Europe's shock Google privacy ruling: The end of history? Don't be daft Anyone familiar with The Day Today's "IT'S WAR" episode will know how much the media love to create an imaginary threat. Channel 4 had its own "It's War" moment yesterday, asking whether the European Court of Justice (ECJ) had signalled the "end of history" – by supposedly giving anyone the "right to erase their past". The …
While this does not seem the end of history, it is strange to me that Google would not be allowed to display, or more actually reproduce, an information which is displayed freely and legally on a Spanish web site (and thanks to the Streisand effect, all over the web by now).
To start splitting hair, how about a web site which would start gathering exclusively the type of information that Google is not allowed to show? Would that be legal, for instance, for a news organization to do this? I understand Google was refused a particular protection available to newspapers. And would Google be allowed to link to such a site?
Google is allowed to display anything it wants, all this has done is given individuals the right to request that it be taken down and that request will (usually) be decided in a court who will balance the right of the individual against other rights and entitlements of society in general. It will make no difference to search results except where a specific case has been heard in court or through an ICO panel and decided upon.
"and that request will (usually) be decided in a court who will balance the right of the individual against other rights"
I'm hoping you do understand that this kind of selective "cherry picking" based not on truth/fact but on some arbitrary quantity by a select body is PRECISELY the definition of censorship...
"...PRECISELY the definition of censorship"
Not in my dictionary. As pointed out, courts will consider other rights, such as the right to make a true statement. "It's true" is an absolute defence in libel cases and always has been, so I'd expect courts to give it quite a lot of weight in cases involving other aspects of free speech. However, against that, there is an equally long-standing principle that convictions are "spent" some years after the event and you are entitled to live the rest of your life without being dogged by them. I'd expect weight to be given to that, too.
So if it is true, I'd expect Google (and others) to be pretty free to repeat it and index it for a few years whether or not it shows you in a good light, and be less free to do so over longer periods. Do you have evidence that this isn't how courts are currently operating?
It is not those bemoaning the decision who fail to understand its import. It is the Court and Mr. Orlowski who do so. To begin with, Google is the wrong party for a complainant to pursue. Google is (or at least should be) merely objectively indexing what others are making publicly available. Blaming Google for someone's publishing something online is like blaming the weather on the radio announcer. Those expressing concern know full well that it is the granting to courts of the power to even decide such cases through some Solomonic balancing of interests that is profoundly wrong. Allowing the courts to prevent the publishing of true history would be bad enough; allowing them to treat Google as though it were the publisher is ludicrous.
Mostly agree but there is a problem. We know Google are already fiddling with their search results to hide certain results which they find problematic. Mostly we've tended to agree with Google that the fiddling is both proper and necessary. But the earlier poster did make a decent case with the wife of the German poll. That is a case in which I think Google should consider tweaking their results.
The problems I have with the decision are:
1) For the most part if focuses on the wrong party. If there is defamatory information on the internet, the proper course of action is to seek removal of the defamatory information. Once the information has been removed, it will be removed from Google. If the information is hosted outside the jurisdiction of the courts to which the plaintiff has access, tough shit. Or at least that's been the usual retort from freetards and hacktivists when one country objects to information being made accessible outside their jurisdiction in the past.
2) As noted by an El Reg notable above, truth is no longer an absolute defense.
3) It is not clear how many of these tweaks Google will be required to implement or how it will affect the efficiency and/or effectiveness of their search engine.
Lastly I'll make the following note. Here in the US, once you've been convicted of a felony, if an employer asks about it on a work application you are required to report it. Failure to report it, even if 40 years ago is grounds for firing. Employers are required to not hold the conviction against you unless it directly impacts the position for which you are applying. Companies to hire convicted felons who have served their sentences. I worked with one such fellow who has reformed. I'd hire him for any job for which he is qualified. I'd particularly hire him as a consultant for physical security on buildings. Having done the auto theft and break-in thing previously in life, he spots things most people miss and will proudly point out how stupid they are.
