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

theguardian.com

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

#31

Post by dingdingdang »

kjksf wrote: post #23
mccr8 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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."

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

#32

Post by eloff »

dingdingdang wrote: post #31
kjksf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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."

You guys are all right and wrong at the same time. The article both blames and exonerates Google. Depending on what quotes you pick you can support a case for either. The people who are saying it shouldn't blame Google are right, Google is just complying with the law. That the article is inconsistent with where it's laying the blame, is the fault of sloppy journalism.

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

#33

Post by ascorbic »

objclxt wrote: post #8

The BBC also received notifications from Google today that some of their articles had been hidden from EU search results - http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28130581

Inevitably, searches for [stan o'neal] now return stories about this in the first few results. They should call this the Streisand law.

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

#34

Post by Silhouette »

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…

I don't think you understand what the "right to be forgotten" actually is. The point is not that someone who has done bad things can just demand that the entire world magically forget about it and give them a clean slate.

You might find this summary PDF informative:

http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets...

[Edit: In a discussion about whether this behaviour amounts to censorship, within 2 minutes of posting, someone has downvoted this comment even though all it does is point out what appears to be a widely held misconception about the subject matter and provide a credible source. If that's not irony...]

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

#35

Post by Spearchucker »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #20
mattmanser wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Today's BBC article thoroughly disproves your point: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28130581 Freedom of press is about creating a public record. When you remove that record from the public, when you censor the past of public discourse, you've infringed on free speech. Real discourse is full of [citation needed], and if you can preemptively remove those citations, there will be cheating.

And yet those [citation needed]s haven't disappeared. I can and do still find them using duck duck go and Bing. Information will be free. There's an agenda at play here because I can't imagine how the people behind this law couldn't have foreseen this. I wonder whether Google is being set up because of its market-dominating position. If not, why weren't the other search engines similarly constrained?

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

#36

Post by magicalist »

Spearchucker wrote: post #35
GauntletWizard wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today's BBC article thoroughly disproves your point: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28130581 Freedom of press is about creating a public record. When you remove that record from the public, when you censor the past of public discourse, you've infringed on free speech. Real discourse is full of [citation needed], and if you can preemptively remove those citations, there will be cheating.

And yet those [citation needed]s haven't disappeared. I can and do still find them using duck duck go and Bing. Information will be free. There's an agenda at play here because I can't imagine how the people behind this law couldn't have foreseen this. I wonder whether Google is being set up because of its market-dominating position. If not, why weren't the other search engines similarly constrained?

> If not, why weren't the other search engines similarly constrained?

They are if they operate in the EU.

But there's no universal place to submit takedown requests. People would also have to send them to Bing (according to this article DDG doesn't operate at all in the EU so is not subject to the ruling).

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

#38

Post by rudimental »

ganeumann wrote: post #16

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.

That process is happening right now, and it is interesting. But will it continue, aka is it a viable long term workaround? Articles being removed is new and in a sense exciting for the press, Google, and the public- that probably won't be so in a few months or years.

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

#39

Post by rgbrenner »

Silhouette wrote: post #34
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…

I don't think you understand what the "right to be forgotten" actually is. The point is not that someone who has done bad things can just demand that the entire world magically forget about it and give them a clean slate. You might find this summary PDF informative: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets... [Edit: In a discussion about whether this behaviour amounts to censorship, within 2 minut…

After reading your link, it sounds like peter understands it just fine.

He did say "send takedown request to Google".. and that's exactly the situation that is described in your PDF when discussing the case. The article says the court decided that the newspaper archive would be kept intact, and Google would need to delete the links -- and this was the correct balance of the public's right to know.

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 -- since Google only links to other people's content, and that content will be available even if Google's links to it are deleted.

Edit: the quote:

The case itself provides an example of this balancing exercise. While the Court ordered Google to delete access to the information deemed irrelevant by the Spanish citizen, it also emphasised that the content of the underlying newspaper archive should not be changed in the name of data protection (paragraph 88 of the Court’s ruling). The Spanish citizens’ data is still accessible but is no longer ubiquitous. This is enough for the citizen’s privacy to be respected.

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

#40

Post by ghshephard »

mccr8 wrote: post #17
munificent wrote: post #15

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…

It was a poor article - casual reading of it leads one to believe that Google is engaging in Censorship. Careful reading of the entire article places the blame on where it's supposed to be - the Law - but the fact that the article kept calling out Google, when it should have been repeatedly mentioning the law that Google was complying with, was problematic.
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