perpetually rewriting history to fit their narrative. This is it, history is being rewritten.

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past

cwyers• 12 years ago

It is absolutely a restriction on freedom of speech to tell Google that it can't mention the very existence of various Guardian and BBC articles.

GauntletWizard• 12 years ago

Today's BBC article thoroughly disproves your point: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28130581

Freedom of press is about creating a public record. When you remove that record from the public, when you censor the past of public discourse, you've infringed on free speech. Real discourse is full of [citation needed], and if you can preemptively remove those citations, there will be cheating.

darkarmani• 12 years ago

Unless, of course, you don't believe in redemption or rehabilitation.

Neither of which have anything to do with a "true" reputation.

lotsofmangos• 12 years ago

freedom of historical reports?

If we lose that one we are truly fucked.

voyou• 12 years ago

"It just will eventually get removed, years afterwards"

I'm fairly sympathetic to the "right to be forgotten", but this Guardian article does raise some troubling questions about exactly how it is going to work. Two of the things it mentions being hidden from Google results are from 2011 and 2010. Is that "years afterwards"? Is three years so long ago that the information is genuinely irrelevant?

Silhouette• 12 years ago

I don't think you understand what the "right to be forgotten" actually is. The point is not that someone who has done bad things can just demand that the entire world magically forget about it and give them a clean slate.

You might find this summary PDF informative:

http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets...

[Edit: In a discussion about whether this behaviour amounts to censorship, within 2 minutes of posting, someone has downvoted this comment even though all it does is point out what appears to be a widely held misconception about the subject matter and provide a credible source. If that's not irony...]

rgbrenner2• 12 years ago

After reading your link, it sounds like peter understands it just fine.

He did say "send takedown request to Google".. and that's exactly the situation that is described in your PDF when discussing the case. The article says the court decided that the newspaper archive would be kept intact, and Google would need to delete the links -- and this was the correct balance of the public's right to know.

In fact, from my reading of the article, I'm having a hard time thinking of a case where Google could refuse to delete a link -- since Google only links to other people's content, and that content will be available even if Google's links to it are deleted.

Edit: the quote:

The case itself provides an example of this balancing exercise. While the Court ordered Google to delete access to the information deemed irrelevant by the Spanish citizen, it also emphasised that the content of the underlying newspaper archive should not be changed in the name of data protection (paragraph 88 of the Court’s ruling). The Spanish citizens’ data is still accessible but is no longer ubiquitous. This is enough for the citizen’s privacy to be respected.

drewcrawford• 12 years ago

Maybe you can convince of something.

Most people from the next generation use Facebook. They're not ignorant of how they use it--they use their privacy settings to hide posts from the public.

However Facebook's ToS says [0] Facebook may use any information you share with them "to protect Facebook's or others' rights or property". So hypothetically, if Facebook felt some policy of a presidential candidate threatened "Facebook's rights", they would be in the clear, legally speaking, to publish those photos of you smoking a joint at 18.

So what is the difference exactly between Facebook publishing a photo of a joint and an old Guardian article? They are both expressions of speech. They are both things that the public arguably has a right to know. They are both cases where there is no legal impediment to the speech--other than, in your words, the "right to censor criticism or true facts about yourself." On what basis can we say one is allowed and not the other? I cannot generate a reason for analyzing these situations differently, although I very much want to. I suggest we have to either allow both, or forbid both.

This analysis would suggest that free speech and privacy have a very fundamental conflict--that the gain of one comes at the expense of the other. Increasingly, the right to privacy is really the right to prevent others from publishing information about you that they lawfully and ordinarily collect. I grow increasingly doubtful that we can achieve both outcomes--I think at some point we will have to choose sides.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/your-info#howweuse

smsm42• 12 years ago

>> they would be in the clear, legally speaking, to publish those photos of you smoking a joint at 18.

So what? We know three of the last US presidents used drugs when they were young. For none of them it was a major problem. If they had seriously bad things done in the past - that would be a problem, but the we want to know about it. Knowing that the presidential candidate smoked weed in college doesn't hurt him anymore - we already know pretty much everybody did it anyway.