@Ken exactly. The point is, if the information is "no longer relevant" should it still be appearing in search results or on non-news websites? Then the question is, whether this no longer relevant information is still in the public interest.
It sounds, in this case, like the original newspaper article is still in the public interest, because it was public record, but putting it in search results for a "current" search would be illegal under Spanish DPA, so it has to be removed. IF somebody really wants to do the donkey work, they can still go to the paper and search it for the article.
No it won't usually be decided in courts, may be the first few hundreds or even first few thousands but our court system could never cope with tens of thousands or even millions of requests that may come from this ruling, certainly not the ICO which has only a handful of staff. Plus these rulings will need to be review on regular bases as what is irrelevant one week could become relevant the follow week or the following month or even following year.
Wong:
Europeans can submit take-down requests directly to Internet companies rather than to local authorities or publishers under the ruling. If a search engine elects not to remove the link, a person can seek redress from the courts.
http://news.yahoo.com/google-gets-down-requests-european-court-ruling-source-183010113--sector.html
So the court just gave every European citizen the same rights as the RIAA. That's going to turn out well. NOT.
Yes, I found it interesting that it is not the Spanish web site that contained the original data that was being asked to delete something, but Google, which just indexed it. Of course, without Google, it would be much more difficult to find the original data if Google removed it's index.
I suppose that the data could have been removed from the Spanish web site, and Google was slow to update it's index and also cached the original data, but I suspect that this wasn't the case.
I wonder if we will see similar things from the Wayback machine, although I believe that they already have a way of asking for specific data to be removed.
On a related note Google has already acted.
The wife of the former president of Germany, Bettina Wulff, has been alleged to have worked as a prostitute in the past. As far as I know the allegations have never been proven correct and in fact have been proven in correct. However, the interest in the subject was so great that Google promoted some of the terms to "search as you type". It was argued that this continued to spread unproven and possibly defaming allegations without qualification. Just imagine something similar with your own name and something like "child sex offender".
This isn't about Google ratfox, this is about a general law that Google decided to ignore. Anyone displaying such information without the right to do so or if the information falls into the irrelevant, no longer relevant etc. (which is the case here), they must take it down.
In the case of the paper, it was public record from the 90s and they are a newspaper, so they don't have to take it down, even though the information is "no longer relevant". Registered press has some leniency and as long as it wasn't liabalous, they can leave it up - this is part of the problem, the papers used to be a record of the day, and unless you went to their archives or searched through microfiche at a library, you wouldn't find the information; something that is too much bother for most people. With the advent of the internet and searching this information that should be "legally forgotten" is always just a couple of keystrokes away.
I would also think, that the case in question that it would be clear on the newspaper site that it is historical, because you would have to search their online archive to find it. The Google result probably (I haven't checked) doesn't differentiate it that much from current results - especially if the archive was first put online a few years ago; it probably wouldn't even display the correct date, making it seem on the search list that the information might still be relevant. If a researcher didn't go further than making a few clip notes on the Google page, they would be gathering "no longer relevant" information as relevant.
Could a news agency publish the information that Google had to remove? Probably not, if it was no longer relevant or irrelevant to the "public good". They would have to have good grounds to do so, something like "Google wasn't allowed to display results for ratfox and armed robbery, because he was found not guilty in 1997," probably wouldn't be sufficient.
Asking the Spanish website to delete the info would be censorship. Asking Google to remove the link is not necessarily.
In fact, you might create a website about all sorts of people and post a link - say a direkt permanent link - to the Gonzalez story: No problem But it is a problem for Mr Gonzalez if this matter is the first that comes up whenever anyone searches his name.
The case is just a reminder that there's a difference between raw information and search results.
IIRC this all kicked off because some spanish guy Googled his own name (and we all know: nothing good ever comes from doing that) and discovered that it listed a financial embarrassment from years gone by.
Now, whatever the ins and outs of that particular situation, surely the easier approach (easier than grinding your way through the courts) is to simply change your name?
