Google bows to EU privacy ruling(ft.com) |
Google bows to EU privacy ruling(ft.com) |
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 When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information—for example, information about financial scams, professional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.
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]
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=...
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.
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.
Do you have a reference that confirms this? I have not seen it mentioned in any of the articles about this issue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
This is probably what author did. :/
For those reading this later, the submitted url was http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...
It's called LAW! You don't BOW to it, you OBEY.
What would FT do in Google case? form an army and go fight against the EU?... Sick of reading articles like that.
Its sad that the EU is voting those laws, but its not Google fault of trying to be a legal 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.
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.
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.
If You can make a decentralized search engine that indexes everything no exceptions you would still find it.
Or you could make your own. It doesn't make it impossible to find just impossible for the average person.
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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
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?
EDIT: BTW, I can view the article. Is that because I'm coming from outside the US?
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
Laws that can only be enforced by building a massive system of internet censorship akin to China's are indeed "doing it wrong".
Happy now?
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 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
This "right to be forgotten" conveniently does not seem to apply to governments, only search engines. So from a democratic perspective it's lose/lose.
I don't want a potential google search to reveal I got my home repossessed for instance.
The employer could take advantage of this by offering you a lower wage since you're desperate it's more likely you will take it or not hire you at all.
However the way the court choose to handle this was completely wrong. This shouldn't be handled at search engine level but at the publishing website level.
The ability of anybody requesting content to be removed from the internet should be very limited in the types of things they can have removed and rigorously monitored by a court of law.
Plus there should be a private database containing the Names of the people who had content removed and what was removed.
That would discourage political reasons since the log of their activity exists even if the content doesn't.
If someone claims to be an expert in a certain area which you need but are not yourself an expert in, it would be very useful to be able to search their name and discover that things they wrote about the topic have been discredited. It'd be even more useful if you could find unflattering opinions about them written by their peers: perhaps it avoids a very long and messy employment of someone who will then be difficult to fire, but who doesn't know what they're doing, potentially crippling your business.
The guy you're looking at would probably love to make the criticism of his work unfindable whilst simultaneously leaving behind the bits that make him look good. But why should he have that right? Employers have needs too.
For what it's worth I quite agree that the existing framework for getting things removed from the internet (by going to the source) works well enough, but that's not what the court has now created.
And to be clear, I don't actually have much of an opinion on whether the immediate consequences of the ECJ ruling will be positive or negative ones for EU citizens. My issue is mainly with the way this topic was and is reported on in some of the US media – lots of fear mongering and misrepresentation of facts by mainstream press and high-profile bloggers alike. It smells like a PR campaign. (The completely unreflected freedom-of-speech-as-a-religion type forum commenter is really just a consequence and an extension of that.)
Larry Page happily confirms that suspicion. From the article:
“I wish we’d been more involved in a real debate . . . in Europe. That’s one of the things we’ve taken from this, that we’re starting the process of really going and talking to people” - Larry Page
Translation: "This whole ordeal made us realize we need to do a lot more lobbying in Europe and pay off more media outlets in non-english language markets, since our propaganda there didn't work nearly as well as we had hoped. Don't worry, we're working on it."
At the core of the ECJ decision – whether you consider it good or bad, or hilarious, or plain stupid – lie important questions about what privacy and human dignity mean in this age and how much of them we're willing to give up. These questions deserve more than being drowned in the overwhelming noise of corporate shills.