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're entitled to your opinion, but a single comment on a US-centric discussion forum does not convince me that it's a majority opinion as far as Europeans go. My observations so far indicate the opposite.
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 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.