Why has Google cast me into oblivion? | Hacker News Reader

Why has Google cast me into oblivion?

bbc.com

271 pointsgraeme146 comments

I like that they told the author that his article would no longer be viewable.

If that's the case, and the 'removal' is not secret, then they could (should?) totally make available a separate database of articles that people have asked to be removed.

Basically, the original article may be old (or theoretically irrelevant) but the fact that someone asked for it to be removed is very new and not at all irrelevant. It would be awesome to see this as the Streisand effect writ large - everything that people want to see buried actually gets a new surge of attention.

The Guardian reported[1] that they were at least considering a notice at the bottom of a search result page that had a result removed, like they do with DMCA requests.

If that's the case, hopefully they can do what they do with DMCA notices, and link to a copy of the actual takedown request (which would include a link or links to what was taken down). ChillingEffects.org could start a new section for right to be forgotten requests.

On the other hand, reprinting DMCA takedown notices is protected by the First Amendment in the US, but reprinting right to be forgotten requests may be frowned upon by EU courts.

Edit: according the newer Guardian piece that thegregjones posted above, there is a warning[2], but just a "Learn more" link, no link to the actual removal request.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/08/google-sea...

[2] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BrYpLOwIgAE8pF0.jpg

Google considered a DMCA-like notice. The court found this to be an attempt to circumvent the ruling, since it would make it too easy to find removed material. Instead, they settled on a notice for any search that might have been affected (essentially any search for a name), whether or not results have been removed:

http://searchengineland.com/right-to-be-forgotten-notices-19...

This is actually a very good outcome. It will end up with those things where people do not mind something being forgotten actually being forgotten, while the decision to revive the content is still a perfectly viable option.

Presumably he can then reissue the article. That for Google is a different instance and recent content making it outside the auspices of the EU law?

Perhaps we need something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_Chi....

In fact just publish the original request alongside the notice that the search results are censored.

There's a possible darker side to this, of course.

Today, the following story -- regarding an ex-member of the British Cabinet and a paedophile network -- started gaining a lot of traction in the UK, mainly because there are an increasing number of Members of Parliament (MPs) demanding an inquiry[0]:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jul/02/lord-brittan...

The story itself has been around for decades.

Coincidentally, Google have begun removing articles relating to the story[1] -- for example, the search "Leon Brittan PIE" will return -- at the bottom of the page:

"In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at ChillingEffects.org."

Currently, for this notice, chillingeffects.org returns[2]:

"Notice Unavailable: The cease-and-desist or legal threat you requested is not yet available. Chilling Effects will post the notice after we process it."

Coincidence or not, it's a troubling how easily this mechanism can be abused.

[0] http://www.exaronews.com/articles/5282/pressure-builds-in-pa...

[1] http://tompride.wordpress.com/2014/07/02/google-searches-for...

[2] http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=1719125

This is a great example of the Streisand effect [0] -- trying to hide something draws attention to it.

Specifically, I now know about Stan O'Neal, who "was forced out of Merrill [Lynch] after the investment bank suffered colossal losses on reckless investments it had made." Google may no longer be showing the original result, but now I see the reason for the original article and the fact that he wanted it hidden.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

A Google UK search on Stan O'Neal from within the UK yields the wikipedia page, then at #2 a Salon article explaining how Google has given notice to Mr Peston that the original BBC article may be de-indexed. The next half dozen links are pretty critical of Mr O'Neal as well.

Oddly, this new BBC page is not apparent in the index (yet).

As of 1921 BST on 2014 July 3rd, the BBC article in question is now second link when searching for Stan O'Neal.

So you can ask for a page to be de-linked but if you are in the public eye and the de-linking gets noticed, the results may not be what you expected.

Spot on. All this will do for the person trying to erase their past is drag up old memories and re-syndicate whatever they are running away from. More eyeballs, more indexing of new pages, more edits to the Wikipedia page, more comments on social media.

Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all.

James Ball at the Guardian has written about some of their articles that have been disappeared: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/02/eu-righ...

This is really good and should be the top article, not the rather silly BBC piece.

