Oh those poor search engines, making billions of dollars having to have the decency to let private individuals not have to have their lives opened up to casual searches on the internet 24/7. What a tragedy!
I for one have NO DESIRE for my children to grow up in a world where they do not have control over information about themselves on the internet. I can only pray this sensible law makes it to North America.
For those downvoting - are you a shill for Google? Try reading the form itself to appreciate how exceedingly reasonable it is:
A recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union found that certain users can ask search engines to remove results for queries that include their name where those results are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed.”
In implementing this decision, we will assess each individual request and attempt to balance the privacy rights of the individual with the public’s right to know and distribute information. When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information—for example, information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials.
You'll note this is the privacy that Eric Schmidt already enjoys, or at least believes he should enjoy, whether it's using lawyers to get one his many mistresses' blog yanked from the internet [1], or when he tried to get his political donations pulled from google search:
Mr. Schmidt, Google’s outspoken chief who will be replaced by Mr. Page on
Monday, has made public gaffes when speaking about privacy. Mr. Levy reveals
that he has made gaffes inside the company, too. Mr. Schmidt asked that
Google remove from the search engine information about a political donation
he had made. Sheryl Sandberg, a Google executive who is now Facebook’s chief
operating officer, told him that was unacceptable. [2]
And of course, there is always his infamous suggestion that people should change their name when they turn eighteen, in part to avoid google reporting every dumb thing they did as a child.
It's hard to say whether he's a sociopath or an entitled asshole, so I suggest compromise: he's an entitled sociopathic asshole.
I don't see why it is Google's responsibility to act as a censor. After all if there is truly a right to be forgotten (which is wonderful news to a great number of criminals and future politicians), you should go after the origin of the information, not the index.
> They are complaining that you are just removing it from google. The info is still there!
Which, as far as I can tell, is the point of the ruling.
The idea is to not have one particular thing that the world found interesting or newsworthy at some point in the past cast a shadow over an individual's life, so to speak. Yes, if you're really interested in someone's dirt, all the info is still there for you to dig up. Again, that's the idea.
Your point about google.com being unfiltered is, if true, somewhat valid. But the inability to enforce a good thing globally does not excuse not making an effort locally.
By the way, most countries in the EU do not use a `.co` domain for commercial entities.
Given the disaster this is likely to inflict on search results if scaled up, and the fact that it's not required in America, do you really think they'll make the whole global search engine work this way? Or do you think they'll do the same thing as done in every other case where some stupid country requires censorship: block based on domain name or IP address?
Historically, for Europe it's been done via domain name. Doing it via IP address would not be any more effective though: there'd immediately be dozens of proxy sites set up running in the US that simply forward the search to the US Google and return the results.
Short of building an equivalent to the Chinese Great Firewall and blocking all encrypted traffic, or forcing Google to apply European cenorship globally, there's no way to stop Europeans who want regular results pages from getting them.
The search engines aren't the ones losing out. This will not impact their bottom line.
We, the users, are missing out on the completeness of our search results. You already have no control over information about you. It has always been like that, people have been gossiping since the dawn of language. If something was published, then it should be in the index.
If you don't like it, take it up with the publisher. This is just like those ridiculous rulings on copyright infringement by linking to a copyrighted work.
And yes, everyone who downvotes you is a shill for Google at 0.2$/downvote. There's just no other explanation.
>> "If something was published, then it should be in the index."
We already make exceptions for certain things (illegal content). Obviously a line has to be drawn somewhere - it's just a matter of where we draw it.
>> "We, the users, are missing out on the completeness of our search results."
With this law AFAIK content cannot be removed if that would be against the public good. So, for example, a politician can't have an article that makes the look bad but is true removed. Technically, although no longer 'complete', the quality of your search results should not be hit. The only results being removed are ones which are incorrect and damaging to someone.
>> "If you don't like it, take it up with the publisher."
AFAIK with this law the publisher has to remove it too. Google is involved because they cache pages which can include deleted content.
Actually, it was not removed from the newspaper archive, because the article referring Mr. Gonzalez was published under a judicial injunction. And so his request was rejected by the Spanish court of data protection. But the case was upheld against Google.
I think the case make a distinction between a newspaper publication that is rather ephemeral and spatially located vs a search engine that plays a big part in disseminating information or any other "data processor" that can potentially expose the information for ever.