So, if Mr Derek Stinky was to change his name to, say, Mr. Albert Stinky then Google would have no link between the two names - so far as they are concerned it's only data and there is no attribute (unless Mt Stinky was to explicitly add one) to link the two. Even then it would have to be an exceptionally clever little search engine to twig the fact - and since it's main function is to push advertisements, there's no reason to make it so smart. [ Now GCHQ: there's a search system to be reckoned with ].
So, being a lazy git and always taking the path of least resistance, I would always go for the simplest solution to a problem of this size: and simply become someone else. Pete 3 has a nice ring to it.
Changing your name means updating it formally with many important organizations in your life (the state, banks, employers, insurers, etc) It also means breaking social links with out-of-touch friends (like trying to find old schoolmates who now have married names) And you'd cheerfully do all this to evade one bad link? (and hope that nobody helpfully provides the "HTTP 301" for you, as they often do for married names "Mary Smith (nee Bloggs)", since Google is quite capable of supporting such common patterns too.
OK I'll bite...
I have a name given to me at birth - as we all have.
I do something stupid but not terribly damaging to my life, run up some bad debts 10 years ago - like this guy.
I get it sorted out and I'm back on track within a year or two - just like this guy
I go for a job and they do a few simple searches and my private financial history shows up and shows I was young and stupid. Sorry no job for you.
Your solution is for me to completely change my identity and start a new life. OK assume this is possible and I actually do it.
I go for a job and they do a few simple searches and what's this, oops I have absolutely no life history prior to 2014? In this day and age that's a wee bit dodgy isn't it? Suddenly appear out of nowhere? Sorry no job for you!
I go for a job and they do a few simple searches and my private financial history shows up and shows I was young and stupid. Sorry no job for you.
Why would an employer care? I mean, I'll grant you that a few/some/many/most/all companies do this but why? Do they think bad credit is contagious? I'd love to hear the HR side of this.
Some do. It's not sensible, but there it is. Personally, if I see someone who made a hash of his finances early in life but took responsibility for it and straightened himself out, I'd see that person as more desirable rather than less. It shows initiative, sense, and commitment. I know. I made a hash of my personal finances early in life when I was young and irresponsible. I'm still working to clean it up 30 years later, but it's been under control for the last 25.
There's another thing you should consider if applying for a job at a company that would hold something old against you: would you really want to work there?
I changed my surname back in 2000, and after the initial hassle of passports and banks it's all been fine and dandy.
Even my new name doesn't come up in Google, for anything, yet I still manage to find jobs.
Although at one interview I was asked why they couldn't find me on Facebook and thought that was suspicious, until I made the guy realise that it would be a stupid thing to do by pointing out that since I usually have access to secure systems for governments and banks etc. the last thing I should be doing is telling everyone that I've just finished building the new 3rd party VPN platform for a bank (via LinkdIn) and that I'm going on holiday (via Facebook) (presumably leaving the company laptop with all the juicy details on it at home).
So no, not having a profile on the internet isn't suspicious at all, unless you only find people who are attention whores non-suspicious.
"I go for a job and they do a few simple searches and what's this, oops I have absolutely no life history prior to 2014? In this day and age that's a wee bit dodgy isn't it? Suddenly appear out of nowhere? Sorry no job for you!"
Not that strange really, I myself have a very minimal google profile, about 3 valid entries that all stem from the same source (which is public data anyway) so not strange...
> Your solution is for me to completely change my identity and start a new life. OK assume this is possible and I actually do it.
Well, thousands of women manage to do this [change their names] every year, with very little hassle, when they marry and adopt their husband's last name. The biggest problem they have seems to be "learning" a new signature. There certainly isn't anything as dramatic as "start a new life" - though I guess you could go for some plastic surgery as well, if you wanted to.
Sure, there are some hassles - like having to apply for a new passport and notifying your bank of a name-change. But you have to ask: which is more onerous? a few small administrative alterations, or dragging Google through the courts as the instigator of this whole story did, for many years, just to get one link changed.
well Pete... For starters, in most european countries changing your name is only possible under some very specific circumstances, and needs approval at the highest level. Which means quite a lot of work, and usually a process lasting at least a year or two involving courts and proof of duress etc...