Speaking of the Streisand effect, if you search for "Dougie McDonald Guardian" on google.co.uk as it suggests, the offending links are gone, but now all the top links are to stories about the offending links.

Someone needs to make a search engine that only returns results for things that people have tried to hide under this law.

Or just make it hard to find all the instances. For example, this article itself references the content in the article that was removed from search results. The effectiveness of having the original link removed is probably very minimal unless this page is also removed.

Ultimately, it's a race. The "hider" has to find all the things they want hidden and explicitly list them. As long as the content spreads faster than it is banned, the banning is negated.

It's just weird that the search engine is tasked with the removal. If other sites can legally link to the "forgotten" content - which appears to still be online - then why can't a search engine link to it? If they want this ruling to make sense at all, the removal requests should go directly to the entity hosting the content in my opinion.

Since the impact of such an implementation would be greater, it would be harder to pass a law requiring it. This is a more gentle way to censor public debate, while allowing more specialized "research" search engines to continue providing the information to those who could not accept to have it denied.

Not to mention how much easier it is to send all requests to a handful of major search providers rather than having to determine who hosts what and hoping they know how to properly deal with such a request.

don't confuse logic with politics! :)

Here's how this is going to do down:

Google is going to slowly be asked to forget all of Europe, including the holocaust (since this is a stain on the families involved).

This will cause a backlash against "erasing European history"

And then they will repeal this.

All through this, Google will be the villain, not the ding-dongs running the EU.

FWIW, in some EU countries holocaust denial is a crime.

But not speaking about the holocaust isn't.

The EU really is a joke.

I think if people want to hide stuff like revenge porn, or obvious slander, then fair enough. But unindexing legitimate journalism is stupid.

I think there are games being played here. The European Court ruled that some things should be made harder to find (revenge porn, obvious slander, spent convictions etc.).

Google don't want to do this and are trying to make a mockery of the ruling removing from the results anything that they are asked to as long as it is about a person with the very aim of stirring a backlash against the ruling. Requests to take down important stories from major news organisations are the perfect way to do this provided that they keep the blame on the EU not on their implementation.

I haven't read the ruling but I'm pretty sure that there is some leeway for judgement and for Google to have a process to decide on these cases rather than having to comply with every single request.

I would need to understand the ruling better to come down with a full view about whether it is right or not. On the one hand Google's results can cause a lot of damage and they should carry some responsibility for them on the other legitimate stories of real public interest and information about serious wrongdoing shouldn't be censored.

> On the one hand Google's results can cause a lot of damage

Public, factual information causes damage and Google is responsible because somebody else reported on it and they indexed it? And so Google should stop linking to the article which will still exist and can be found on other search engines in other jurisdictions without any effort? And we can pretend online censorship works all of a sudden now that the EU found a "good" excuse for it?

> The European Court ruled that some things should be made harder to find (revenge porn, obvious slander, spent convictions etc.).

So what does freedom of expression mean to you, then? A regulated, controlled public discourse with arbitrary rules about what the government thinks is relevant or important for people to know or read about? And it looks like you slipped "spent convictions" in there, which throws off the argument.

I think you already made your mind up.

I wouldn't classify automatically generated results as expression.

So it's not a harm to freedom of expression if we allow your blog to exist, but we censor links to it because they're "automated"? It doesn't matter if it's automated or highly moderated. It's an expression and censoring anything like it influences the public discourse in some way.

The original person who started his was a Spanish business who wanted court records removed over his debts and their was a dr who had been in trouble or struck off from practicing by his country's medical certifying body.

Yes, it's evil google's fault. Maybe you can be a peach and come up with a better implementation than doesn't require all google employees to work on this full time.

Google representative on the radio today indicated that the search result suppressed is the name of 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.

I think if a conviction was reported in a newspaper when it happened, I don't think that should be removed from Google, even if the conviction is subsequently "spent". Do people go through newspaper archives deleting them from the (what used to be) microfiche copies?

> I think if people want to hide stuff like revenge porn, or obvious slander, then fair enough. But unindexing legitimate journalism is stupid.

The difficulty with following that logic is in the blurry middle area. Where is the line drawn and who makes that decision?

