[Ryanmf]

  "The ruling confirms the need to bring today's data
  protection rules from the 'digital stone age' into
  today's modern computing world where data is no longer
  stored on 'a server', or once launched online disappears
  in cyberspace"

— European Commission vice-president Viviane Reding ("who has led the EU's data privacy efforts")

What—and I'm asking in earnest—is that quote even supposed to mean?

[pedrocr]

It just sounds like "once you publish something online it will be replicated in so many places that trying to get it removed is meaningless". Which is true and irrelevant to the question if people should be able to get things taken down from Google, a highly visible place being the leading search engine by a huge margin. It's like saying "because we can't erase every single physical record in the world you can't demand to take down that libelous billboard in Times Square". Not that I think Google is that billboard, it's just indexing what's already there.

[axanoeychron]

Does this mean we should accept and ignore character smears, witness protection, cyberbullying and libel? Is it okay for someone to surrender the arbitrary association of content to their name which may not be true?

The solution might not be beautiful or scalable but removing search results could seriously improve some people's lives'.

I'm not talking about allowing people to remove information pertaining to trying to hide poor behaviour online or bad reviews online. I'm talking about the life ruining things.

[ubernostrum]

I'm talking about the life ruining things.

Except this case was about a life-ruining thing that was true.

And raises some potential problems: suppose I default on my mortgage and get foreclosed, and you end up buying my house. Now, the fact that I was once the owner and that it changed hands in the foreclosure is part of the chain of ownership of that property, and may become necessary information if your ownership is ever challenged.

Does my "right to be forgotten" preclude your right to prove your ownership of the property?

[dredmorbius]

It was a 1998 foreclosure. Under US law, items older than 7 years are stricken from credit reports (though other actions may remain part of a record). In a world in which arbitrary reasons for denial exist, being prejudiced by a 16 year old, or 26 year old, or 46 year old financial mishap would seem ... less than just.

How about the roughly 485,000 households in the US receiving foreclosure notices in the 2010 foreclosure crisis. I'm sorry, that was in September 2012 alone. If that's a persistent Web record, should that follow them around for the rest of their lives?

Or, in a different context, does a rhinoceros have a right to be forgotten? http://redd.it/25ll1v

[ubernostrum]

There are several things your over-simplified analysis is missing here.

One is that the "right to be forgotten" does not exist in a vacuum -- it has to coexist with a bunch of other rights, and weighing how important each of them is in relation to the others is incredibly difficult. And that's without getting into as-yet-uncodified rights (example: making history more accessible via scanning/OCRing of old newspapers, which now seems like it'd have to come with a censorship regime built in to expunge news that's "meant to be forgotten").

Another is the practicality issue, in that information of this sort is actually incredibly hard to destroy, and often is required to be published in order to provide a fair process to everyone involved.

Finally, there's the issue that this is going after Google, but that doesn't actually accomplish the kind of "forgetting" you seem to be talking about. Sure, the general public won't see a newspaper listing about the foreclosure in Google anymore, but the people in a position to use that information to wreak institutional harm still will have access to it, because the databases they use are not publicly accessible, meaning it's not possible to determine if you're even in them in order to sue for removal.

[dredmorbius]

Digitizing old newspapers isn't all that great an intrusion -- though it makes old content available, you're still bound by the bandwidth of those original print sources. It means that you might see what had been talk-of-the-small-town splashed around on national or international coverage now. In a levels-of-harm basis, it's not so bad.

On the weighted importance, one of the interesting elements I've seen said of Xeer (mentioned recently on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7736841) is that there's a concept of increasing obligations with increasing power or wealth (this is hearsay from a reddit comment, the Wikipedia article doesn't touch on this). It's similar to how I feel disclosure rules should operate. Someone with little or no impact on society should fear little disclosure. Someone with a great deal of impact (financial, political, military, religious, cultural power, or with a record of criminal acts causing suffering or death to others) should be obliged to disclose more of themselves.

