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EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

theguardian.com

21–30 of 77 posts

Re: EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

#21

This law is a very serious threat to freedom of the press, and freedom of speech in general. While it was (allegedly) introduced for reasons that seem quite reasonable - avoiding unfair reputations in search results - it could quite validly be termed as "Right to censor criticism or true facts about yourself". Let's take high-profile person X who is found guilty of some serious crime, like sex offences. They have the…

There's no threat at all to either freedom of speech or the press. If the guardian publishes something, it will have its day in the sun. It just will eventually get removed, years afterwards. No press freedoms impinged, years after you've had your expressive speech. Whatever freedom that is, freedom of historical reports?, it's nothing to do with speech or press. If you want to re-report the information, you could, b…

> Unless, of course, you don't believe in redemption or rehabilitation.

Neither of which have anything to do with a "true" reputation.

Re: EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

#22
post #5

The interesting part of this, for me, is that the Guardian believes that a) Google has the power to put the genie back in the bottle (dubious, but reflective of Google's massive control of Internet navigation) and b) the Guardian would have the power to put the genie back in the bottle (absurd).

What do you mean by "putting the genie back into the bottle"?

The Guardian believes it has the capacity to make the editorial decision to unpublish an article (true) and by consequence make "the Internet" forget about facts in the article (false).

Re: EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

#23
post #17

This article is pretty terrible. I think it's great that it's drawing attention to the problem, but it spends most of the time rallying an angry mob and pointing the pitchforks in the wrong direction: > Guardian articles have been hidden by Google > Editorial decisions belong with them, not Google > But such editorial calls surely belong with publishers, not Google. Google has done absolutely nothing wrong here. It i…

Put down your Google pitchfork. The article is clearly not placing the blame on Google: "As for Google itself, it's clearly a reluctant participant in what effectively amounts to censorship." The second paragraph says this is the result of a court ruling. If the most concerning thing to you about this article is that it doesn't spend enough time exonerating Google for their role in this, then I don't know what to tel…

Google doesn't have to be "exonerated" of anything because all they do is comply with (absurd) law.

And the article does imply the blame lies with Google way too many times.

Re: EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

#25

This law is a very serious threat to freedom of the press, and freedom of speech in general. While it was (allegedly) introduced for reasons that seem quite reasonable - avoiding unfair reputations in search results - it could quite validly be termed as "Right to censor criticism or true facts about yourself". Let's take high-profile person X who is found guilty of some serious crime, like sex offences. They have the…

There's no threat at all to either freedom of speech or the press. If the guardian publishes something, it will have its day in the sun. It just will eventually get removed, years afterwards. No press freedoms impinged, years after you've had your expressive speech. Whatever freedom that is, freedom of historical reports?, it's nothing to do with speech or press. If you want to re-report the information, you could, b…

freedom of historical reports?

If we lose that one we are truly fucked.

Re: EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

#26

It won't take long before a UK search for Dougie McDonald shows the article talking about how the articles about Dougie McDonald have been removed from Google, and what those articles are about. Google tells the media which articles are being expunged, the media writes about the articles Google expunged and then Google indexes these pages in their search results. Interesting process.

Already happened.

Re: EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

#27

This law is a very serious threat to freedom of the press, and freedom of speech in general. While it was (allegedly) introduced for reasons that seem quite reasonable - avoiding unfair reputations in search results - it could quite validly be termed as "Right to censor criticism or true facts about yourself". Let's take high-profile person X who is found guilty of some serious crime, like sex offences. They have the…

There's no threat at all to either freedom of speech or the press. If the guardian publishes something, it will have its day in the sun. It just will eventually get removed, years afterwards. No press freedoms impinged, years after you've had your expressive speech. Whatever freedom that is, freedom of historical reports?, it's nothing to do with speech or press. If you want to re-report the information, you could, b…

"It just will eventually get removed, years afterwards"

I'm fairly sympathetic to the "right to be forgotten", but this Guardian article does raise some troubling questions about exactly how it is going to work. Two of the things it mentions being hidden from Google results are from 2011 and 2010. Is that "years afterwards"? Is three years so long ago that the information is genuinely irrelevant?

Re: EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

#28

This law is a very serious threat to freedom of the press, and freedom of speech in general. While it was (allegedly) introduced for reasons that seem quite reasonable - avoiding unfair reputations in search results - it could quite validly be termed as "Right to censor criticism or true facts about yourself". Let's take high-profile person X who is found guilty of some serious crime, like sex offences. They have the…

There's no threat at all to either freedom of speech or the press. If the guardian publishes something, it will have its day in the sun. It just will eventually get removed, years afterwards. No press freedoms impinged, years after you've had your expressive speech. Whatever freedom that is, freedom of historical reports?, it's nothing to do with speech or press. If you want to re-report the information, you could, b…

[deleted]

Re: EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

#29
post #7

[deleted]

I think this is a great idea but would go a step further and include every major region/country rather than just the EU and US.

A group of international servers cross referencing indexed webpages for possible censorship would be a powerful tool. It could rank each region on their applied censorship laws in regards to the internet while providing a means of presenting the information that is censored. For it to be successful though, it would have to work 'out of the box' internationally.

Re: EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

#30
Google is playing this ruling really cleverly. They will just blanket accept every single request for a "right to be forgotten" that they receive.

Once swathes of valid journalism disappears down the toilet, the shit is slowly going to hit the pan.

You could use this for some nefarious purposes I'm sure.

I have a client that wants a page removed because of a court case that painted them in a bad light. This ruling just made their year.

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