For starters, they could require a court order for each case. That would certainly limit the amount of requests.

That sequencing is probably not in compliance with the law. The fact sheet put out by the European high court makes it explicit:

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

"In practice, a search engine will have to delete information when it receives a specific request from a person affected... Google will then have to assess the deletion request on a case-by-case basis and to apply the criteria mentioned in EU law and the European Court’s judgment....

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 access to the information in question justifies showing the links in Google search results. In such cases, John Smith still has the option to complain to national data protection supervisory authorities or to national courts. Public authorities will be the ultimate arbiters of the application of the Right to be Forgotten. "

I interpreted 'they' as the lawmakers, not google.

Yes, that's what I meant.

Easy. Remove the special exception the EU randomly added to Google and Google only. Laws that are specific to a single company are obviously bullshit.

Then we just end up back in the previous situation where you had to get the site that posted the content to remove it, which had a fairly well defined set of requirements. And tada! Just like that there's no problem anymore.

The EU added no special exception or a previous situation to go to.

This is simply the result of the courts interpretation of the law as it is and it applies to every search engine not just Google.

There's a difference between the EU and one particular court ruling. The EU itself is brilliant in many ways; this Stalinesque ruling, not so much.

Following the law is a joke? I may not like the law, but I rather like that Google does not get to be above it.

He called the EU a joke not Google.

Should Google try to interpret the ruling as closely as possible, only blocking the most clearly irrelevant information, and honoring requests for appeals from journalists whenever possible? That would limit damage to those seeking information, but risk another turn at the courts.

Or should they just implement it as broadly and bluntly as possible, lowering their risk of noncompliance, reducing their costs of evaluating each case, while increasing the chance that people will start to grasp the negative consequences they argued about to the court?

Despite the near term harms, if we're worried more about the long run, there's a case to be made for the latter...

There should be a name for deliberately making a big fuss of following every regulation as expansively as possible to prove a point; inverse civil disobedience, civil obedience maybe?

There is, it's called "work-to-rule."

Somewhat ironically some countries have laws that make work-to-rule (usually phrased in law as malicious compliance) as illegal.

There used to be, but it isn't PC: "white mutiny".

for individuals, that's being passive-agressive.

> Google must delete "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" data from its results when a member of the public requests it.

Could Google legally get around this ruling by claiming that recent deletion requests inherently make the data in question relevant? Since the right to be forgotten is important news, the stories about people requesting the deletion of their data (and what kinds of data are being deleted) is very relevant. It's the equivalent of the "every number is interesting" paradox.

Edit: proper quote from the ruling is actually "inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive"

The problem is your dealing with a court who decided that the _search result_ should be deleted and not the web page that is "inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive". I would not bother arguing logically with them.

Only if the court agreed, which they would not.

I wonder if Google is making a statement here about the ruling. They've been really vocal about how they are taking away "useful" (certainly in the sense of background checks) information that is in places people don't expect to be censored (like newspapers).

This will lead people to point out that they can go to the city library and look at the back issue of the newspaper and it won't be censored there. And that will lead to the question of what is, and what is not, the public record and what sort of damage to that record is tolerated in the interest of justice.

Nobody has attacked the elephant in the room.

If an article was written about me committing murder, and I want that "forgotten", then I will request google to take the info down in the EU. Great. A background checking company goes to "www.google.com" and finds that article. They don't give a shit that they are in France and should abide by the french blocks, or they'll use a proxy. That's the point, this is completely stupid and prevents a common untrained person from accessing the information, but does nothing for background checks and the like.

I do this "for a living". Reputation Management is when you pay someone like me to make that result fall to the 5th page of Google so people searching for you only see the happy fun stuff you have done.

What is missing from the implementation from Google, that Google really needs to be "fair" is an OPT OUT.

You see when I go in and fix a reputation by outranking bad stuff with good, the bad stuff is still there if you know what you are looking for.

BBC JOHN DOE KILLS BABYSITTER is not going away, just not showing up when you Google JOHN DOE BABYSITTER because I will have place the top 40 results with things about How awesome SUSAN THE 16 YEAR OLD is who is now JOHN DOE's babysitter.