>> This analysis would suggest that free speech and privacy have a very fundamental conflict

Only if you define privacy as "ability to go back in time and undo public things that I did". In my book, privacy doesn't mean that. 1984's memory holes are not privacy, they are an instrument of oppression and mind control. I don't see why somebody would be allowed to control my mind and make me forget things about them that they no longer consider beneficial to them. So I know which side I would choose - the opposite of where 1984 is and where EU is heading now.

objclxt• 12 years ago

The BBC also received notifications from Google today that some of their articles had been hidden from EU search results - http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28130581

ascorbic• 12 years ago

Inevitably, searches for [stan o'neal] now return stories about this in the first few results. They should call this the Streisand law.

josephb• 12 years ago

Hopefully sites like BBC, The Guardian and others will maintain an article listing all the de-registered / hidden articles.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

I really really do not like this. Who needs government to create an Orwellian future when we are more than willing to do it to ourselves.

I am especially distressed that people can remove all the wrong they do from sight. What is next? Deny the holocaust? (yes hyperbole)

The_Pherocity• 12 years ago

I once thought that I could tell my children that I was born in a world without the internet. But if governments and corporations keep on this path, my children won't have one either.

munificent2• 12 years ago

This article is pretty terrible. I think it's great that it's drawing attention to the problem, but it spends most of the time rallying an angry mob and pointing the pitchforks in the wrong direction:

Guardian articles have been hidden by Google
Editorial decisions belong with them, not Google
But such editorial calls surely belong with publishers, not Google.

Google has done absolutely nothing wrong here. It is making zero editorial calls. It's removing links that were flagged for removal by someone outside of the company, and it is compelled to do so by EU law.

In fact, if you ignore the finger-pointing at Google, you'll see that Google actually tries really really hard to get around this: It informs you when results were blocked, notifies when results are blocked, blocks only the narrowest possible search terms, and helpfully points you to google.com which doesn't filter.

Publishers can and should do more to fight back. One route may be legal action.

No, legal action is the only route. This is a matter of law.

mccr8• 12 years ago

Put down your Google pitchfork. The article is clearly not placing the blame on Google: "As for Google itself, it's clearly a reluctant participant in what effectively amounts to censorship." The second paragraph says this is the result of a court ruling.

If the most concerning thing to you about this article is that it doesn't spend enough time exonerating Google for their role in this, then I don't know what to tell you.

kjksf• 12 years ago

Google doesn't have to be "exonerated" of anything because all they do is comply with (absurd) law.

And the article does imply the blame lies with Google way too many times.

ghshephard2• 12 years ago

It was a poor article - casual reading of it leads one to believe that Google is engaging in Censorship. Careful reading of the entire article places the blame on where it's supposed to be - the Law - but the fact that the article kept calling out Google, when it should have been repeatedly mentioning the law that Google was complying with, was problematic.

ganeumann2• 12 years ago

It won't take long before a UK search for Dougie McDonald shows the article talking about how the articles about Dougie McDonald have been removed from Google, and what those articles are about.

Google tells the media which articles are being expunged, the media writes about the articles Google expunged and then Google indexes these pages in their search results. Interesting process.

danbruc• 12 years ago

Already happened.

rudimental2• 12 years ago

That process is happening right now, and it is interesting. But will it continue, aka is it a viable long term workaround? Articles being removed is new and in a sense exciting for the press, Google, and the public- that probably won't be so in a few months or years.

ganeumann2• 12 years ago

Maybe every media company should have a summary page for each of their articles that have been removed from Google. And Google should prioritize those summary pages in its searches.

oneeyedpigeon• 12 years ago

Presumably, Dougie McDonald will in turn request those pages be disassociated from his name in Google's search index. Interesting to note that plenty of other non-Guardian results relating to his duplicitous behaviour currently appear when searching for his name [1] [2] [3]; will those too disappear in the near future? I have a feeling a lot of articles about Dougie McDonald are about to spring up; this is the first I've heard of the case. Has Dougie McDonald not heard of the Streisand effect? [4]

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/scot_prem/9143508.s... [2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1333950/Re... [3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/celtic/80980... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

jackgavigan• 12 years ago

Google's hiding Guardian articles? That's outrageous! The Guardian should stop paying Google to index their website and display their articles in search results!

Oh, wait...

walshemj• 12 years ago

so how long till the news papers run their own search engine or google buys news papers I bet the independent is for sale

junto• 12 years ago

Google is playing this ruling really cleverly. They will just blanket accept every single request for a "right to be forgotten" that they receive.

Once swathes of valid journalism disappears down the toilet, the shit is slowly going to hit the pan.

You could use this for some nefarious purposes I'm sure.

