Hidden From Google

http://hiddenfromgoogle.com/

by e15ctr0n • 12 years ago

70 22 12 years ago

hiddenfromgoogle.com

splintercell• 12 years ago

"Right to be forgotten" - I am sorry but these positive rights are getting ridiculous.

nfoz• 12 years ago

Why?

explorigin• 12 years ago

Seriously? How can we expect legislation to protect our privacy but not the privacy of those that we don't like?

Your comment is exactly like Eric Schmidt saying "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." and then pushing for drone control to keep his own privacy.

bad_user• 12 years ago

I don't think you know what privacy means and I'm not defending Eric Schmidt here.

Getting busted for drunk driving, with a news story as a side effect - that's public information, not private. And if indeed you prove your innocence with a blood test, you can always ask the newspaper to retract their story or sue for defamation. But again, getting caught drunk while driving, that's public information, not private, so privacy doesn't enter the picture.

Just to be clear, lets try some samples:

PUBLIC: a picture with you drunk done by somebody else

PRIVATE: a selfie with you drunk that's stored on your laptop or DropBox or GDrive

PUBLIC: a record of you being at a Starbucks at 12:00 this Monday

PRIVATE: your track record of where you've been hanging out every day at 12:00 in the last month

PUBLIC: your face

PRIVATE: your social security number

PUBLIC: your sexual orientation

PRIVATE: your sexual orientation

Can you spot any differences? As a hint - privacy is the right to protect private information about yourself, but it's definitely not the right to hide information that's already public.

Of course, I can see the rationale behind the "Right to be Forgotten". I could agree with it. Except for the fact that I live in a country in which corruption is a problem - and this right will be used for censoring acts of corruption and I have a problem with this.

_yosefk• 12 years ago

A right to be forgotten - that is, not to be mentioned somewhere - looks more like a negative right, not unlike a right not to be mugged or not to be photographed in your own bathroom through an open window. A right to be remembered would be a positive right - not unlike a right to be employed or fed.

(You could say that "forgetting" published material requires action and not inaction - but so does editing out someone videotaped in their own bathroom through an open window, and so does not running over pedestrians, strictly speaking; generally as programmers know following rules to not do something requires some sort of computation which is a form of action... but that means inaction takes action and then all rights are positive.)

jpgvm• 12 years ago

Alot of these people seem to have found themselves in trouble they would rather forget. I can understand that.

However, it doesn't work that way. Just because Google might forget you doesn't mean DuckDuckGo and friends will, how about Usenet and news aggregator sites like HackerNews?

No matter how much these people want whatever happened to go away that can't and won't happen, it's only a matter of time until this new law is abolished too.

Vik1ng4• 12 years ago

The ruling applies to every search engine.

90%+ of Europeans use google. How many use DuckDuckGo? So not having that stuff on google is pretty effective.

   how about Usenet and news aggregator sites like HackerNews?

Who uses that stuff when looking up someone?

joosters• 12 years ago

It only covers EU 'based' search engines. If DDG has no servers in Europe, I don't think they have to do anything to comply with this ruling.

Ragnarork• 12 years ago

I'm actually happy that it can't "go away" that simply.

What strikes me with what's happening with the "Right to forgetten" is how it "shouldn't" work this way IMHO. When something shameful/problematic for some people go down in history, it must not be dealt with in the future by "removing" it from history, but rather by educating, improving. E.g.: for these persons who found themselves in trouble, showing they're not this kind of person anymore, or that this was a mistake and they know it.

The "Right to be forgotten" is an attempt to rewrite/erase history, while the correct thing to do would be showing these facts are, actually, "history".

Vik1ng4• 12 years ago

   showing they're not this kind of person anymore

Because every employer will happily give you that chance. Right. Let's invite the guy with a questionable past to an interview and not just the others with a clean record...

r721• 12 years ago

Previously discussed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7994613

Vik1ng4• 12 years ago

12 listings... Well, that seems to work really great considering google is complaining about thousands of requests.

caiob• 12 years ago

Well, this website kinda defeats the purpose, no?

matchu• 12 years ago

That's the purpose. These folks aren't Google, but are actively trying to undermine the EU ruling forcing Google to remove these links.

randywatkins• 12 years ago

What is the ostensible reason these things are being hidden?

minaandrawos• 12 years ago

The issue here is two fold: if you committed a simple offence like -say- shop lifting at some point of your life, get caught, get punished, regret it then you try to make things right and get back to society. Having a permanent record of that in the internet can pretty much destroy your life even though you didn't kill anybody. We are all humans, we all make mistakes. On the other hand, if it is okay for courts to make things "disappear" from internet gates like Google then any ambitious politician\lawyer with zero concern for public interest can make the internet his pet by hiding some of his history from the public and any dictator can mask everything they do even if their citizens use proxies to bypass their firewalls. In my personal opinion, the most practical way to address this is to prevent publishing names on newspapers for offenders in minor offences as opposed to hiding Google's search results.

incision• 12 years ago

'The issue here is two fold: if you committed a simple offence like -say- shop lifting at some point of your life, get caught, get punished, regret it then you try to make things right and get back to society. Having a permanent record of that in the internet can pretty much destroy your life even though you didn't kill anybody.'

Not necessarily.

Exactly such a conviction didn't stop at least one guy from becoming in some sense the most notable CIO in the US and VP at a major SV company.

Of course, I expect he was better equipped than many to mitigate such things, but not exceptionally so.

Ideally, we would - as a society stop discriminating against or wholly shredding each other over petty bullshit. We'd acknowledge a whole range of stuff that currently is called at best an indiscretion or lapse in judgement as actually perfectly average, human behavior.

Obviously, that's not to say any and everything is simply 'OK', particularly if it is habitual or done with malice.

It's simply getting back to a reality where we try to hold each other to such squeaky clean ideals that someone representing them would either be so bland as to have little in common with the rest of the world or more likely, have done a great job of covering it all up.

Moving forward, I actually think we get to that point one way or the other. I don't think information security has much hope of keeping up with our increasing connectedness, sharing (intentional or otherwise) and growing trail of digital footprints.

Eventually it's all just noise.

chippy• 12 years ago

How many man hours at Google went on to develop the feature for this, I wonder?

Hidden From Google

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