If Google did an OPT OUT, you would be able to say, "I am John Doe of Hicksville, IN" here is my picture, remove me from the interwebs. And nothing about you would be there. No good, No Bad.

Is this just me having sour grapes that my business of shaping reality is going away? No. If anything this is good for business. People will want what the EU has and flock to me.

For those who think I am a bad person. Yeah, I know that http://www.blackwaterops.com didn't pick its name because we thought we were the good guys.

But at the same time a lot of what we do is good. We work with organizations that share the name with bad people. You know how hard it is when you share the name with a serial killer to get a job even after that serial killer was executed?

You know how hard it is to recover from stuff 20+ years after the the Jack in the Box ecoli outbreak?

Or being named Play Boy's Hottest X and then trying to get a job working with kids? Even if you didn't ask to be associated with Play Boy?

Down the memory hole goes everything in the EU. I'm thankful every day for the First Amendment in the US.

I don't understand; did they single out Google, or does the ruling also apply to Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Apple, Facebook, and many other companies that cache results?

Search engines may cache information, but the content usually originates on some other hosting site. Those hundreds of thousands of hosting sites may still have the content, so what the Court is saying is all the more silly--you must disallow search results if anyone in the world opts out.

I say, Google should just go about its business and if EC doesn't like it, Google should pull out of Europe and just allow anyone to access it from overseas servers. It will be just like China, which blocks Google.

Information wants to be free. This is a huge step backward.

If they adopt an attitude like that, they'll run out of countries to remove themselves from in not long.

I also received (yesterday) this same message from Google: Subject: [Webmaster Tools] Notice of removal from Google Search

"We regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google: [one url with a post in my site] For more information, see www.google .com/policies/faq/?hl=en

The post in my site that was blocked by Google had only some catalog information about a car dealer in Netherlands and I could not understand why it was removed by Google search.

chomps on popcorn

This can only get better.

Clearly this person should sue Google on the grounds that all of the time, effort and energy they put into their blog entry means that it has a "right to be remembered". Or, at the very least, they have a right to a specific explanation about why it is being blocked, so they can challenge it properly (ultimately in court, if necessary).

I'm seeing a catch-22: by writing and posting this article this article made the other article relevant. And Stan O'Neal, if he requested it deleted, is relevant again - albeit in a context of filing a removal notice.

Wait, so Google hasn't actually done anything to the article?

"Although the BBC has had the notice from Google that my article will not show up in some searches, it doesn't appear to have implemented this yet."

Relevant : http://www.google.co.uk/policies/faq/

What I want to know is, if you are searching from outside the EU, is the info also censored? Or does it affect everyone?

Indeed it is clumsy because the media is exempt of this ruling.

Which makes me suspect this was an easy way of drawing some media attention, and spreading misinformation.

The media is exempt from having to censor their own stories, but search engines are not exempt from removing links to media stories.

The whole ruling was about forcing google to remove links to news stories about Costeja González.

No it wasn't about news stories from legitimate news organisations. This is all misinterpreted by people not knowing the facts nor the law, but lets ignore that and jump on the outrage bandwagon.

To be fair to Google, it opposed the European court ruling. But its implementation of it looks odd, perhaps clumsy.

I find it incredible that Google is held at fault in this case because they don't choose whether it is "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" in a way that fits the author's view. Such an analysis is so absurdly subjective, and it is impossible for Google to satisfy both sides.

The European Court ruling is pure absurdity, and this article could more accurately be titled "European Court Rules That Past Must Be Wiped. Much Comedy As Result."

There is no possible way that Google can implement it that won't endlessly earn them criticism, such as this piece.

Unless Google wants to treat the EU like they did China and redirect all searches to a jurisdiction with actual press freedoms, they're doing all they can here.

"a jurisdiction with actual press freedoms"

And where would that be?

So long as you're not reporting on matters of "national security", the U.S. actually has a decent track record with that ...

Yes, but the problem is that what is a "matter of national security" in practice is whatever the government says it is. So this exception is enough to effectively eviscerate the freedom of the press.

