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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

#181

Post by Barrin92 »

jasode wrote: post #35
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…

>As a society, we approve of jail being the mechanism to "forgive" a person's crime. That's not really true. Serving prison time is neither a way to "forgive" nor a way to "pay debt back to society" . Those are just common phrases some people use. If felons were truly forgiven , they would have their right to vote restored. They wouldn't be denied a passport to travel abroad or denied a firearms license. Convicted fe…

American society != every society

This doesn't happen in Europe. Part of the social contract over here is that criminals who have served their sentence have the right to have their fundamental rights restored. That in fact is the justification for punishment in the first place.

A society that takes on the authority to punish individuals must integrate these individuals after they have payed their debt to society. If they wouldn't the punishment would be arbitrary, cruel and serve no purpose.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#182

Post by greglindahl »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #127
stevenwoo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's a difficult question. Not at all. It's up to the legal system and law enforcement to handle this. Not up to citizens, and for good reasons.

And if Google only had to remove links due to a court order, that would be a lot more fair then the current self-censorship regime.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#184

Post by stale2002 »

bad_user wrote: post #75
darkmighty wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you're not talking about forgiveness, you're talking about forgetting. Forgiveness is when we acknowledge mistakes and give them another chance, forgetting is when we erase mistakes. Perhaps instead of artificially limiting our own memory we should be looking to learn to better forgive people in the age of perfect recall.

You’re an idealist, the world doesn’t work this way. Mark paid his debt to society by time served. And if you want to not hire ex convicts, you simply ask for his criminal record. Is that not a possibility in the US? Anyhow, Google giving you tabloids or other crap simply cannot be a reliable criminal record. And note we’re talking of somebody that’s actually proven guilty in a court of law. What about people being t…

Sure, you can find out that information about him, eventually. But you might not find out the information IMMEDIATELY.

After the background check is completed, he may have already gone through your full interview loop, and impressed everyone, and you may just decide that you want to hire him anyway.

In a different world, you would have rejected him outright, without giving him a chance to prove himself.

I think this matters a lot.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#185

Post by BadassFractal »

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 about what she did, and a bunch of photos of her on it. It was about how, when they were together in college, allegedly the woman had slept with other guys, and the boyfriend got pretty upset about it.

It was mortifying for me to run into it, and I can't even imagine how she must feel when the n.1 Google result for her name is that, forever. This must have happened over 10 years ago, and yet it kept haunting her to that day.

I talked about this with a few lawyer friends and my understanding is that you can't actually be sued for it. Apparently, if you're not lying and just stating actual facts about what happened, you're not liable, and don't fall under defamation/libel category. You could start a JohnDoeWillGiveYouGonorrhea.com and that's totally legal. The person trying to take the site down would have to clearly prove that their lives were seriously impacted by its existence, and quantify the damages, which would be pretty hard to pull off.

Real odd legal corner case.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#186

Post by rootlocus »

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?

If anything, you were probably feeling safer without being connected 24/7 to all the problems in the world. I'm really skeptical you were more afraid of strangers because you couldn't access public records about them.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#187

Post by jaredklewis »

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…

In theory, I think right to be forgotten is the government shirking its own responsibilities and leaving the administration of justice to large mega-corps.

In practice, it’s a pointless regulation circumvented by changing the url that imposes huge enforcement costs on big and small companies alike.

But the real problem is that it is top down legislation that tries to fix a symptom, not the disease. What is the problem? Companies won’t give ex-convicts jobs. Why? Because people distrust them and they can afford not to hire them (plenty of unemployed people to choose from). My impression is that the vast majority of employers feel this way. Interestingly, right to be forgotten does nothing to incentivize people to change or punish people for their prejudice. It also does not address the lack of jobs.

It's like if you had a society where 80% of people drive over the speed limit but doing so is illegal. The problem isn't that you need more laws. The problem is that your society has a different set of values. You can't legislate that people have a different set of values. At best you can try to reform a small set of the population that falls out of line.

And you can't legislate prosperity either. Making it illegal to not have a home won't get rid of homeless people anymore than the right to be forgotten will decrease unemployment in the EU.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#189

Post by lotsofpulp »

F_r_k wrote: post #167
lotsofpulp wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smoking pot is not the same as theft. One is harmless to society, the other is not.

Yet, some people have got a different point of view and think that smoking pot is not harmless to society. Same thing and op's point of view and yours

Having a different point of view doesn't make it valid, you need a chain of reasoning with cause and effect.

Re: Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case

#190

Post by mulmen »

jasode wrote: post #35
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…

>As a society, we approve of jail being the mechanism to "forgive" a person's crime. That's not really true. Serving prison time is neither a way to "forgive" nor a way to "pay debt back to society" . Those are just common phrases some people use. If felons were truly forgiven , they would have their right to vote restored. They wouldn't be denied a passport to travel abroad or denied a firearms license. Convicted fe…

Mostly agree with you here but small nit to pick. There's no such thing as a firearms license in the United States. Felons lose their right to own (or even possess?) guns.
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