This article is pretty terrible. I think it's great that it's drawing attention to the problem, but it spends most of the time rallying an angry mob and pointing the pitchforks in the wrong direction:
> Guardian articles have been hidden by Google
> Editorial decisions belong with them, not Google
> But such editorial calls surely belong with publishers, not Google.
Google has done absolutely nothing wrong here. It is making zero editorial calls. It's removing links that were flagged for removal by someone outside of the company, and it is compelled to do so by EU law.
In fact, if you ignore the finger-pointing at Google, you'll see that Google actually tries really really hard to get around this: It informs you when results were blocked, notifies when results are blocked, blocks only the narrowest possible search terms, and helpfully points you to google.com which doesn't filter.
> Publishers can and should do more to fight back. One route may be legal action.
No, legal action is the only route. This is a matter of law.
Put down your Google pitchfork. The article is clearly not placing the blame on Google: "As for Google itself, it's clearly a reluctant participant in what effectively amounts to censorship." The second paragraph says this is the result of a court ruling.
If the most concerning thing to you about this article is that it doesn't spend enough time exonerating Google for their role in this, then I don't know what to tell you.
It was a poor article - casual reading of it leads one to believe that Google is engaging in Censorship. Careful reading of the entire article places the blame on where it's supposed to be - the Law - but the fact that the article kept calling out Google, when it should have been repeatedly mentioning the law that Google was complying with, was problematic.
Title, Introduction, First Paragraph read as follows:
EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google
Publishers must fight back against this indirect challenge to press freedom, which allows articles to be 'disappeared'. Editorial decisions belong with them, not Google
When you Google someone from within the EU, you no longer see what the search giant thinks is the most important and relevant information about an individual. You see the most important information the target of your search is not trying to hide.
My Rewrite:
EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been required removed by law.
Publishers must fight back against this indirect challenge to press freedom, which allows articles to be 'disappeared'. Editorial decisions belong with them, not the government.
When you search someone from within the EU, you no longer see what might be the most important and relevant information about an individual. You see the most important information the target of your search is not trying to hide.
Title: EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google
"EU's right to be forgotten", people with context understand this cause.
You are so good at political correctness... That does not matter if you use "search engine" to generalize google, Google is effectively the "search engine". You can say that Google has no fault in this incident, but you should not pretend that Google is not playing a crucial role in this incident...
You guys are all right and wrong at the same time. The article both blames and exonerates Google. Depending on what quotes you pick you can support a case for either. The people who are saying it shouldn't blame Google are right, Google is just complying with the law. That the article is inconsistent with where it's laying the blame, is the fault of sloppy journalism.
This is what the grandparent is missing. Google is doing this because it exhausted all options of appeal and was forced to do this by law. I have no doubt that Google doesn't like being told what it can or cannot show in its search results.
Reluctant seems perfectly cromulent here. Pretty much any definition includes 'unwilling', and the word itself in its original form contains the image of struggling against something.
In some ways it's more appropriate than your options, because it implies that Google is fighting the implementation of the law as far as it can.
This law is a very serious threat to freedom of the press, and freedom of speech in general. While it was (allegedly) introduced for reasons that seem quite reasonable - avoiding unfair reputations in search results - it could quite validly be termed as "Right to censor criticism or true facts about yourself".
Let's take high-profile person X who is found guilty of some serious crime, like sex offences. They have the money to hire a professional "reputation management" firm to find all stories in the press about them, and send takedown requests to Google, who is legally compelled to comply with those requests. The result is that information that is out there in the public domain, and that the public arguably has a right to know, is censored.
There's a balance here between an individual's right to be protected against defamation, and the public's right to know. I don't think this law strikes the right balance. Furthermore, it ignores the technical and social nature of how the Internet works - the so called "Streisand effect" that repeatedly gets invoked whenever someone tries to suppress information. And as technology evolves and there's even more ways for information to become replicated (think peer-to-peer search engines and the like), it's like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
I don't think you understand what the "right to be forgotten" actually is. The point is not that someone who has done bad things can just demand that the entire world magically forget about it and give them a clean slate.
[Edit: In a discussion about whether this behaviour amounts to censorship, within 2 minutes of posting, someone has downvoted this comment even though all it does is point out what appears to be a widely held misconception about the subject matter and provide a credible source. If that's not irony...]
After reading your link, it sounds like peter understands it just fine.
He did say "send takedown request to Google".. and that's exactly the situation that is described in your PDF when discussing the case. The article says the court decided that the newspaper archive would be kept intact, and Google would need to delete the links -- and this was the correct balance of the public's right to know.