Nobody got in trouble in the U.S. for reporting on/distributing the Snowden leaks. There weren't any newspaper raids. Nobody was asked to "keep quiet". Anyone who did censor did so out of mutual interest.

Press freedoms have not been eviscerated here. It's a trendy narrative, but in reality you have enormous freedom to distribute content which was illegally obtained as per the Pentagon Papers cases and others. The worst thing we have here is cozy relationships between the media and the government, but alternative news sources are available everywhere and Americans are relying on them more than ever.

> Nobody was asked to "keep quiet"

Given the existence of NSL's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter) there is no way of knowing who has been "asked" to keep quiet.

And when Glenn Greenwald visited the U.S. recently it was far from clear that he would not be taken into custody.

Just to be clear, NSLs are largely unregulated by the judiciary and are frequently overbroad in the information they demand, but they aren't arbitrary gag orders.

They can keep you silent about the fact that you got an NSL (and that therefore there's an investigation going on), but not about the content itself.

Right?

If they were asked to "keep quite" maybe we don't know about it huh?

Greenwald doesn't seem to think so. James Risen probably doesn't agree.

Press freedoms and freedom of speech haven't been eviscerated in the US, true, but neither is the US the bastion of freedom of speech or press that it's promoted as. It's reasonably free, and has some weird corner cases like Westboro Baptist Church's activities, but it's not head-and-shoulders above its contemporaries.

Reporters Without Borders puts the US at 46th position in their Press Freedom Index. An awful lot of things can be turned into "national security" issues.

It's 32 now. So in other words, the year of the Snowden leaks actually improved their relative position in the press freedom index.

I'm getting 46 from this page, in the graph and in the text http://rsf.org/index2014/en-index2014.php - where are you seeing 32? I vaguely recall it being around 30 last year.

From here: http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2013,1054.html which is 2013. Since the page lacked a 2014, I assumed that because the year wasn't out they hadn't changed it.

How often is it updated?

Not sure - the page I got was from google, but also if you go through their front page. It looks like they don't go back and update the older pages.

And IP

http://www.ice.gov/news/releases/1312/131202washingtondc.htm

http://www.dmca.com/takedowns.aspx

Those aren't great examples -- it's pretty rare to get taken down for simply reporting on IP issues. You can get taken down for distributing someone else's copyrighted content, but I have yet to see the government go after someone for simple journalism. The closest we've gotten to that was the Dajaz1 domain name seizure, but that was because they served up actual copyrighted songs (though arguably with authorization), not because of their reporting.

That said, there's been plenty of DMCA abuse and unwarranted legal nastygrams against journalists, but as far as I'm aware, in every case where people actually took the case to court rather than just giving in, they've won. Our IP system provides for plenty of opportunities for "extortion by lawyer", but it's a different problem than "press freedom" IMHO.

Reporting facts themselves can sometimes be an IP issue in the US due to the "Hot News" doctrine.

The "hot news" doctrine is mostly dead these days.[1] And at worst, it delays wide-spread dissemination of news for a day, rather than suppress it outright.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/hot-news-doctrine-surv...

There is also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

From the linked article: "The United States rejected this doctrine in the 1991 United States Supreme Court case Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service"

Hong Kong

Perhaps they should.

Ah, contempt of court. Always a solid tactic

I don't really see how it would be contempt of court for Google to shut down its European servers and redirect all its European domains to go to Google.com. It would be a lot of other things, but I don't think it would be contempt of court.

The court ordered Google Inc to remove certain listings. They did not specify "only on certain TLDs" or "only from certain servers." Including them in search results is violating the court order. I guess if Google pulled out of the EU entirely, closing all European subsidiaries, relocating employees and removing all assets, then they could make a case that the court no longer has jurisdiction... that seems like it'd be difficult. IANAL.

As the Guardian notes, Google.com still has the results that Google.co.uk has removed:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/02/eu-righ...

Indeed, and if that wasn't enough of a disincentive they'd lose out on the favourable taxation they get from basing themselves in Europe - specifically, Ireland.

http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/google-pays-17m-in-...

