[blazespin]

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 When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information—for example, information about financial scams, professional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.

[x0x0]

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.

[1] http://gawker.com/5477611/googles-ceo-demanded-his-mistress-...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/business/01author.html?_r=...

[Aloisius]

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.

[ars]

People aren't complaining about the idea of removing private information.

They are complaining that you are just removing it from google. The info is still there!

And not only that, it's only removed from google.co.{eu*} google.com will still have it.

Which makes it as stupid of a law as the one about cookies: Make it look like you are helping privacy while actually doing nothing of any value.

Anyone from the EU who wants the full scoop about someone will just use the US google site, making this a completely pointless exercise.

[krbbltr]

> 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.

[throwaway7767]

> And not only that, it's only removed from google.co.{eu*} google.com will still have it

Do you have a reference that confirms this? I have not seen it mentioned in any of the articles about this issue.

[MzHN]

>it's only removed from google.co.{eu*} google.com will still have it

Where is this information from? Sounds a bit strange, but I guess it could be true. It's not the first time big companies say "f u" to these rulings.

[mike_hearn]

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.

[spindritf]

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.

[k-mcgrady]

>> "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.

[seren]

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.

Full EU court ruling in the following link: http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&doc...

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").

[seren]

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.

[mike_hearn]

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.

[seren]

> 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.

[mike_hearn]

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.

[seren]

Overall, I think it is more dangerous for democracy, if everyone is indexed in a database with their political opinions, religious affiliation, favorite ice-cream flavor, than missing out a few bad apples.

I agree it will cause issues, and create complex cases, but I think it is worth trying. And if it does not work out, it will be canceled or obsolete in 10 or 20 years. It is not such a big deal.

More on UE Data laws : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive

[chrismcb]

Who decides what is inadequate or irrelevant?

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.

This is akin to shooting the messenger.

[llii]

> 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.

[bowlofpetunias]

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.

[Vik1ng]

> 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.