I have a client that wants a page removed because of a court case that painted them in a bad light. This ruling just made their year.

Terr_• 12 years ago

the shit is slowly going to hit the pan

I can't tell whether that's less appealing than the usual idiom.

runn1ng• 12 years ago

I am from Czech Republic (part of EU) and I cannot replicate the described effect.

Plus, most results about those individuals are now the articles about the censorship itself. Which is funny. Will the mentioned folks block those articles too?

UVB-76• 12 years ago

Bravo to the Guardian for instigating the Streisand effect in this instance.

By way of example, I knew nothing of the Dougie McDonald scandal until this article, which not only brought the scandal to my attention, but also suggests someone (presumably McDonald himself) doesn't want people to find out about the scandal.

smoe• 12 years ago

The question is, how long will this effect last? These are the first cases, where the right to be forgotten is used against news sites and the outrage is of course big. But what about in a few months, a year? I doubt that every case will end up on the front of hn and similar.

phantom784• 12 years ago

It'd be interesting if the Guardian simply changed the URL to the articles slightly when they go the notice from Google. It'd turn the whole thing into a cat-and-mouse game.

lelandbatey• 12 years ago

To focus on something else: I'm incredulous that people believe we have the "right" to be forgotten. Maybe it's just that I've grown up being told everything I do will be recorded forever and never forgotten, and my behavior has changed as a result? But I truly don't feel as if we have any kind of right to be forgotten.

untog• 12 years ago

I actually disagree. We live in a world where so much of what we do is recorded permanently, and that's a very new thing. I absolutely support the idea that we have a right to be forgotten.

This execution, however, is absolutely awful.

porker• 12 years ago

I wonder what the effect would be if everyone submitted removal requests for all articles on prominent politicians (let's take the UK Prime Minister David Cameron as an example).

Methinks the law would be quickly changed. Especially with an election coming up next year.

Of course I am in no way encouraging anyone to do this, or condoning such behaviour.

bliksem• 12 years ago

We should simply provide a searchable resource to add and record the 'removed' articles. Not a search engine. Simply a searchable list.

paul_milovanov• 12 years ago

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

zmmmmm• 12 years ago

It's shocking that this is being applied to articles from 2010. It shows how quickly a small crack in free speech is expanded way beyond its intent. I am sure no reasonable person would argue that the intent of the EU ruling was that something that happened 4 years ago is no longer "relevant". The reasonable intent was for things that are decades old, perhaps from a time and context either at the individual level or the societal level that are likely to cause a read to seriously misinterpret or misunderstand the material.

I don't think Google should escape criticism here. Yes they have to follow the law, but they should be aggressively pressing to the minimum boundary of what they have been asked to do. They should be declining cases like this and wearing the law suits that result until the real line and intent is hammered out. It sounds like they are taking a DMCA-like approach and taking things down by default, and that is very very worrying.

alex_duf• 12 years ago

The fact that this law is going to be applied blindly as a technical solution to a human problem is the issue. There is one missing piece here : a judge. Add a judge , and this whole problem goes away.

nothxbro• 12 years ago

Whats especially troubling is that this is spilling over to other countries now. I always felt that despite having relatively lax laws in regards to the internet, russia is starting to turn into a seriously unfriendly place for the internet. Being a expat in moscow makes it especially awkward as I have tasted the koolaid on the 'free' side.

adamconroy• 12 years ago

I don't know it there is a good solution to this problem. I personally had an issue about 8 years ago, when at the time I started looking for a new job. I couldn't understand why recruiters weren't contacting me after I had applied to many jobs, most of which I was sure I was a good candidate, good enough to at least warrant a phone call or email in response. Eventually I rang one asking for feedback, and he told me off the record that he had googled me and my name had appeared on news group posting that associated me with hard drug use. I had posted something on a newsgroup in 1996 about a band I had seen in concert, and the thread descended into a discussion about the band's drug use. When googling my name, the search results certainly looked bad. You had to read the whole thread to realize the context.

Anyway, at the time google had an automated (or semi-automated) service where you could ask them to hide news group postings. You had to declare you were the author and give a reason and so forth. I went through the process, and actually lied because the post that caused me problems wasn't posted by me but it was just a stupid one liner by some idiot which just had my username buried in the header somewhere, asked for it to be deleted because it was causing me problems getting a job, and thankfully they did it.

It pretty much saved my career, at least for now because I do live in fear somehow it will resurface.

EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

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