Although I understand that the European Commission will soon be focusing their attention on the tax arrangements of some of the Irish-based tech giants (Apple, Google etc.)

They still show the results on non-EU TLDs.

Why do you say that? The court's authority AFAIK had nothing to do with the TLD being used, but because Google Spain is within their jurisdiction.

Check out the Guardian story, which has screenshots of the two side by side (or try their example directly by searching for "Dougie McDonald Guardian" on google.com vs google.co.uk. Ignore the news articles, just look at the missing top stories).

He or she says it because it's true, and widely reported.

The EU court has no authority outside of the EU.

And Google is in the EU, no?

Which is why the EU version of Google has complied with the EU court.

In Europe they're more serious about the concept of "spirit of the law". Particularly when circumvention is used as a route around a ruling.

> I don't really see how it would be contempt of court

Well I do, and I can guarantee you that courts would see it too. In Europe, laws generally aren't to be interpreted by the letter. You can't game them with technicalities (well it depends, but in this case it's quite clear).

> In Europe, laws generally aren't to be interpreted by the letter.

That's a very general statement and generally untrue (although you are in this case, partially correct). Acts and statutes are always interpreted by the letter, you are perhaps confusing this by making a comparison of these EU statutes with common law or jus commune as that is interpreted by "the spirit of the law" (usually informed by case-law, constitutions etc. depending on the country).

Acts and statutes are not common law (or natural law), and these EU measures are enabled by acts and statutes in each separate EU member state. So they are indeed interpreted to the letter as these acts must be implemented in states with codified constitutions (where one court has supreme interpretation of a constitution and must apply EU law with direct effect, although the big ones haven't done this till recently) and ones without (where there is an indirect effect of law). This is known as the Supremacy Doctrine[1]. The only exception is when the interpretation comes from the European Court of Justice.

The part you are absolutely right about, is that in this specific case, interpretation will not be up to each member state as this amendment was straight from the European Court of Justice. Generally, however, as far as "European law" goes, until we have an actual constitution or become an actual federation, your general statement is untrue most of the time (lets not forget the EU is enabled by treaties and if you don't think the letter matters in a treaty then I have come contracts I'd love you to sign...)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_%28European_Union_la...

Well then explain it to me. Google.com still shows the listings. Is that contempt of court?

It's not, as long as the European sites don't show them, because the court is well aware that it doesn't have jurisdiction outside the EU.

It's really not complicated.

Well that was my entire point: that Google was doing everything it could to fight the EU's "right to be forgotten" short of simply deciding (like they did with China) to stop operating a search engine in EU's jurisdiction.

My point is that stopping operating their search engine in the EU, while redirecting European domains to Google.com, and keeping headquarters there, would be contempt of court. Because it's very obviously not following the court's decision. Whereas obeying the court order in Europe but not in the rest of the world is completely normal.

Of course, stopping all operations in EU altogether would be fine too, but they're not going to do that.

So you are saying you'd be ok with Google censoring searches in China?

Interesting to think that it is in Google's interest to create a clumsy system that does not properly check requested deletions. Too many deletions that have no merit under the scheme will likely create a backlash, placing a negative highlight on the scheme to the average person on the street who will now start to read news article after news article about erroneous deletions.

What the EU is trying to do is likely impossible. But I can't help but think that their intentions are sound. For example, I fully expect a modern society to give a second chance to a difficult teenager that receives a criminal record. Many governments would hide such a record after a certain time.

> For example, I fully expect a modern society to give a second chance to a difficult teenager that receives a criminal record. Many governments would hide such a record after a certain time.

There seems to be a simpler way to accomplish this than the current EU approach: a name change. It seems much easier to have an individual change his or her identity than to have the whole of society collectively agree to not associate a name with some act. You might still need some law to prohibit linking old identities with new ones, but this is vastly more workable than asking third parties to decide if something is "inadequate or irrelevant". It's also less likely to be abused -- e.g. a politician can't censor a prior criminal act while simultaneously getting the benefits of name recognition.