As for coming up with automatic rules, I doubt that's possible, but then, it's not in law either -- that's why we've got judges.

Your criticism in going after Google has merits, though any law such as the EU one should address not only the access and indexing of such information, but of its use. Though proving someone knows a certain fact or accessed a specific piece of information is at best difficult.

[axanoeychron]

That is a contrived example. In your example, the information would be kept, the fact the property was foreclosed would probably be stored in a cabinet or computer system in an office somewhere. You would make an effort to seek out and obtain that information legally and with justifiable cause. (To prove your ownership.) It would not be publicly accessible for the world to see for there is no reason for it to be. It would be a bit like medical records.

The core part of the argument to the right to be forgotten is to treat some pieces of information as medical information, i.e, private or not your concern. Things that you would rather not be known for they bestow little benefit to you except for you to profit at my expense. A lot of people find this uncomfortable, for good reason.

Should divorce cases be completely public?

[magicalist]

> The core part of the argument to the right to be forgotten is to treat some pieces of information as medical information

That sounds great, but this case clearly shows that's not the case at all. This is information that can be widely and freely reported, just not by everyone. A newspaper could run it as their front page story every day, but some other people can't report it, and, in fact, can't even tell you the fact that someone else is saying something related to the topic you're searching for. That's something very different than treating it as private data.

[dredmorbius]

One thing about restricting public disclosures to established news organizations, as had been the case prior to the advent of the Web, is that there's a distinctly limited bandwidth for this. While _an_ individual could be smeared, the ability to do so on a mass basis was distinctly limited.

I haven't read the EU decision yet, nor have I made up my mind as to whether or not it does or doesn't have merits. In general I subscribe to the principle that there's a proportionality appropriate to disclosure: that the greater a person's (or institution's) power and responsibility, the greater the obligation for disclosure of relevant details of their life, most particularly as it might affect others (individuals, organizations, government(s), etc.).

[aeturnum]

She's saying that, in her view, people should own their information. Where Google (or anyone else) chooses to store it, should not be an excuse for denying what she sees as the right to manage that information.

At a high level, I imagine she would support a law that requires all information that can be associated with an individual (google account, ip address, etc) to be stored with metadata tracing it back to that identity and require that companies be able to remove all the data by metadata.

What do people find confusing about the quote? It seems like pretty standard politician to me.

[magicalist]

> At a high level, I imagine she would support a law that requires all information that can be associated with an individual (google account, ip address, etc) to be stored with metadata tracing it back to that identity and require that companies be able to remove all the data by metadata

What does that have to do with linking to a factually true news story about a guy? It seems a lot more like she's trying to conflate things for a soundbite.

In any case, making all statements that are about information about someone transitively "personal information" seems like an awfully bad idea. That's great when Google can track an account or an IP address, but where's the metadata for Mario Gonzalez to be found in a newspaper's story about Mario Gonzalez? And considering that news stories are often about more than one thing, what's the balance when a story is about someone who wants the event to be forgotten and someone who doesn't (or it's important that it's not)?

[CamperBob2]

It means that the EU, like the US, gives large amounts of power to people who literally don't know what they're talking about.

[benjarrell]

It sounds to me like she doesn't know that 'cloud' is just the internet.

[majc2]

Well you see the internet is a series of tubes...

In all seriousness though, in the UK credit record agencies can only keep 6 years of financial information - a search engine is not subject to any regulation around this and could for example return an insolvency event from 16 years ago.

Reding is saying this is a double standard and infringes on an EU citizens rights and that they'd like to regulate this.

[harshreality]

A search engine does not know how old the contents of a page are. They'd have to diff different versions of a page, which is not foolproof; for html it's particularly noisy compared to, say, code. Even when that strategy works, or when there's only one version of a page, it's only possible to determine when the search engine first saw a piece of content, not when that piece of content was created.

In contrast, things on a credit history are dated.