[wombosi]

I find it fascinating to see the division of this topic being along seemingly national lines, i.e. European commenters seem in favor, while American commenters seem vehemently against the EU court ruling. This is somewhat of a generalization, but it does highlight an interesting phenomenon. It appears the overwhelming (?) majority of young American internet users, who have come of age in the post 9/11 USA are disturbingly willing to relinquish as many freedoms and rights, as is demanded of them. In fact, they take it one step further, in a form of self-perpetuating pseudo-cultural hegemony, they try to impose this "If you're innocent you have nothing to hide!" mentality on Americans and non-Americans alike.

The fact that global search engines often can have extremely negative implications vis-a-vis personal data retention, is one that more easily escapes those who were born naturally into the Internet age, as opposed to those who "merely adopted it". The "adopters" are usually more sensitive to the before-and-after effects, than the "naturals", usually because the naturals often lack the firsthand context with which to make informed comparisons of said effects.

A contributing, and perhaps aggravating, factor is the tendency of many (possibly younger) HNers to fall into knee-jerk behavioral patterns of vociferously defending all that is Google, from the somewhat irrational perspective of Google being All That Is Good And Holy, simply because of the corporation's trite slogan of "Do No Evil". At the very latest, the Snowden revelations and ensuing NSA scandals have shown us Google and co. are as far from sainthood as any other multibillion dollar multinational corporation.

In summary, the European little guy has scored an important victory that gives them the tools to improve their quality of life, or at the very least avoid a degradation thereof. How this is twisted into censorship of a search giant is fascinating and very revealing of other deeper and far more worrisome underlying tendencies within the very defenders of the "Mega Corp".

[HenryMc]

> It appears the overwhelming (?) majority of young American internet users, who have come of age in the post 9/11 USA are disturbingly willing to relinquish as many freedoms and rights, as is demanded of them.

I see Google's censorship as an attack on "freedoms and rights".

> HNers to fall into knee-jerk behavioral patterns of vociferously defending all that is Google

I personally hate Google, and avoid their products whenever possible. I've used Bing for a number of years, and recently switched most of my searching to DuckDuckGo.

> European little guy has scored an important victory that gives them the tools to improve their quality of life

I don't think this is an "important victory", but rather an attack on the freedom of information.

P.S. I live in Australia and New Zealand.

[zxcdw]

> I see Google's censorship as an attack on "freedoms and rights".

Have I misunderstood something, but isn't this exactly about giving people a right to choose about the online visibility of their name?

If that is the case, isn't it a good thing that people get to have control over what is being shown and what is not? Or is full disclosure of personal details, the full personal transparency online the Right Thing to go with?

I thought a year ago during the NSA diclosures the consensus was that people should have the right to control the information collected, stored and shown about them. I see this paralleling that indirectly.

For what it's worth and to give someone something to grab onto, I am from Europe.

[wombosi]

>I personally hate Google, and avoid their products whenever possible.

You took my quote out of context and ran with that. I said many HNers. Not all HNers.

There is no censorship involved here. Read the EU ruling. The ruling does not prevent Google from indexing personal information. It prevents Google from permanently indexing personal information if it is irrelevant or no longer relevant. Even after said information has been removed from Google's database, it will still be available at the source that Google previously linked too. It's fallacious to pretend that information is being surpressed.

[Oletros]

The problem is defining what it is irrelevant

Wby Bing or Google can't index a La Vanguardia article? Why they are the ones censoring that name and not La Vanguardia?

[ASneakyFox]

I'm pro privacy. But the law is just stupid. Its about taking information that is meant to be public knowledge (much of it being public for good reasons, eg lawsuits) and saying that the information should still exist just be hard to find. Bassicaly instead of implementing actual privacy they just outlawed effeciency. And they didn't even do that. I'm sure any one who is interested in those search results can easily just access the us google. Hell I'm sure its about to be a chrome browser extension.

[gdewilde]

We might not agree, they do provide us a great service actually. One can never have to many different opinions to consider. It seems online American opinions about what Europe should do outnumber the European opinions 10 to 1. They told us a million times what they think about it.

What do the Russians think? And the Chinese? And the Africans? No one knows? Assuming they even have an opinion about it?

If we don't like it we can always censor them?

hehehe