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Google seeks to limit ‘right to be forgotten’ by claiming it’s journalistic

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Re: Google seeks to limit ‘right to be forgotten’ by claiming it’s journalistic

#2
Seems pretty journalistic to me. This "right to be forgotten" seems incredibly dangerous to me. Should we give Trump the right for his bankruptcies to be forgotten? Do we give child molesters the right for their crimes to be forgotten? Why should people have the right to have things they don't like wiped from the historical record?

EDIT: I should point out, I do understand the other side. People shouldn't be punished forever for a crime they've already paid their ostensible debt for. However, I think this is a pretty nuanced issue, and a universal 'right to be forgotten' or a blanket "everything about everyone is accessible forever" is probably not the right solution.

Re: Google seeks to limit ‘right to be forgotten’ by claiming it’s journalistic

#3
> England’s Information Commissioner dismissed Google’s argument and said that journalism presupposes a process that includes human editorial decision-making, something that Google’s very algorithmic service does not do.

A side issue (not relevant to the mentioned court case, which deals with long-ago crime convictions): Google News incorporates some human editorial decision-making -- the whitelisting of domains. At some point courts will have to make more difficult/less binary decisions about what constitutes human editorial decision-making, which in modern times almost always involves a mechanical algorithmic process. I guess we've run into this before when deciding if bloggers enjoyed the same protections as traditional news institutions.

Re: Google seeks to limit ‘right to be forgotten’ by claiming it’s journalistic

#5
Journalistic? Like an "editor of content"? That's something that will backfire.

There is no escaping that google is the author and editor of an algorithm and that it chooses to remove things from the index for a variety of reasons, so I don't think it's unfair to have laws that try to regulate the list of exclusion.

Re: Google seeks to limit ‘right to be forgotten’ by claiming it’s journalistic

#6
post #2

Seems pretty journalistic to me. This "right to be forgotten" seems incredibly dangerous to me. Should we give Trump the right for his bankruptcies to be forgotten? Do we give child molesters the right for their crimes to be forgotten? Why should people have the right to have things they don't like wiped from the historical record? EDIT: I should point out, I do understand the other side. People shouldn't be punished…

But it might be safer to start with the right to be forgotten then start outlining exceptions to that, instead of the other way around.

Re: Google seeks to limit ‘right to be forgotten’ by claiming it’s journalistic

#8
post #2

Seems pretty journalistic to me. This "right to be forgotten" seems incredibly dangerous to me. Should we give Trump the right for his bankruptcies to be forgotten? Do we give child molesters the right for their crimes to be forgotten? Why should people have the right to have things they don't like wiped from the historical record? EDIT: I should point out, I do understand the other side. People shouldn't be punished…

As I recall from "The man who spent 100,000$ to remove himself from google," the "right to be forgotten" specifically targets falsehoods and lies.

So no, Trump's bankruptcies won't be forgotten in this system, but a false accusation of child molestation can be.

Re: Google seeks to limit ‘right to be forgotten’ by claiming it’s journalistic

#9
I am usually a advocate for privacy and right to be forgotten but in this case I am with Google. The criminals can easily erase their conviction and start 'scamming' victims again. Remember a time when I was looking for apartment and I Googled the name of the owner only to find news articles about how he had built 2 apartments inside one, even though they had no fire escape.

Re: Google seeks to limit ‘right to be forgotten’ by claiming it’s journalistic

#10

> In its defense, Google has argued that it should be protected under an exception for journalism because it provides access to journalistic content This is like saying a grocery store should be exempt because it sells newspapers

I think it's a little more nuanced than that. Google Search provides access to news articles which themselves aren't not subject to withholding/deleting this historical information. If Google Search were ordered by the government to delist one news site over another, that would almost certainly be seen as an attack on freedom of the press.
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