In fact, from my reading of the article, I'm having a hard time thinking of a case where Google could refuse to delete a link -- since Google only links to other people's content, and that content will be available even if Google's links to it are deleted.
Edit: the quote:
The case itself provides an example of this balancing exercise. While the Court ordered Google to delete access to the
information deemed irrelevant by the Spanish citizen, it also emphasised that the content of the underlying newspaper
archive should not be changed in the name of data protection (paragraph 88 of the Court’s ruling). The Spanish citizens’
data is still accessible but is no longer ubiquitous. This is enough for the citizen’s privacy to be respected.
> In fact, from my reading of the article, I'm having a hard time thinking of a case where Google could refuse to delete a link.
How about the case discussed right here? The summary linked above says:
The request may for example be turned down where the search engine operator concludes that for particular reasons, such as for example the public role played by John Smith, the interest of the general public to have access to the information in question justifies showing the links in Google search results.
That seems like it could be pretty easily satisfied in this case: Stanley O'Neal is a major business figure with a clear public role, serving on the board that controls gigantic multinational corporation Alcoa. Given that powerful role, it's in the interest of the general public to be able to search for and find information about his recent past in positions of power at other gigantic multinational corporations, such as major events during his CEOship at Merrill Lynch.
The main practical problem, imo, is that Google is unlikely to want to put in the resources that would be necessary to make case-by-case determinations, and would therefore probably just err on the side of deleting anything requested. But taken in isolation, this particular case really seems like one of the easier cases in which to reject the request, which they would probably win if litigated. Perhaps not quite as easy as if it were Silvio Berlusconi asking for articles about his political career to be delinked (that request would be really clearly rejectable), but O'Neal is still clearly a public figure, and the article in question was also about his public role as CEO (while the Mario Costeja González case was about the personal bankruptcy filing of a pretty obscure individual).
this particular case really seems like one of the easier cases in which to reject the request, which they would probably win if litigated.
Which is exactly the problem with this law -- if Google wants to reject a request, the burden of proof is on Google to prove that the information should NOT be deleted. While you may believe Google could win this case, you're suggesting Google spend legal resources (and money) fighting over a few links... and that they should do that every time they get a bogus request. AND if they repeatedly do this and lose their case, Google may be subject to fines of 2% of worldwide annual revenue (over $1B/year).
Why would Google ever decline a request when the penalty is $1B/year?
That's certainly a possible concern, but I'm not sure it's the one in question here. Is there much chance that: 1) O'Neal would actually sue; and/or 2) win? My guess is that if Google rejected his request, he wouldn't sue. Both because of the bad publicity, and because he's in a fairly weak position to invoke this right with respect to his past as CEO of Merill Lynch, a very public role.
I think the bigger issue for Google isn't their fear of fines and/or losing lawsuits if they really did make case-by-case determinations, but rather than difficulty & expense of putting together any kind of system for case-by-case determinations in the first place. They tend not to want to put together such systems, as can also be seen in the "delete first, ask questions later" approach to letting music labels delete videos on YouTube after algorithmically scanning, not even requiring the labels to put together a proper under-penalty-of-perjury DMCA request. I'm sympathetic to that position from a practical perspective, but I think it's a somewhat different problem. The problem here is that even if it is perfectly possible to make case-by-case decisions in a reliably compliant way, Google just doesn't do case-by-case decisions in that manner, for business reasons: their entire business model is automated decisions at scale, not manual curation of content.
Does Google want to do a good job of assessing requests?
I think it highly unlikely that the court would want this article suppressed. I think Google may be taking things down over enthusiastically to bring the law and the ruling into disrepute. They are betting that the law rather than their particular takedown process will be blamed.
The law imposes a penalty if an appropriate request is not honored, but does not, as I understand, do so if an inappropriate request is honored. It therefore encourages exactly the behavior Google is taking, because erring on the side of taking things down is the legally safe approach.
The DMCA notice/counternotice arrangement has a similar but more subtle effect, because while it is superficially symmetric, the situation of the parties with respect to it is asymmetric in a way which results in the one side systematically being privileged.
Are you sure that is right? Penalties for contempt of court, for not having a process or for always denying requests as a process I can imagine but can you link to anything referring to the penalties for making wrong judgements in this area.
I'm quite sympathetic to the idea that the rules may be wrong or could be made better but I think that there being some control in this area is a good idea on balance.
The FAQ someone linked to refers to balance of freedom of speech and data protection so there is the possibilities of complaints from both sides.
Google representative on the radio today indicated that the search result suppressed is for one of the thread's commenters and not for the bank executive's name which will still return the correct link.
