Comment by merb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by merb | Hacker News Reader

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the problem ist, that if google wants to "forget" your data, they need to save two things.

- the data they need to "forget" - the request for forgetting the data

google is just an index over sites, if they do NOT want to remove things, google will index it forever.

thus thats why I hate the "right to be forgotten" law. it uses the wrong approach. it targets google, which does not provide the data. unfortunatly most often people want to silence news outlets which do not NEED to remove the data. so its extremly complicated.

I dislike both and I think the law should remove data from the web if it targets people and is relatively old (discussable). This would eliminate the problem completly AND all search engines would need to stop it. Or better implement a banned.txt or something that news outlets/sites need to implement if they are targeted, so that even archives can remove the data. all in all the law is pretty stupid in its current state. because it does not fix the problem it just duck tapes it.

The real problem is that it's fairly easy to get random websites to delete info about you. It really is. I contacted maybe 30 websites in the last year or so and all deleted/or hidden my information promptly without any questions.

Getting it THEN deleted from google/bing/and friends is freaking annoying. They act like they're some superimportant holders of knowledge, and require all kind of identification, personal information, ID document copies, whatever, just to even listen to you.

There's outdated link removal console for both search engines, but it only works if websites are implemented certain way, to properly return 404 error on no longer existing pages. Some websites will redirect non-existing urls to home page, and good luck getting anything removed from search engines then. They will refuse, because the page still exists. They will not even check that the page has changed.

>They act like they're some superimportant holders of knowledge, and require all kind of identification, personal information, ID document copies, whatever, just to even listen to you.

Google's real issue isn't that they have some deep ideological conviction to free speech. This isn't 1998-2008 Google anymore, all the "free speech" libertarians have either left the company or retired rich.

Their real issue is that a zero marginal cost business, like a search engine, is starting to have some costs now. Their opposition to these types of laws is about preserving their high margin, infinitely scalable business model. That may have been the primary motivator in the early years of Google as well, the ideology may have just been grafted on later.

Yeah, it's really easy to prove you have a valid request on the internet, if the real people are processing your request. When I assumed some website would liked more verification that I actually owned the domain before asking for removal, I just put the text into a file hosted on the domain, and there was no problem.

But that requires having people process your request and having un-structured request medium, like accepting e-mails on some preferred address.

And it looks like google liks to avoid having an unstructured input from random plebes, presumably to avoid expensive human labor.

As far as I can tell the only logical reason is political. It would be far less popular to force news organizations, which might be influential and local, to delete data than forcing an unpopular foreign corporation to do it.

Related factoid: a commonly accepted approach to GDPR compliance for those who have backups (that are retained for longer than the GDPR grace period) is to store enough information about the request to delete someone's data so that during the restore procedure the data can be deleted again.

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