The crux of the argument seems to be that even if you are only indexing, by definition, you are managing/duplicating data, and in some case, they are private data so you have a responsibility before the person being identified (the "data subject").
We, the user, are only going to lose some information on "common people", and only the one mindful of their public image, no public figure, on events that probably happened 10 or more years ago. So, yes, it could become harder to find if someone was drunk at their prom night, harder to stalk an ex, but I don't think we are going to lose anything crucial. Basically, we'll be back to pre web 2.0. And I am pretty sure that most people won't request any removal to anyone.
Yeah? Really? And what happens if that common person goes on to later become famous for some reason? Does all the info about their drunk prom night reappear the moment the first newspaper story about them is published?
The distinction between someone of public interest and someone who isn't is entirely arbitrary and open to endless debate. What happens when people start disputing that they're famous enough to no longer meet this standard? Historically it results in giant and expensive court fights, which puts people off from trying this - almost by definition, if you're rich enough to waste money on arguing you're not in the public interest, then you are in the public interest. But making Google do this means unless they charge lawyer like bills, suddenly everyone has an incentive to argue they're not important.
> Yeah? Really? And what happens if that common person goes on to later become famous for some reason? Does all the info about their drunk prom night reappear the moment the first newspaper story about them is published?
Let's imagine you have somehow cleaned your past when you were unknown and you are now running for the presidential election. Your past is not going to magically reappear online, but you can expect that some journalist will try to write a bio on you, contacting friends, people you grew up with, etc... And it could happen that your friend Joe would talk about your drunk prom night. So it is back on the public eye, and it won't be removable this time.
Maybe it would have been easier if the information had always been available in the first place, but I am personally willing that some extra effort, both from "data processor" and investigator, would be needed in the sake of the personal data protection of John Doe.
But why do you think the ruling works that way? The justification for suppressing information is that someone isn't in the public interest, the canonical example being a politician that wants to cover up past corruption scandals. Everyone seems to agree that this is a case where data wouldn't get filtered.
But if someone is thinking about becoming a politician, uses their current obscurity to delete the data from a search engine, and then goes on to run in an election, isn't this exactly when we should want to see all that is on the internet about them? So it makes sense that the information would come back.
Your proposed solution to this is that everyone should have to effectively give up modern technology in this case and hope that some journalist, somehow, without any modern tools, finds all the relevant information despite governments helping this person bury it. Why would we give up powerful tools like this? How is that not a Luddite strategy?
I don't see any way this ruling (I hesitate to call it a law because it doesn't seem to be connected to any actual law that anyone knew about) can be applied in any kind of consistent or useful manner. It WILL turn into a giant fight over who is or is not worthy of being censored or not, with lots of people bending over backwards to argue that they aren't really in the public interest. As presumably there are punishments and fines for not censoring enough data, but there's no punishment for censoring too much, this will inevitably hurt not only ordinary everyday people but also democracy itself.
Search engines just index the web. If you have an issue with some stuff on the web, then go after the person hosting it, not the person telling you where it is.
> where they do not have control over information about themselves on the internet
The biggest gripe for me about this thing is that removing a link from google doesn't remove it from the website itself.
But people think they're safe once the can't find it via Google because Google is all they know. Especially in the age of removing URLs from the browsers input field and all.
Hey, here's a surprise: the law also applies to the website itself.
Just because the person who brought the suit targeted Google first (which is not strange, given that Google collects and re-publishes that information in a way that makes it immeasurably more accessible and "public" than the original publication) doesn't make the everybody else exempt.
The only valid debate her is if Google significantly adds to the damage, or if Google's search engine is just a neutral utility. I would say the answer to that is pretty f-ing obvious. That ship has sailed a long time ago.
Today, Google's search results and interface are so thoroughly manipulated (not just for profit but also for political/ideological reasons) that it counts as a curated publication.
The fact that Google uses algorithms instead of humans for most of that curation doesn't absolve them from responsibility for the result.
> But people think they're safe once the can't find it via Google because Google is all they know.
But the same is probably true for the average person looking for it. A small Employer might look trough a few results to see if can find something about a applicant, but he is not going to do some big reasearch.
Larry's request at TED a few months back that we have more faith in corporations shows how much we have already lost to the hands of an increasingly commercial internet. When it is clear that there is no neutral party to trust any more (gov nor corp) balkanisation through enforcement of new laws is a needed and natural effect.