Moreover, since a name change typically requires some sort of administrative petition, it provides an opportunity for judicial oversight. You could make it work like bankruptcy -- you petition the court for a name change, and a judge would decide what aspects of your old identity carrier over to your new one.

A name change is not simple, particularly if you are a bit further along in life.

That's the point. If there is something so terrible that you feel the need to hide truthful information on the Internet, then the process shouldn't be simple.

You can't just change your name everywhere.

Why not? People change their names all the time (e.g. for marriage or religious reasons), so there's existing precedence for this. During the name change process, you get a certificate of name change, so that helps with issues with bank account names, contracts, etc. Your friends and family may still refer to you by your old name, but that's generally not an issue from a "right to forget" standpoint. The only difference would be that the government would seal any records regarding your name change.

Changing your name is, at any rate, easier than making other people forget what you did last summer.

In the US that might be the case, that doesn't make it so in other countries.

In Germany the scenarios in which you are allowed to change your name are all defined by law. While you are allowed to change your name for resocialization or as a protection against harassment, you can get search results removed for reasons that wouldn't allow a name change.

Furthermore changing your name takes quite a bit of effort, asking a search engine to remove search results is a much simpler process.

To be clear, my original post was normative. As a policy, the law should favor name changes over a right to demand Google remove a search listing.

> Furthermore changing your name takes quite a bit of effort, asking a search engine to remove search results is a much simpler process.

Simpler for you, but not for the search engine! Or for society as a whole. More to the point, it should not be easy to erase your name from the Internet. The right to be forgotten is easily abused, and it should be invoked as a last resort not the first.

> For example, I fully expect a modern society to give a second chance to a difficult teenager that receives a criminal record.

They could do that by avoiding judgment on a teenager with a critical record rather than not pretending like that record doesn't exist. And if the problem is that too many people are judging, then it's not true that society at large really does feel the same way about it.

Give people facts, not judgments about the facts.

Can't upvote this enough. I see that EU (and in wider sense, many private advocates wrt. discussions about Facebook, et al.) wants to go the way of denying and removing facts, which is both hurtful for the society and not going to work anyway.

The real problem are not teenager's criminal record or photos from drunk partying - the problem are the people who judge others by things like that, many of which are done by everyone else anyway. And if this is the majority of people, maybe we should finally admit that this is a society-wide problem.

The reality is that someone who has 50 applications on his table and wants to invite 5-10 for an interview for 1 position is looking for easy ways to narrow them down.

And over time society will recognise that prejudging applicants based on irrelevant crap unearthed on the Internet isn't the best business strategy, so the original problem diminishes.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! <sniff> Oh, you kill me ... I needed a good laugh.

Reality check. Look at the prevalence of tattoos. Think that the prejudice against that has diminished? As far as I can tell, it's gotten worse.

Before, tattoos were sufficiently rare that if somebody had one who was applying for a job where they were unusual, they generally were given the benefit of the doubt (ex-serviceman, gang member who got out, etc.).

Now, they're so common that they're used as a proxy for "lower socioeconomic status" and all the discrimination that comes with that.

Re: tattoos - maybe that's only a US thing. Visit any finance tower in Melbourne Docklands on casual Fridays and you will see plenty of the early 20s male staff with full sleeve tattoos on display. And I'd guess around 10% of the female staff have small neck or wrist tatts. Ten years ago that would have been completely verboten.

Yes sadly very common in the US. Many employee dress codes require "no visible tattoos", when unfairly penalizes excesses of youth, cultural differences, and people of lower socioeconomic status, who are unlikely to have funds available for tattoo removal.

This should be the top comment!

How does this request not have merit? What makes it "clumsy"? Because the linked author says it is?

Recall that the original action that yielded the right to be forgotten clause was a gentleman who wanted a debt confiscation and sale removed from the public record. The actual national agency told him to get lost -- the data was valid and unchallenged, and is a part of the recognized past, and is fully available and robust if you search them -- but the European Court decided that search engines must, for some reason, erase this past.

Merrill Lynch was absorbed into Bank of America: It no longer exists as an organization. This gentleman has moved on and no longer serves as Chairman or CEO, effectively retired and sitting on apparently a single board.