Given this my comment is probably too harsh, there is no evidence that Google isn't properly assessing requests that I am aware of.
Most people from the next generation use Facebook. They're not ignorant of how they use it--they use their privacy settings to hide posts from the public.
However Facebook's ToS says [0] Facebook may use any information you share with them "to protect Facebook's or others' rights or property". So hypothetically, if Facebook felt some policy of a presidential candidate threatened "Facebook's rights", they would be in the clear, legally speaking, to publish those photos of you smoking a joint at 18.
So what is the difference exactly between Facebook publishing a photo of a joint and an old Guardian article? They are both expressions of speech. They are both things that the public arguably has a right to know. They are both cases where there is no legal impediment to the speech--other than, in your words, the "right to censor criticism or true facts about yourself." On what basis can we say one is allowed and not the other? I cannot generate a reason for analyzing these situations differently, although I very much want to. I suggest we have to either allow both, or forbid both.
This analysis would suggest that free speech and privacy have a very fundamental conflict--that the gain of one comes at the expense of the other. Increasingly, the right to privacy is really the right to prevent others from publishing information about you that they lawfully and ordinarily collect. I grow increasingly doubtful that we can achieve both outcomes--I think at some point we will have to choose sides.
>>> they would be in the clear, legally speaking, to publish those photos of you smoking a joint at 18.
So what? We know three of the last US presidents used drugs when they were young. For none of them it was a major problem. If they had seriously bad things done in the past - that would be a problem, but the we want to know about it. Knowing that the presidential candidate smoked weed in college doesn't hurt him anymore - we already know pretty much everybody did it anyway.
>>> This analysis would suggest that free speech and privacy have a very fundamental conflict
Only if you define privacy as "ability to go back in time and undo public things that I did". In my book, privacy doesn't mean that. 1984's memory holes are not privacy, they are an instrument of oppression and mind control. I don't see why somebody would be allowed to control my mind and make me forget things about them that they no longer consider beneficial to them. So I know which side I would choose - the opposite of where 1984 is and where EU is heading now.
There's no threat at all to either freedom of speech or the press.
If the guardian publishes something, it will have its day in the sun.
It just will eventually get removed, years afterwards. No press freedoms impinged, years after you've had your expressive speech.
Whatever freedom that is, freedom of historical reports?, it's nothing to do with speech or press. If you want to re-report the information, you could, but it then would likely no longer be for the public good or interest, it would merely be vindictive.
Unless, of course, you don't believe in redemption or rehabilitation.
"It just will eventually get removed, years afterwards"
I'm fairly sympathetic to the "right to be forgotten", but this Guardian article does raise some troubling questions about exactly how it is going to work. Two of the things it mentions being hidden from Google results are from 2011 and 2010. Is that "years afterwards"? Is three years so long ago that the information is genuinely irrelevant?
It is most definitely censorship, even if delayed. For example, book burning is pretty hard to defend, and the books burned were likely written many months and years before they were burned.
Freedom of press is about creating a public record. When you remove that record from the public, when you censor the past of public discourse, you've infringed on free speech. Real discourse is full of [citation needed], and if you can preemptively remove those citations, there will be cheating.
And yet those [citation needed]s haven't disappeared. I can and do still find them using duck duck go and Bing. Information will be free. There's an agenda at play here because I can't imagine how the people behind this law couldn't have foreseen this. I wonder whether Google is being set up because of its market-dominating position. If not, why weren't the other search engines similarly constrained?
> If not, why weren't the other search engines similarly constrained?
They are if they operate in the EU.
But there's no universal place to submit takedown requests. People would also have to send them to Bing (according to this article DDG doesn't operate at all in the EU so is not subject to the ruling).
It won't take long before a UK search for Dougie McDonald shows the article talking about how the articles about Dougie McDonald have been removed from Google, and what those articles are about.
Google tells the media which articles are being expunged, the media writes about the articles Google expunged and then Google indexes these pages in their search results. Interesting process.
That process is happening right now, and it is interesting. But will it continue, aka is it a viable long term workaround? Articles being removed is new and in a sense exciting for the press, Google, and the public- that probably won't be so in a few months or years.
Maybe every media company should have a summary page for each of their articles that have been removed from Google. And Google should prioritize those summary pages in its searches.