Also, while a partner in a marriage contract may be able to adopt a spouses' name, this is not reflected at the census level, where the original family name is retained. Besides.. a marriage is easily researched and part of the public(!) records. Change of name through marriage will not help you in any way if you want to dodge things.
It seems to me the correct response to that is to sue the employer, not Google. And when the headlines hit about the company being sued for employment discrimination, not only it, but every other employer out there gets the message that they aren't to abuse the searches.
I didn't expect this size of balls from the ECJ. I agree, it's NOT about journalism, regardless what JW trying to sell you, that's just ridiculous. I have kids and unlike in our times today everything ends up online within seconds... while I do believe good parenting makes the most difference once they grow up they will be on their own, they will fall on their on and learn from those failures. I want them to have this option, free from constant fear of ruining their future chances - now I only have to figure out how could we get something similar done over here, the other side of the Atlantic...
People all have a past, a present and a future. You can't change what you did, but you can change what you're doing and will do. Your kids chances won't be ruined by what they did, but by what they kept on doing, are still doing and will do.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." It's the fact that you do have a past that drives you to change in bad cases. If you can sweep it under the rug, you have no drive for improvement at all. It also drives you to have an interest in keeping one you're proud of, lest it comes back to bite you in the proverbial.
I'm on every social network that'll have me for this exact reason. There is a minor financial embarrassment in my past, I ain't exactly proud of it, but I can't deny it, it was nothing illegal, it happened, it's happened to millions of others. But that doesn't mean I want it top of the list when a potential employer or customer is doing their due nosiness. Drowning it with results from inskypabookwitter works pretty well. Hell, I think I still have a myspace account.
Not so simple. If you declared yourself bankrupt 20 years ago and that turned up in Google's search today it would have a negative impact, even though the episode is finished and has no current legal bearing on your financial status.
Even for jobs where the employer has to get a report from the police, the police aren't allowed to give information about some offences that have since passed their sell-by date or have been sealed. If the police and other authorities aren't allowed to give somebody that information, why should websites or Google be excused?
If Mr Snow is suggesting that this is the "end of history" then all I can say is "You know nothing, Jon Snow"
Back OT:
I find it interesting that Bing and other search engines have avoided all mention in news outlets. Apparently, only Google has this sort of data that can be searched through and all others are totally innocent.
All well and good to say that any search engine operator falls under this ruling but how will that be applied over multiple search engines?
Mr. Gonzalez has won this ruling for Google to remove the links to him, will he now have to go through another multiple of cases to force Bing, Yahoo, etc take down links to an identical article? I can't see Microsoft saying "well, Google had a ruling against them so we'll also drop this from Bing without being told". The precedent set by that would cause their lawyers nightmares for future cases.
"Mr. Gonzalez has won this ruling for Google to remove the links to him"
Isn't the ruling merely saying that he can take them back to a lower court or agency (Spanish Data Protection Agency in this case) to re-assess?
I think his claim against the paper hosting the story being linked to had already been rejected, as may still happen with his against Google.
"will he now have to go through another multiple of cases to force Bing, Yahoo, etc take down links to an identical article?"
Will make no difference now as due to the Streisand Effect any search for his name will now have hundreds of news links talking about this ruling, each one repeating the original reason of his 'embarrassment'. Any attempts to suppress those would probably have a new raft of news stories discussing the suppression of the suppression of the original story ... and ad infinitum.
If he truly wanted to hide his details then effecting a ruling like this was not a good way to do it (I think a super injunction would be needed) so I guess he just wanted to prove a point.
The website that published the mans details is the source of the issue not Google. Google's system indexes ALL websites for search purposes. If they selectively ignore certain search results, the EU would charge them for THAT too.
All Google did was index what others were responsible for doing first. Reputational impact belongs eleswhere. Yes Google is ubiquitous, thats it's raison d'etre, it indexes EVERYONE, it did not create content of a deleterious nature.
You do know my 'spoiler' wasn't true, don't you? (The clue being that he is still around in season 4) And that newscaster Jon Snow was mentioned in the article? If I wanted to make people dislike me, I'd indignantly post petulant, wrong, shouty answers to harmlessly trivial snark. Like THIS!
I know ranting about anti-Google rants won't do a thing in a Reg-iverse where Google invented war and the Black Death so I'll just pre-position my "I told you so" now for when, in a few years we discover all the things that people have had expunged from view (because you know there's no defensible line around Google that's going to prevent this ruling from being applied to any web search or scraping service). Business opportunity: be one in the legion of companies that will soon spring up to work what ever system gets set up to implement this ruling, all making money from rich people, politicians, and companies who will pay to bury their past, airbrush out any trouble. The negative press about our product? How dare you link to that! The suit my ex filed over my domestic violence? Out with that! Photo of corporate boss vacationing with politician? Piffle! The only people who will have to live with their past will be the rest of us who can't afford these services. I know I won't convince you now, but mark my words..., we will rue this decision and the google-noids will ask me to pass the gravy so they can choke down their big, feathery dish of crow.
The AEPD (Spanish ICO) had rejected Mr González complaint against La Vanguardia to remove, alter or exclude from search the original publication. The pages were allowed to stand.
The ECJ judgement is about removing search results but does nothing about their sources.
http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014-05/cp140070en.pdf has the official summary of the judgement.
is one of jurisdiction.
Google wanted the courts to accept it processed data in the US and only flogged ads in each country, this actually runs counter to what it told parliment in the UK when it claimed it sold everything out of Ireland.
Google and others will operate with impunity until jurisdiction is established in each area.
As for that Wales character his fear is being forced to take responsibility for the mountains of incorrect and irrelevent shit on wikipedia as he is in the same boat.
@Ken
"Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by a government, media outlet or other controlling body."
Emphasis on "inconvenient" for this case. By all means, contend all you want, but it IS censorship. Whether it's done by some dictators "blue pencil" office or by a court makes no difference. Note that, as in the ruling, the information being true/fact or not isn't a consideration. All that matters is that "someone" found it "bad" for some subjective reason.
@Diodesign
And now it's not only republishing, linking to that which is already published also lands you in hot water it seems.
What's next? I link to some data and i get told to remove the link? I'm sure M$ would love all those links to the DoJ affair removed. Those past practices are so "irrelevant" these days. How about the NSA? All those links to their evil doing were "irrelevant and inconvenient" even before they existed.
@downvoters
Keep downplaying the importance of your freedom of speech and expression and you'll eventually find yourselves short of both...
"By all means, contend all you want, but it IS censorship. Whether it's done by some dictators "blue pencil" office or by a court makes no difference. "
By all means lean on your strict dictionary reading all you want, but no normal speaker of English would use the word censorship to describe a court, for example, protecting a vulnerable witness against potential lethal defendants. The word has very negative overtones and so I hope your dictionary quotation is incomplete. When a court balances the rights of various parties in accordance with ages-old practice (as I was suggesting in my original post) it just isn't what the man in the street calls censorship.
Permanently scrubbing your profile from Google+ or FB or some other Ad-serving Govt-Snooping site?
Instead censorship and the public right to know has hijacking this phrase. But I want the right to be forgotten when forced to write to a gmail account, or when a website sneakily redirects there. I don't want my email Ad-scanned, never mind added to Google's global address book for the five-eyes and advertisers! Moreover, I want the right to be forgotten by google-analytics. Forget AdBlock etc, what good is that when the beast uses server side scripts and super-cookies...
I hope Andrew is correct in his interpretation of the effect of this ruling, and that any 'right to be forgotten' can only be ordered by a court. But who wants to fight a court case over every such request? Perhaps Google will, but it's reported that requests are already in from a child molester, and MP caught up in the expenses scandal and a dodgy company director. I have a bad feeling about this ...
Requests that will fail the public interest test are to be expected, because most (almost all) of the media has failed to mention the public interest test. Documents and web pages relating to the expenses scandal are clearly in the public interest.