Is a newspaper article slandering him really relevant (the pertinent demand of the court ruling) to anyone anymore?

Why, if the search engines have to pretend that a man didn't really have property confiscated and sold for debts, do they not have to also pretend that he wasn't a CEO?

Note that European courts really like giving out big fines (especially, it seems, to American companies), so this impossible to judge subjective basis by which items must be deleted is a no-win situation for Google, and of course they must lean to the side of erring to delete. Erring to retain is a legal quagmire.

> Is a newspaper article slandering him

It's not slander if it's true.

I didn't say this case is or isn't 'clumsy', nor that it is or isn't 'meritful'.

But I believe the incentive as I stated it exists, regardless of the specifics of this case.

The incentive Google has is to not get sued for contravening a lawful order of the European Court. I don't see what conspiratorial wagering adds (the implied notions of your first post were obvious to all).

And be sure that every person with the means is going to exploit this immediately to expunge anything negative in their past. Google is in a position of being unable to decide what the European Court, or any other court, might decide is "relevant" (perhaps the court will be willing to offer its services to judge this), so the end result is obvious, no conspiracy needed.

I get what you're saying but given that there has yet to be a fine issued under this scheme what you are describing is also wagering. I am doubtful about any commercial entity's good intentions when it comes to an opportunity to exploit a system to their benefit.

It doesn't make any business sense to do it any other way. Checking if requests are valid costs money. Following requests blindly costs almost nothing, just a single internet page is lost out of millions. Google makes money off the long tail of advertising, a huge amount that flies under the radar of personal wine and dine deals. They know very well they can't afford to check every request personally.

The internet routes around foolishness like this, thankfully. The only thing the EU court is doing here is damaging their own credibility.

No, it doesn't. Try getting any visitors to your site if you don't have name recognition and get de-indexed by Google.

It's not about any one individual site. It's about information being removed altogether. The point is that's essentially impossible - there is no way the information about Dougie MacDonald (and the rest) is going to be suppressed - if anything, this will make it more widely available.

Google in Europe will be known to be censored, there will be Google results to blogs about censored data that will be visible in a plain Google search, even in Europe.

Couldn't of said it better myself.

It's "couldn't have" or perhaps "couldn't've" but it's certainly not "couldn't of". Interesting error born of an incorrect interpretation of phonetics.

I'm sorry if I'm being naive, but can someone explain to me why everyone blames EU for this? I mean, the motivation behind the ruling seems to be a very good one. So what am I missing?

It is very hard to define exactly what "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" means and if Google refuses to delete an entry upon request the person asking for the deletion can sue them if they disagree with Google (which they probably would since they asked for the deletion in the first place).

This could potentially result in thousands of expensive cases for Google which means they will probably just follow through with most of the deletion requests. This in turn means that many fear cases like this, where somebody could be trying to clean up their past, getting rid of entries that display them in a negative light, if justified or not.

At its core the idea of the law is probably desirable but the current wording and its subsequent implementation mean that is a powerful weapon for everybody trying to clean their past from the web.

Google has a definition of what is relevant. It's not hard to come up with one. What is hard is to get people to agree. Right now Google controls the definition, but given it's monopoly status in Europe, it is not surprising that The EU is starting to work on this.

People tend to respond negatively to bad outcomes regardless of good intentions, and I'm not so sure the intentions are good in the first place. Additionally, the law showcases an utter misunderstanding of how the internet works and unfairly singles out a single company that many people are generally in favor of.

In an odd way though, if this is what is to be done, then targeting Google, as the primary (and these days nearly only) information source for the vast majority of people in the EU (and elsewhere) is actually quite reasonable.

The practicality of this sort of law (which I really can't decide if I am in favour of or not) has been decided by our apathetic approach to Google's dominance of what quite frankly is an increasingly large part of our day-to-day lives.

Who else is to blame? Google was very much against it and there aren't other parties at stake. The motivation has no bearing whatsoever, people doing bad things don't usually think of themselves as bad people.

The path to hell is paved with good intentions.

All google has to do is buy an European news paper and become a traditional publisher - they could buy the independent cheaply.

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