I don't know why, but this creeps me out. This seems like such a hard balance to get right and also too much of a burden for search engines. Also, there is potential for abuse.
Sure, it is a hard balance to get right. But privacy is an important right and we should not throw it away because it creates some extra effort for a multi-billion dollar company.
I also find it weak that Page plays the 'think of the startups' card. In fact, I think that since the Snowden leaks, there are far more opportunities to create privacy-aware or privacy-protecting services. E.g., I am pretty sure that Duckduckgo, a startup in search, benefitted tremendously from the recent attention to privacy issues.
DuckDuckGo certainly has benefited from privacy becoming more salient, but this ruling is probably negative for them. Each of these removal requests needs manual review to keep people from requesting takedowns of other people's stuff. There are ~500M people eligible to request takedowns under the ruling, and if 1% of them ask for one link removed per year that's 14k requests per day. If each request takes 5min then you need 143 people working full time. Which high but doable for Google, but at ~20 employees this would be an enormous burden for DDG.
These numbers could be higher if someone puts out a campaign that goes viral and gets lots of people submitting requests, and there's nothing that stops people outside the EU from submitting (invalid) requests.
One thing in DDG's favor, however, is that that at first people are probably only going to send these requests to Google.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, on open source software.
There are ~500M people eligible to request takedowns under the ruling, and if 1% of them ask for one link removed per year that's 14k requests per day. If each request takes 5min then you need 143 people working full time. Which high but doable for Google, but at ~20 employees this would be an enormous burden for DDG.
You are making a mistake in your math here, since a sizeable portion of that 500M people use Google, but probably only a fraction of a percent uses DDG.
In other words, if DDG's usage is currently 1% that of Google (which would surprise me), that's 1.43 people. If you are a search company of 20 people, it seems reasonable to me to have at least a few people working on keeping your index clean.
For my privacy to be protected in this way it doesn't matter what search engine I use, it matters what search engine the people who are trying to look me up use. If I want a fact about me to not come up when people search for my name I would need to remove it from any search engine others might look in. This is a lower barrier than usage, but you're right that at least for now people probably won't bother submitting these to DDG.
Unless someone makes a single form for submitting a removal request to all/most search engines? Though I guess then the search engines could pool together and do some kind of centralized processing of these requests?
DuckDuckGo is primarily a Bing frontend, no? I seem to recall that they claim to be a real search engine and have their own crawler, but any time someone analyses their results deeply they're almost always identical to Bing.
Given that Microsoft has a large EU presence and is presumably also affected by this law, perhaps they will have to start doing the same thing as Google. Which would then automatically feed through to DuckDuckGo.
I don't believe there are any competitive startup search engines at the moment. However, this doesn't mean there would never be. Plus this ruling is so vague it's likely to impact all kinds of companies that are not startups: think specialised social networks, etc.
Also open data like OpenStreetMap will really help DuckDuckGo and other services to contest google in that market. Especiylly when that data is connected to Wikipedia & Wikidata then they can show similar snippets as google.
Duckduckgo is getting better each quarter. Whenever I type
anything into a search engine; I now pause for a micro second, 1/8 of the time I access DDG.
I don’t really see what privacy has to do with it. Really. Privacy, to me, isn’t something that is timed. Either it’s ok to state something publicly or not, time shouldn’t matter in my opinion.
Privacy is only very tangentially linked to what you say, this is also related to what you did, or even what happened to you in a passive way.
Let's say that 20 years ago your family was murdered under your eyes by an axe-wielding maniac when you were 4 years old.
Now as a potential employer, I type your name on Google and the first result is an article from 20 years ago. Maybe I am prejudiced but I wonder if you would be a pretty stable employee, and as a result, I bin your CV.
This has nothing to do with being able to "state" something but this is really a privacy issue.
Which is really the idea. The law isn't about squelching free speech, it's just trying to keep this information from being so easily available. It's the right balance.
I find it so incredibly hard to believe that so many people are falling for this "poor-us" google routine. I just shake my head in bewilderment every time I hear it.
> The law isn't about squelching free speech, it's just trying to keep this information from being so easily available.
You're just mincing words here. There are profound speech arguments to be made when someone is coerced or threatened for publishing _facts_. It is the same nanny-state crap that Europe invokes when it criminalizes offending people, and they have an army of people like you to jump on their bandwagon.
