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Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

bbc.com

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Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#91

Post by yiyus »

comboy wrote: post #69
abritinthebay wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say it’s doable. How?

I'm glad you asked :) I want to publish a website with thoughts so far and looking for more brains. What I have in mind is a global, multilayered web of trust. It would be a game changer. Of course, I don't mean it as a startup, it must be decentralized. I don't care who creates it, I just really want to have it. I'm sure you know about the small world effect[1]. Example of layer: coding skill. I assign weights to fr…

> Example of layer: coding skill. I assign weights to friends I know. Now if I want to know if X is a good coder I check what friends of my friends think about it and multiply it by weights I have assigned to those friends (recursive). But it's much more than just having reasonable opinion about coding skill of somebody who you want to hire or cooperate with.

So, basically, your multilayered web of trust is just a popularity contest. Sorry, but I do not think this is a good idea.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#92

Post by sammoth »

TomMarius wrote: post #74
izacus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how a lot of EU countries function - which is why there's friction there. The American "You are a criminal for life and will eternally be punished!" attitude is clashing with an EU mindset of being able to start a new life. Permanent records are hugely damaging for persons livelihood in these cases.

I (an EU citizen) want to keep my right to think whatever I want about a criminal - and that includes looking at or keeping records. I feel like this 'right to be forgotten' hurts my safety - I don't want to forget that someone murdered someone or raped someone, these things are unforgettable and definitely unforgivable - and I want to know about them, and I want employers to be able to look them up.

But your ability to do that may be directly infringing on the ex-convict's right to make a living or feel safe themselves

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#93

Post by TomMarius »

cavanasm wrote: post #88
TomMarius wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I (an EU citizen) want to keep my right to think whatever I want about a criminal - and that includes looking at or keeping records. I feel like this 'right to be forgotten' hurts my safety - I don't want to forget that someone murdered someone or raped someone, these things are unforgettable and definitely unforgivable - and I want to know about them, and I want employers to be able to look them up.

No one is getting murder or rape convictions removed from the record. This is considerably smaller scale stuff, and the story itself mentions that two men jointly fought to have news of their conviction removed, one who got 6 months in jail, and one who got 4 years, both non violent white collar type offenses, and only the guy who got 6 months actually won. The second guy lost.

Yes, treatment should be always the same - the records stay. Two things though - many thigs that are considered a crime shouldn't be a crime, and second, if the crime is minor or irrelevant, the record won't hurt the person, otherwise it's a proof that it's not as irrelevant as you think. For example in my country, you will get even parking offenses (repeated, but still) written in your record. It hurts nobody because nobody cares.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#94

Post by danShumway »

This is kind of a trend I've been noticing, where Europe will try to fix a valid technological problem, but pick the most problematic or poorly implemented solution to do it.

It's not clear to me what the difference is between a government censoring someone directly and a government making it impossible for anyone to find a piece of information. Right to Be Forgotten only works if it becomes prohibitively expensive for a company or individual to locate past articles. So who cares whether or not the original source has been taken down?

It's not clear to me why it's not troubling to European citizens for their government to be in charge of what information is and isn't relevant to the public. Whenever I ask people about this, I get the response "well, that's why we have courts." I dunno, Europeans must trust their courts a lot more than I trust mine.

It's not clear to me why this problem couldn't be solved more elegantly by creating anti-discrimination laws around criminal records. If a company gets 90% through the hiring process, runs a background check, and then immediately says "no", then you sue them.

It's also not clear to me that this will be enforceable in the future. I consider distributed site indexing to be an unsolved problem, but I don't think its unsolvable, and people are actively working on it. If for some crazy reason a distributed web search starts getting used on par with DuckDuckGo in the next 5 years, what do you do about that? Ban the technology?

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#95

Post by izacus »

TomMarius wrote: post #74
izacus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how a lot of EU countries function - which is why there's friction there. The American "You are a criminal for life and will eternally be punished!" attitude is clashing with an EU mindset of being able to start a new life. Permanent records are hugely damaging for persons livelihood in these cases.

I (an EU citizen) want to keep my right to think whatever I want about a criminal - and that includes looking at or keeping records. I feel like this 'right to be forgotten' hurts my safety - I don't want to forget that someone murdered someone or raped someone, these things are unforgettable and definitely unforgivable - and I want to know about them, and I want employers to be able to look them up.

Except that most people aren't removing those convictions. With your rigid midset you are punishing thousands of people who have been abused by social media and have done nothing wrong. Destroying their lives permanently.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#96

Post by stevenwoo »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #40
volak wrote: post #28

Entering into a deeper relationship with someone (employer/employee, landlord/tenant, etc) you want to know everything about the other person. This is not because you are some nosy person - its because breaking that relationship means risking lawsuits or damage to your property or a whole eviction process which can take months to years... Its a dangerous thing to "trust" someone when they'll have that level of contro…

So a convicted criminal should be eternally punished by losing any employment security and being paid less than their peers? That doesn't sound like a society I would like to live in. The other alternative is that these restrictions would begin with convicted criminals, and spread to the rest of the population. Just because someone hasn't been convicted doesn't mean they aren't a criminal with drugs and weapons in th…

How do you handle someone like this guy after he gets out of prison: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/our-tim... If we erase his past from the internet - that kind of enables him to do his scam again immediately. It's a difficult question.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#97

Post by 2ef90u »

comboy wrote: post #19

It's absolutely insane what they are doing (EU). Should libraries remove newspapers with my name if I don't like what's written there about me? It's pure censorship. It all stems from the fact that society hasn't yet adjusted to the reality that not everything on the Internet is true. People share between themselves lots of false beliefs. The Internet is just another medium. The problem is that if I put up a billboar…

Tech wonk thinks world belongs to tech wonks -- "Only tech can save us from ourselves!" declared would be cult leader "Just Google it!". Film@11

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#98

Post by izacus »

TomMarius wrote: post #90
sorokod wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I feel like this 'right to be forgotten' hurts my safety" A few years ago you had no such facility at all - how did you manage?

I was feeling less safe, that has improved. Why go back in time?

Because it hurts innocent people.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#99

Post by downandout »

Elessar wrote: post #8

We're rapidly moving to a point where an official (government) criminal record is not important to folks you want to interact with -- landlords, employers etc. They will instead turn to Google. As such, Google might as well be the official record for many people. And if one put themsleves in the shoes of a victim, or even a criminal who has served their time, Google's pagerank is doing them a disservice. I don't know…

Google might as well be the official record for many people.

I couldn’t agree more. Public records are technically public, but often opaque and difficult to access. It’s one thing to allow a sufficiently motivated person to find this information out; it’s quite another to make it easy for casual acquaintances and neighbors to do it.

Google makes these records instantly accessible to anyone, and for whatever reason, seems to push more negative results about an individual higher in the search results. One need to look no further than to observe the prominence of Ripoff Report results in Google searches to prove this. The people behind this extortion scheme, which operates under a disgusting perversion of the Communications Decency Act, tout their Google dominance as one reason that their victims should pay them thousands of dollars per month to delete or modify the “reports” against them that appear on the site.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#100

Post by lumisota »

danShumway wrote: post #94

This is kind of a trend I've been noticing, where Europe will try to fix a valid technological problem, but pick the most problematic or poorly implemented solution to do it. It's not clear to me what the difference is between a government censoring someone directly and a government making it impossible for anyone to find a piece of information. Right to Be Forgotten only works if it becomes prohibitively expensive f…

Discriminating on the basis of spent convictions is illegal in the UK (where this ruling took place).
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