The problem with this is they ask you up front on your application for most jobs whether you have been convicted of a crime. If the answer is yes, generally your application is thrown in the trash. If you lie and they catch you, they have grounds to reject you.
San Francisco was one of the few places in the world to try to address that with it's 'ban the box ' initiative. Crimes must be relevant to disqualify a candidate. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
As I recall, the effect of this was reduced hiring of black and Latino candidates, which employers used as a proxy for criminality.
The problem with this is they ask you up front on your application for most jobs whether you have been convicted of a crime. If the answer is yes, generally your application is thrown in the trash. If you lie and they catch you, they have grounds to reject you.
San Francisco was one of the few places in the world to try to address that with it's 'ban the box ' initiative. Crimes must be relevant to disqualify a candidate. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
It's the law in the UK (and presumably similar in the rest of the EU).
Every conviction must be declared for a small number of years if asked. After that period it must only be declared if you're applying for a sensitive job (e.g. school teacher) and it resulted in a custodial sentence.
True. And thanks for confirming my supposition. It's rare to see this mentioned in coverage of the issue. For reasons that are understandable, I guess. The EU has pressured Google to censor its results globally, as I recall. But Google has prevailed on that, at least. So far, anyway.
Further if Europe can ask for info to be censored what happens when 100 other nations ask the same for their own reasons. Will the search index be composed only of data that is acceptable to all parties?
When EU dictates what can be in the search index it is "right to be forgotten".
When China or Russia does it, it's at least "censorship", and probably also "dictatorship".
>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…
> 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?
Or if I'm, say, a convicted con artist I can hide that fact from my future victims, making any future crimes significantly easier...
This is a big point of confusion. A background check will check the court records, where your convictions will still be listed (unless protected from disclosure e.g. California background checks generally don't show convictions > 7 years https://www.goodhire.com/california/background-checks ). A real con artist can just fake someone's ID, for them it's pretty trivial. The issue is less than 1% of convictions ever mak…
I guess it depends where you live. In my country faking IDs is hard as we use biometric documents and it's a very serious crime, so many small time tricksters will not do that. There's a tone of small online merchants, lousy businessmen, crooks, etc. pulling small tricks on people - taking money and not providing anything in return, or providing really bad service, or you order one thing and they send you something else. Since CC payments are still not that common here and it's not uncommon that you wire your money to the merchant and then you're not covered by usual money-back guarantees from the bank and visa, and you need to complain to them and threaten to sue them and then they usually give you money back after a few months, using it meanwhile for their own profit. They do that on purpose. However, if you know better usually you can google them and find people complaining about being tricked, so you can avoid falling in the trap. I'm not talking about big media news, but usually forum posts or tweets and things like that, and you can't find those ever without a help of google. I do this every time I buy something online from a local seller. Since this is EU, if this right to be forgotten becomes a common law they'll be able to completely cover their tracks and I see that as a real-life problem for me and many others here.
If you read the article it was a bit more nuanced than that. The one who had the right to be forgotten denied had a track record of misleading people about his conviction. The court (rightly, in my view) took this behaviour as evidence that his conviction remained relevant in a way that it was not for the other person (described as showing remorse). They didn’t just measure the length of the sentence. IMHO, this is a…
Is it up to Google's lawyers to do extensive investigations to find out that this guy had "a track record of misleading people"? What if Google decides they don't want to pay for that? Then all that nuance will be gone.
If google wants to ignore an erasure request for journalistic and public good/interest reasons, yes.
Responsible Journalism can’t ignore stuff like this, so I’m not surprised that the Judge would expect google, after making the journalism case, to demonstrate some of that attention to detail.
This is kind of a trend I've been noticing, where Europe will try to fix a valid technological problem, but pick the most problematic or poorly implemented solution to do it. It's not clear to me what the difference is between a government censoring someone directly and a government making it impossible for anyone to find a piece of information. Right to Be Forgotten only works if it becomes prohibitively expensive f…
It’s an individual right and it applies to all controllers and processors . So in this instance to all sources where it’s not public record.