The ruling is technologically illiterate. It fails to appreciate the growing ability for anyone to access and index public information as time goes on. It fails to appreciate its jurisdiction and effectiveness. It fails to make sound rational justification that separates the role of a newspaper from a news aggregator.
Most important of all, it gives the government an enormously broad -- and practically limitless -- ability to remove the expression and dissemination of information based on purely subjective and even temporal characteristics. Europe's freedom of expression laws are a joke with endless carve-outs for "public stability" and "offense" which will only become increasingly useful tools to regulate and censor legitimate public discourse.
Too bad for you, these laws won't work and when they fail it will be embarrassing. In the short term, enjoy the further rot of economic growth in the region due to compliance costs of this and other ridiculous judgments.
You sound bitter. Why do you get so worked up over 'nanny-state crap' that's going on on the other side of the world? Business interests in the EU and don't like to put in the extra effort? Or do you just enjoy that mode of righteous indignation?
I find it amusing that – even taking the Google shills out of the picture –, most of the 'debate' around this topic is along the lines of Americans preaching to Europeans about how they're 'doing it wrong', often with emotionally charged language, just like your comment here. Ever thought that Europeans just might have some slightly different values than you do?
You going to have to come up with a better defense; the "it's just a different culture" and "you wouldn't understand" and "our values are different" does NOT insulate you from criticism. Your 'balance' is poorly reasoned, and should be openly mocked and despised by anyone in western society.
This ruling affects everybody because of its balkanization effect on the Internet. Other than that, I just feel bad for Europeans who throw fundamental human rights away in favor of populism.
I actually have what I think is a valid reason to use this.
Years ago I created a friendfeed account. I used their Twitter signup button. Now years later I would like to close my friendfeed account to remove that information from the internet. There's nothing particularly bad about it but it's old, useless and I would rather it was deleted. The problem is I can't login into my account as I authorised through Twitter and I've since deleted my Twitter account. I also can't get in touch with anyone at friendfeed since they've shutdown but left their site up.
This ruling gives me a way to hide that friendfeed page from people. Unfortunately it will still be up but it's unlikely anyone will find it 'accidentally' if it isn't on Google.
I also agree that for reasons such as this (deleting an unwanted account) the ruling is useful. The real problem is demanding Google or other services like theirs to delete data that appears from other services, that Google has nothing to do with, other than indexing them. Of course you'd have to believe that once the data is gone from the parent host, it disappears from Google's cache, too, automatically.
But just asking Google to get rid of it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and I think it unnecessarily punishes them, too. Think about the tens of millions of such requests they'd have to respond to every year in the future.
The ruling can be use for good and bad reasons.But I think it's important people can at least reach google in some special case,where a result from 10 year ago can be detrimental.
It's a clever trick. Unfortunately, it breaks the referential integrity of the post. I don't think we can allow it as the submission url, for the same reason we don't allow link shorteners. People who are already posting links to Google searches in comments, though, might want to post these instead.
Quite a few of your comments about editorial decisions (changing URL, changing title) include a note about what the original was. I really like that, it helps people make sense of the conversation.
The only problem is now when you click on the submission link you can't view the article because you need a FT subscription. If you clicked the link that sends you via Google you can view the article due to the FT allowing limited free views via search engines.
Yes—that's why the trick is clever. But this has been the situation for a long time, and much as we're all annoyed by the annoyance, it would clearly be inappropriate to have all paywalled links show up in HN as "google.com". If people want to post links like this in comments, that wouldn't be a big deviation from current practice.
Maybe, in cases where the initial URL submitted redirects, the title should show two domains: the initial domain, and the final domain reached when the entire redirect chain is followed. Or we could try to convince the HN community to favour other sources over FT; this story, in particular, isn't short of write-ups elsewhere.
EDIT: BTW, I can view the article. Is that because I'm coming from outside the US?
This way you can skip the FT paywall, since it looks like you're coming from search or google news.
It exploits the daily allowance of free articles shown to users coming from the search engine.
I for one have NO DESIRE for my children to grow up in a world where they do not have control over information about themselves on the internet. I can only pray this sensible law makes it to North America.
For those downvoting - are you a shill for Google? Try reading the form itself to appreciate how exceedingly reasonable it is:
A recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union found that certain users can ask search engines to remove results for queries that include their name where those results are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed.” In implementing this decision, we will assess each individual request and attempt to balance the privacy rights of the individual with the public’s right to know and distribute information. When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information—for example, information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials.