French authorities take lead in grilling Google on 'Right to be Forgotten' Google, Yahoo! and Bing have been grilled by the EU’s top data protection tzars. Representatives from the search engines were asked by the Article 29 Working Party (A29WP) how they plan to manage requests to take down links to outdated or irrelevant information. On 13 May, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ordered Google to …
"Following widespread concern from digital civil liberties groups, who believe that profit-making companies should not be making judgments about what is in the public interest at all...."
I assume that these people obviously also disagree with the newspapers and other media outlets all of whom determine what is in the public interest when deciding their editorial policy. Of course it could be argued that Google is not making such a decision as they only provide the link to another publisher who has already decided that publishing the information is a matter of public interest (well at least at the time they published it) therefore in reality it is the requestor and not Google who is determining whether or not something is in the public interest by asking for the link to be removed on the basis it is no longer in the public interest.
Perhaps people should stop and think this whole thing through a bit better than the judges who still think Androids are called Marvin and act pretty miserable.
Reuters also reported that the watchdogs were concerned that the removed results could still be found on the international Google.com site even though they had been taken off local variants such as Google.co.uk <-- From the Beeb's write up.
This is going to get ever so messy.
If the A29 group are seriously considering data accessed within the EU is in-scope of the Data Protection legislation being used to back all this up ... Well what we need is nationalised databases (and given who's recently proposed that, we can probably forget about it)
Was that an EU/US trade war I heard brewing? At this time on a Friday night?!
"If the A29 group are seriously considering data accessed within the EU is in-scope of the Data Protection legislation being used to back all this up ... Well what we need is nationalised databases (and given who's recently proposed that, we can probably forget about it)"
Google is processing the data of European citizens. Whether it does that in York or New York is irrelevant, if Google has a presence in Europe. Google can always pull out of the EU, if they feel that strongly about it.
there is an article making the rounds in the US that someone in the EU Govt. is trying to force Google to enact a worldwide removal....
This is simply insane. Google should not censor ANYTHING.AT.ALL. they are an index. Being buried at 1,000,000,000 may well be enough for most things...
I raised the question a few days back, that it is bad enough knowing what is *missing* from google without corrupting it with political influences. Which *will* happen, if it hasn't already...
The laws around publication should perhaps made more equitable...since a newspaper article is probably more likely to be read than some random persons blog, perhaps force retractions to be printed in the same font and place as the original article. And online a permanent "this was retracted" border.
I don't know the answer, but this is not it.
P.
Then they should learn to go to the source of the information instead of the search, one article at a time and censor that way, forcing the removal of the information instead of demanding that a 3rd party acts as the censor to the world.
Incidentally, why is that they expect Google to censor but not other search engines? Are the idiots that run the EU that pig ignorant of the fact that if Google is forced to not show a search world wide then it just means that people will start using other search engines and get to the same data that way.
Mind you, saying that, it's the same people that think it should be against the law to sell a banana that is too curved etc.
"Incidentally, why is that they expect Google to censor but not other search engines? Are the idiots that run the EU that pig ignorant of the fact that if Google is forced to not show a search world wide then it just means that people will start using other search engines and get to the same data that way."
Cannot tell if stupid or just trolling. FIRST LINE of the article:
"Google, Yahoo! and Bing have been grilled by the EU’s top data protection tzars."
Seriously, get a clue.
The source is often protected by law - E.g. accredited press. They cannot be forced to take down an article. Likewise if the article is in the public interest it cannot be taken down.
What the law tries to do is make a compromise. If you do a search on "StimuliC" and it brings up as the first entry that you were arrested for murder, but you were released without charge, you can request that that link be removed when using a search term with "StimuliC" in it.
This works in analogue to paper press. The article is widely known at the time, but sinks into obscurity over time, so most people would forget that you were arrested, as you were not charged and convicted. If somebody wants to write a book on the case, they can still go to the paper archives and get all the articles on the case. To whit, if they search for the name of the victim, they would also get the article where you were arrested, but they wouldn't get the article if they searched for you explicitly. If you were charged and convicted, then you probably couldn't get the articles delisted when searching on your name, because that is still in the public interest.
It is a compromise. But Google seems, with its first few high profile cases, to be deliberately "overdoing" it and removing all listings to the article, not just "affected" listings, to try and make a point - that the law is censorship - when in fact they are doing the censorship themselves, because they are misrepresenting the ruling.
I believe I said this would happen in my response to news of the ruling itself. It's a dumb ruling that charters a dumb notion and attempting to implement it is raising about a bazillion interlinked, often contradictory issues. The whole situation makes the European bureaucracy sound like a flock of acephalous chickens.
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However, the A29WP will not be producing any such guidelines for search engines.
Do they plan to contribute at all to the process of figuring out what is the so-called right to be forgotten? Or do they want Google to keep blundering in the dark until they get sued again, and a new ruling of the ECJ adds one more data point?
@bluenose observed
"Perhaps people should stop and think this whole thing through . . ."
Indeed. Users, service providers, lawyers and judges, and those who govern, alike.
Communication of information has arguably been THE driving force in the evolution of human society.
In the beginning, we depended on individual memory and storytelling; a one to few network for communication. Storage in memory of the next story teller demanded time and repetition. The right to be forgotten was a non issue. The invention of writing allowed knowledge to be captured and stored indefinitely. Data distribution required that the information be painstakingly copied, and carried to wherever it was needed. Invention of printing and moveable type (in that order) changed the economics and the practical availability of information.
The first automated information system for capturing and re-using information without direct human intervention is generally accepted to be the Jacquard loom, invented in 1806. The automation was the giant leap there. From an IT perspective it was no great shakes. Data storage on paper tape and performance of 1 Op/second, each loom operating in splendid isolation.
Speaking to writing took us some 10's of millions of years. From writing to printing a few thousand, From printing to automation, a few hundred. From automation at 1 Op/second to the first MegaFLOP stand-along computer about 150. It has taken us a short lifetime and change to move from that to the present. . . PetaFLOP computers that are connected in a global network, connected to individuals with multiple GigaFLOPs of processing power and Terabytes of memory on my desktop for the price of a good suit.
Ladies and gents, I would submit that none of us--users, service providers, lawyers and judges, and those who govern, alike--know f#@k-all about how IT will affect society. We have nothing comparable in human experience to draw on.
Well, actually . . . while the scale of the change is orders of magnitude smaller we do have something of a precedent. . .Gunpowder. Invented about a thousand years ago; progressing to the first nuclear devices being exploded and employed within my lifetime and now proliferating like rabbits around the world. Proliferants include in a number of nations whose views of the world have not evolved since the stone age.
IT has the power to create a golden age of personal knowledge and freedom to counteract the "gunpowder effect." Or used as tool by those who govern, it has the power to create unprecedented social dislocations and stress. That will virtually guarantee that someone will resort to the use of lethal force.
So, as bluenose opines, we damned well better think it through--all of us.
More amusingly, even if the EU bureaucrats do manage to legislate some tedious solution for "forgetting" specific bits of the past, there will always be workarounds, such as the Wayback Machine.
However, it would be so much easier (and safer) to just forget the bureaucrats. Unfortunately, this is where it all goes horribly wrong.
The scariest part of such a mentality is this: if the technology to filter (and effectively censor) specific bits of information becomes the legislated status quo, what happens next?
Absolute control seemsto be very high on the bureaucrat's agenda.
Is this because they might otherwise swiftly drift into irrelevance?
Or are they just puppets working in the interests of those who need to control everything? Methinks the latter.
And if we decide to agree with all this and specific parts of past history (I dunno, let's say news articles and blog posts about Iraq war atrocities, government corruption, mass surveillance, corporate/gov/IMC fiddling, ensuing economic crashes, etc) suddenly become inimical to the "public interest" will these topics become candidates for some regulated global web amnesia? If I were dedicated to dicking with the world's economy on a major scale, that is exactly what I would need.
Will the recently liberated digerati (liberated in relative historical terms) progressively find themselves penned in and converted into info-managed sheep who can only find and read the current party line?
Will there only be two types of internet users: those who only surf and consume the "mainstream" versions of history and those who can find and read "forbidden, non-official" content? In most of human history, the latter group tended to be burned at the stake until some sort of revolution took place.
Although every attempt to legislate the internet should be technically doomed to failure, governments, media moguls, corps and other powerful interests all seem hell bent on doing it.
What does that say about us a world society? Do the powers that be secretly yearn for a return to the Dark Ages where most information was locked out of sight?
Or should we be yearnng for a continued digital Renaissance ? Speak your minds people. I know what I want.
The distinction "those who govern" is deliberate.
The thoughts that follow reflect a fundamental belief that I personally hold, that all powers, rights, and freedoms are vested in the People. The sole purpose of government is the preservation of the People's rights and freedoms. Thus all rightful authorities and powers of government derive from the will of the governed.
Government, per se, is a theoretical construct, whose realization has many parts. There is the system of government--the broad framework that a People establish--Republic; Parliamentary; Monarchy, Dictatorship, etc. Anarchy. Except in the last of these, rule of law is the usual mechanism for ensuring the rights and freedoms of the people.
Those who govern may be essential to the operation of the government. But, apart from those they usurp, they have no inherent rights or powers except those they share as individual members of their societies. To the extent that governments operate in accordance with this general principle, they are legitimate. To the extent that the laws they impose and the actions they take are for the sole purpose of securing the rights and freedoms of the governed they are legitimate.
The presumption that laws and actions hostile to the rights of the individual are legal and legitimate simply because they are sanctioned and taken by government authority is fallacious. They do not constitute a legitimate or effective rule of law. And when this occurs, making the distinction between those who govern and legitimate government is critical.
This is because those of us with representative forms have the ability to change those who govern at the polls. And that is where it needs to be done. In the past, officials as good or better than those who now govern have responded with lethal force when the special interests they served were threatened.
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