Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case • Hacker News Board

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#441

Post by elmo45 » Sun, Apr 15, 2018, 10:10 PM UTC

IAmEveryone wrote: post #172

sigzero wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The right to be forgotten is meant to apply to information that is no longer relevant but disproportionately impacts a person Who the hell makes that call? That in and of itself should tell you this is a bad law.

First, Google. Then, if one side is unhappy, a judge. Example: this article. What exactly is wrong with judges making decisions? Seems to kinda be their job.

This means that any time someone is unhappy with the decision, Google (or an other company) has to shell out tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. Maybe Google can keep doing that for a few months but a normal startup would just grant every single request rather than having to fight it in European courts.

The decision should be made by some independent privacy committee which reviews all the facts, and right to be forgotten requests should go through that committee rather than directly to Google

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#442

Post by chunkyslink » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 7:13 AM UTC

Hmm. This is interesting.

I can see how a non violent criminal who has served their time and been punished might not be able to move on with their life when they are only found in Google for the ONE bad thing they did.

This should never be applied to violent criminals.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#443

Post by zaarn » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 7:22 AM UTC

chunkyslink wrote: post #442

Hmm. This is interesting. I can see how a non violent criminal who has served their time and been punished might not be able to move on with their life when they are only found in Google for the ONE bad thing they did. This should never be applied to violent criminals.

What if someone was a violent criminal in the past, like due to an Alcohol addiction, but went through therapy in prison and is now a peaceful citizen?

Serving your time in jail is sufficient to pay for your crimes, IMO. Unless there is a good reason, ie public interest as the law states, we shouldn't rubberstamp all criminals as evil (or all violent criminals).

Part of getting them back into society is rehabilitation which means we give them another chance to integrate and follow the law.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#444

Post by tomkarlo » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 5:55 PM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #429

tomkarlo wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California's constitution alone is over 100 pages, never mind thousands of pages of other legal code as well as precedents. It's not that the laws are so complex, it's that they have to cover so much it's never going to be feasible for someone not doing it professionally to be an expert on it. Folks say "you should consult with a lawyer" when the topic is something that's too obscure or marginal to be obvious to a no…

This is why common law annoys me. Possible recedent from any tiny case any time? That’s sure to help only one thing: an industry of legal workers since no one can actually know the law without doing endless research. I absolutely love how our laws are relatively small, how precedent is from the Supreme Court only, and how most people don’t have any contact with lawyers in their entire life.

Sorry, are you talking about the US or another country?

We have elements of common law in the US code, and you can definitely have binding precedent that doesn't involve the Supreme Court. As for most folks not having any contact with lawyers... I'm not sure I've met any adult who hasn't.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#445

Post by tomkarlo » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:02 PM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #342

tomkarlo wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much does an outsourced background check? Running an interview pool on someone using a bunch of skilled employees costs probably $4K or so. Figure 7 interviews, 3 hrs each (prep, interview, feedback, hiring meeting) plus someone to arrange the onsite. If those are $150K employees, the fully-loaded cost of 20 hrs of work is going to be over $4K.

Interview prep for one candidate is 10 minutes, plus 20 minutes for postinterview discussion. Subjecting someone to 17 hours of interviews borders on the inhumane. Plus, interviews are done iteratively; you don't run the whole process for every candidate. Moreover, background checks are the least likely to actually disqualify candidates, so they are always done last.

I've done 150+ interviews for Google.

A single candidate will do 1-2 screens (this changes over time / role), plus at least 4-5 on-site interviews. That's about 7-8 hours of meetings, minimum. Having interviewed at a number of other SF tech startups, almost all of them had about the same # of interviews.

Once you're past the screen interview, you'll almost always get all 5 interviews in the pool unless you're terrible - it's more efficient to just have the candidate come in once.

Google recommends a 1:1 ratio of prep/feedback time to interview time, so it's ~2 hrs per interview even if you're not involved in the hire / no hire discussion.

The discussion here was specifically that it was likely that background checks would start disqualifying candidates, so maybe it's better to do them up front as that's cheaper than having the interviews done first... I'd say that still makes sense, at least before the pool, if you think there's a reasonable chance they'll get punted.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#446

Post by alkonaut » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #429

tomkarlo wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California's constitution alone is over 100 pages, never mind thousands of pages of other legal code as well as precedents. It's not that the laws are so complex, it's that they have to cover so much it's never going to be feasible for someone not doing it professionally to be an expert on it. Folks say "you should consult with a lawyer" when the topic is something that's too obscure or marginal to be obvious to a no…

This is why common law annoys me. Possible recedent from any tiny case any time? That’s sure to help only one thing: an industry of legal workers since no one can actually know the law without doing endless research. I absolutely love how our laws are relatively small, how precedent is from the Supreme Court only, and how most people don’t have any contact with lawyers in their entire life.

