EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by josephlord » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 12:52 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #70

josephlord wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Google want to do a good job of assessing requests? I think it highly unlikely that the court would want this article suppressed. I think Google may be taking things down over enthusiastically to bring the law and the ruling into disrepute. They are betting that the law rather than their particular takedown process will be blamed.

The law imposes a penalty if an appropriate request is not honored, but does not, as I understand, do so if an inappropriate request is honored. It therefore encourages exactly the behavior Google is taking, because erring on the side of taking things down is the legally safe approach. The DMCA notice/counternotice arrangement has a similar but more subtle effect, because while it is superficially symmetric, the situ…

Are you sure that is right? Penalties for contempt of court, for not having a process or for always denying requests as a process I can imagine but can you link to anything referring to the penalties for making wrong judgements in this area.

I'm quite sympathetic to the idea that the rules may be wrong or could be made better but I think that there being some control in this area is a good idea on balance.

The FAQ someone linked to refers to balance of freedom of speech and data protection so there is the possibilities of complaints from both sides.

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

#72

Post by adamconroy » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 3:01 AM UTC

I don't know it there is a good solution to this problem. I personally had an issue about 8 years ago, when at the time I started looking for a new job. I couldn't understand why recruiters weren't contacting me after I had applied to many jobs, most of which I was sure I was a good candidate, good enough to at least warrant a phone call or email in response. Eventually I rang one asking for feedback, and he told me off the record that he had googled me and my name had appeared on news group posting that associated me with hard drug use. I had posted something on a newsgroup in 1996 about a band I had seen in concert, and the thread descended into a discussion about the band's drug use. When googling my name, the search results certainly looked bad. You had to read the whole thread to realize the context.

Anyway, at the time google had an automated (or semi-automated) service where you could ask them to hide news group postings. You had to declare you were the author and give a reason and so forth. I went through the process, and actually lied because the post that caused me problems wasn't posted by me but it was just a stupid one liner by some idiot which just had my username buried in the header somewhere, asked for it to be deleted because it was causing me problems getting a job, and thankfully they did it.

It pretty much saved my career, at least for now because I do live in fear somehow it will resurface.

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

#73

Post by smsm42 » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 6:29 AM UTC

drewcrawford wrote: post #50

peterkelly wrote: post #6

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…

Maybe you can convince of something. Most people from the next generation use Facebook. They're not ignorant of how they use it--they use their privacy settings to hide posts from the public. However Facebook's ToS says [0] Facebook may use any information you share with them "to protect Facebook's or others' rights or property". So hypothetically, if Facebook felt some policy of a presidential candidate threatened "…

>>> they would be in the clear, legally speaking, to publish those photos of you smoking a joint at 18.

So what? We know three of the last US presidents used drugs when they were young. For none of them it was a major problem. If they had seriously bad things done in the past - that would be a problem, but the we want to know about it. Knowing that the presidential candidate smoked weed in college doesn't hurt him anymore - we already know pretty much everybody did it anyway.

>>> This analysis would suggest that free speech and privacy have a very fundamental conflict

Only if you define privacy as "ability to go back in time and undo public things that I did". In my book, privacy doesn't mean that. 1984's memory holes are not privacy, they are an instrument of oppression and mind control. I don't see why somebody would be allowed to control my mind and make me forget things about them that they no longer consider beneficial to them. So I know which side I would choose - the opposite of where 1984 is and where EU is heading now.

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

#74

Post by kybernetikos » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 6:58 AM UTC

jamesbritt wrote: post #47

dingdingdang wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the article does imply the blame lies with Google way too many times. No, it certainly does not: "As for Google itself, it's clearly a reluctant participant in what effectively amounts to censorship."

"Reluctant" is an odd choice of words though. It suggests Google had some possible option to refuse. "Unwilling" or "legally obligated" might describe it better. It's hard not to see this phrasing as an attempt to spread some culpability on to Google.

Reluctant seems perfectly cromulent here. Pretty much any definition includes 'unwilling', and the word itself in its original form contains the image of struggling against something.

In some ways it's more appropriate than your options, because it implies that Google is fighting the implementation of the law as far as it can.

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

#75

Post by slgeorge » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 7:34 AM UTC

cbhl wrote: post #58

justicezyx wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I have no such feeling of 'casual reading of it leads one to believe that Google is engaging in Censorship'.

Try reading more casually... such as just the headline.

So now we're excusing the inability to actually pay attention and read the article _as it is_! Poor comprehension isn't the articles problem.

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

#76

Post by justicezyx » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 4:59 PM UTC

ghshephard wrote: post #66

justicezyx wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I have no such feeling of 'casual reading of it leads one to believe that Google is engaging in Censorship'.

Title, Introduction, First Paragraph read as follows: EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google Publishers must fight back against this indirect challenge to press freedom, which allows articles to be 'disappeared'. Editorial decisions belong with them, not Google When you Google someone from within the EU, you no longer see what the search giant thinks is the most important and relevan…

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

"EU's right to be forgotten", people with context understand this cause.

You are so good at political correctness... That does not matter if you use "search engine" to generalize google, Google is effectively the "search engine". You can say that Google has no fault in this incident, but you should not pretend that Google is not playing a crucial role in this incident...

Wording is just wording, truth is the truth...

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

#77

Post by josephlord » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 11:46 PM UTC

josephlord wrote: post #67

_delirium wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, from my reading of the article, I'm having a hard time thinking of a case where Google could refuse to delete a link. How about the case discussed right here? The summary linked above says: The request may for example be turned down where the search engine operator concludes that for particular reasons, such as for example the public role played by John Smith, the interest of the general public to have acc…

Does Google want to do a good job of assessing requests? I think it highly unlikely that the court would want this article suppressed. I think Google may be taking things down over enthusiastically to bring the law and the ruling into disrepute. They are betting that the law rather than their particular takedown process will be blamed.

Google representative on the radio today indicated that the search result suppressed is for one of the thread's commenters and not for the bank executive's name which will still return the correct link.

Given this my comment is probably too harsh, there is no evidence that Google isn't properly assessing requests that I am aware of.