If you only listened to C4 or similar coverage, you'd think you get anything embarrassing taken down. So the media has encouraged trolling.
Next week: "This awful trolling crisis".
Google has to submit itself to the laws and regulations of the countries where it wants to do business.
You can substitute Bing, Yahoo! or whomever.
The irony?
I'll wager that some of the comments made by Eric Schmidt and privacy... will have either been removed or buried. ;-)
But back to the point. If ebay wants to do business in Germany then it has to acknowledge that there are limitations to what can and cannot be sold in Germany. (they do) So too should Google. And here's a funny thing... Google claims in a Spanish court that they are an American company. To the IRS they claim that their IP is in an Irish subsidiary so that they don't pay taxes in the US.
It would be interesting to see if some smart lad or lassie in the IRS were to take their testimony in Spain and use it against them to shut down their 'double Irish with a Jamaican twist... or whatever dodge they are using these days...
Yet again the EU lawmakers think that there needs to be a completely new set of rules to govern against stupidity. The fact is, regardless of the communications channel you use, you have a right to your data until the point you choose to relinquish it.
For example if you find that someone has put your information on their website, book, poster, song etc then you can request that they remove it as it is yours. If you chose to publish your own information and gave permission for that site to make a copy of it (which if you read the terms and conditions of almost any site I can think of, when signing up or uploading you will have at the very least have given permission for them to use the data however they like if you still have any rights to it at all), then you have relinquished the right to stop people using that information.
If you try to apply the ruling that the EU have set, where do you stop? Would Amazon have to stop showing the 'people who bought this piece of crap also bought this piece of crap' banner because they have to use your information to link the two purchases.
Simple rule to follow, if you aren't 100% sure that what you're telling people will be passed on, and you don't want everyone to know, shut up.
So if the ECJ can, within the space of a couple of paragraphs, throw out the argument that Google Spain is just a local subsidiary of Google Europe, purchasing foreign data processing services from Google USA in order to sell adverts to Spanish customers from its headquarters in Ireland...
Why can't the taxman?
Sooner or later he will, but megacorps lawyer up a lot harder for money than they do for stuff like this that they basically oppose just for the publicity. And people still think Google are nailing it to the man when Google has far more money and resources available to it than any government department could dream of.
The fact is, the original information about Mr Gonzalez will stay just where it always was, and anyone taking a serious interest in him - such as who might wish to sell him a house - will hopefully not rely on just a quick web search to find out what they know. Doubtless, the local paper or whoever published his little matter back in 1995 has their own searchable archive. If someone is just too lazy for decent research, it's not the end of history!
Laws can be abuse anyone who thinks someone isn't going to try and abuse this law is an idiot. Just like copyright takedown requests are regularly abuse so will these right to be forgotten requests except right to be forgotten is far more powerful. An this is a massively reinterpretation of a law that was never design to be use in this way.
This will also have a chilling effect on anyone who want to get into the search engine game and in fact it probably push the bar to the point where it simply not worth new entrants from entering the market.
An I don't see how google can do anything other than a team of experts running this program and decide what relevant and what irrelevant plus they will also have to decide if some they declare one week irrelevant has suddenly become relevant this week or how the courts systems can possible evaluate this right to be forgotten on a case by case basis, that could easily be 10s of thousands of every year. Which means the only way to enforce this is through automated technology, an again that leave it wide open to being abuse by anyone who got a past they wish to white wash.
An it not just search engines, their nothing to prevent right to be forgotten notices to being issued newspapers websites with their own search engines or even to the register or to people that maintain blogs with search engine functionality or online archives.
There is a fundamental, irresolvable conflict between the right to know and the right to keep secrets.
Ideally, there would be circumstances in which a person should be obliged to make decisions as though they did not know some fact. So the offence would be committed not by, for example, looking up a spent conviction of a job applicant; but in using that knowledge to discriminate against them. In real life, it's impossible temporarily to forget something, and that knowledge might very easily influence someone's judgement.
This is exactly the sort of thing that it is proper for the courts to decide.
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