Sorry if I was unclear, I’m talking about how US law annoys me (it does affect me despite not living in the US, e.g in terms of prices on goods from legal overhead in the US) and how I like that my non-US country has precedent from a Supreme Court and no one knows a lawyer because there almost aren’t any (probably much for that reason - law is rather simple)

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#447

Post by tomkarlo » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:04 PM UTC

jobigoud wrote: post #364

jimmywanger wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn all have roughly the same interview process. One hour phone screen, 5 hour on-site interviews, then a decision. I have never encountered a situation with 7 interviews. Bear in mind that many wash out during the phone screen, so no, a fully loaded interview schedule is not that sort of commitment at all.

I think he means 7H of interviews in total in order to find the right candidate for the position.

Lol, no. It's higher than that because 70% of screener interviews end up not resulting in a hire, and probably 50-70% of on-sites don't. I think the last estimate I saw was about 50 hrs of interviewing total per hired candidate, and that feels about right to me.

7 interviews just for the hired candidate (1-2 screeners, 5-6 on-site pool interviews.) Maybe less than 7 hrs if they're cut to 45 mins each.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#448

Post by krageon » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 10:47 AM UTC

danso wrote: post #273

BadassFractal wrote: post #185

I once got contacted by a female account manager from a well known job boards company in the Valley. I googled for her to find her linkedin so we could link up, since we were going to be doing business together, likely for a while. What shocked me was that the first result that Google returned was a smear page against her from her ex boyfriend, something like janedoesisaslut.com or janedoecheats.com with a long essay…

I wonder how this would be treated under the EU law? It doesn't involve a legal conviction or something that has a codified statute of limitations. It may contain facts, but it also contains opinions, opinions which the site creator may still hold.

The way it would be treated is the domain would be taken down (if that were requested by the victim). I'm not sure if that is EU law or something local. I am fairly certain a lot of EU countries have local provisions that effectively mean the same.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#449

Post by chunkyslink » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 1:07 PM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #443

chunkyslink wrote: post #442

Hmm. This is interesting. I can see how a non violent criminal who has served their time and been punished might not be able to move on with their life when they are only found in Google for the ONE bad thing they did. This should never be applied to violent criminals.

What if someone was a violent criminal in the past, like due to an Alcohol addiction, but went through therapy in prison and is now a peaceful citizen? Serving your time in jail is sufficient to pay for your crimes, IMO. Unless there is a good reason, ie public interest as the law states, we shouldn't rubberstamp all criminals as evil (or all violent criminals). Part of getting them back into society is rehabilitatio…

I just think that a violent crime is not excusable in any circumstance. Yes they have served their time, but if someone is capable of violence even once, it should not be possible to hide this information.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#450

Post by hesk » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 9:09 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #386

hesk wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If felons were truly forgiven, they would have their right to vote restored. This is a very US-centric attitude and very undemocratic in my view. In Germany, for example, people in jail are generally allowed to vote. They could even set up a voting booth inside the jail if there were demand. However, there usually isn't and inmates vote by mail. In the last 25 years, only 80 people, who were found guilty of treason…

80 people have been convicted of treason in Germany since 1993? More than 3 a year? That seems... shockingly high. What were they doing? How many independent acts of treason was this?

I quoted the original number from a newspaper article which didn't go into details. But I was curious myself, so I contacted the author of the article and did some of my own research.

The German federal statistics office publishes a report every year which lists how many people have lost their right to vote or to hold public office according to §45 (2) and (5) StGB (German criminal law) [1]. Unfortunately, the reports do not distinguish between these two cases. In any case, the numbers are vanishingly small in recent years. I looked at the last 12 years for which there is a report (2005 - 2016) and it's only 15 cases, so a little more than 1 per year. Again, it doesn't distinguish between losing the right to vote and losing the right to hold office.

The people who lost their rights according to this law were mostly convicted for crimes against the state, the public order, or misconduct in office. To make it more precise, the report lists crimes such as joining a terrorist organisation, obstruction of punishment, forcing a subordinate to commit a crime, criminal assault while in office, corruption, etc. The original newspaper article summarized them as crimes against the state which I translated as treason.

However, it seems that the law was applied more often in the past. I found a secondary source [2] which lists 178 cases between 1978 and 2008. The primary source [3] is a dissertation which costs 80 €.

[1] https://www.destatis.de/GPStatistik/receive/DESerie_serie_00..., § 5.1

[2] Sonja Bühler, Die Aberkennung des aktiven Wahlrechts von Strafgefangenen nach § 45 Abs. 5 StGB, Freilaw 1/2017, http://www.freilaw.de/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/0...

[3] Jan Oelbermann, Wahlrecht und Strafe, Universität Bremen, 2011, http://www.nomos-shop.de/Oelbermann-Wahlrecht-Strafe/product...