Presumably, Dougie McDonald will in turn request those pages be disassociated from his name in Google's search index. Interesting to note that plenty of other non-Guardian results relating to his duplicitous behaviour currently appear when searching for his name [1] [2] [3]; will those too disappear in the near future? I have a feeling a lot of articles about Dougie McDonald are about to spring up; this is the first I've heard of the case. Has Dougie McDonald not heard of the Streisand effect? [4]
I don't know it there is a good solution to this problem. I personally had an issue about 8 years ago, when at the time I started looking for a new job. I couldn't understand why recruiters weren't contacting me after I had applied to many jobs, most of which I was sure I was a good candidate, good enough to at least warrant a phone call or email in response. Eventually I rang one asking for feedback, and he told me off the record that he had googled me and my name had appeared on news group posting that associated me with hard drug use. I had posted something on a newsgroup in 1996 about a band I had seen in concert, and the thread descended into a discussion about the band's drug use. When googling my name, the search results certainly looked bad. You had to read the whole thread to realize the context.
Anyway, at the time google had an automated (or semi-automated) service where you could ask them to hide news group postings. You had to declare you were the author and give a reason and so forth. I went through the process, and actually lied because the post that caused me problems wasn't posted by me but it was just a stupid one liner by some idiot which just had my username buried in the header somewhere, asked for it to be deleted because it was causing me problems getting a job, and thankfully they did it.
It pretty much saved my career, at least for now because I do live in fear somehow it will resurface.
The BBC also received notifications from Google today that some of their articles had been hidden from EU search results - http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28130581
Bravo to the Guardian for instigating the Streisand effect in this instance.
By way of example, I knew nothing of the Dougie McDonald scandal until this article, which not only brought the scandal to my attention, but also suggests someone (presumably McDonald himself) doesn't want people to find out about the scandal.
The question is, how long will this effect last? These are the first cases, where the right to be forgotten is used against news sites and the outrage is of course big. But what about in a few months, a year? I doubt that every case will end up on the front of hn and similar.
I once thought that I could tell my children that I was born in a world without the internet. But if governments and corporations keep on this path, my children won't have one either.
It'd be interesting if the Guardian simply changed the URL to the articles slightly when they go the notice from Google. It'd turn the whole thing into a cat-and-mouse game.
To focus on something else: I'm incredulous that people believe we have the "right" to be forgotten. Maybe it's just that I've grown up being told everything I do will be recorded forever and never forgotten, and my behavior has changed as a result? But I truly don't feel as if we have any kind of right to be forgotten.
I actually disagree. We live in a world where so much of what we do is recorded permanently, and that's a very new thing. I absolutely support the idea that we have a right to be forgotten.
It's shocking that this is being applied to articles from 2010. It shows how quickly a small crack in free speech is expanded way beyond its intent. I am sure no reasonable person would argue that the intent of the EU ruling was that something that happened 4 years ago is no longer "relevant". The reasonable intent was for things that are decades old, perhaps from a time and context either at the individual level or the societal level that are likely to cause a read to seriously misinterpret or misunderstand the material.
I don't think Google should escape criticism here. Yes they have to follow the law, but they should be aggressively pressing to the minimum boundary of what they have been asked to do. They should be declining cases like this and wearing the law suits that result until the real line and intent is hammered out. It sounds like they are taking a DMCA-like approach and taking things down by default, and that is very very worrying.
The interesting part of this, for me, is that the Guardian believes that a) Google has the power to put the genie back in the bottle (dubious, but reflective of Google's massive control of Internet navigation) and b) the Guardian would have the power to put the genie back in the bottle (absurd).
The Guardian believes it has the capacity to make the editorial decision to unpublish an article (true) and by consequence make "the Internet" forget about facts in the article (false).
I think this is a great idea but would go a step further and include every major region/country rather than just the EU and US.
A group of international servers cross referencing indexed webpages for possible censorship would be a powerful tool. It could rank each region on their applied censorship laws in regards to the internet while providing a means of presenting the information that is censored. For it to be successful though, it would have to work 'out of the box' internationally.
The fact that this law is going to be applied blindly as a technical solution to a human problem is the issue.
There is one missing piece here : a judge.
Add a judge , and this whole problem goes away.
Whats especially troubling is that this is spilling over to other countries now. I always felt that despite having relatively lax laws in regards to the internet, russia is starting to turn into a seriously unfriendly place for the internet. Being a expat in moscow makes it especially awkward as I have tasted the koolaid on the 'free' side.
I wonder what the effect would be if everyone submitted removal requests for all articles on prominent politicians (let's take the UK Prime Minister David Cameron as an example).
Methinks the law would be quickly changed. Especially with an election coming up next year.
Of course I am in no way encouraging anyone to do this, or condoning such behaviour.
This is, among other things, a terribly confusing situation. Who's to blame? The person who asks to have results expunged? The law that requires Google to comply? Google for complying? Or no one—is the right thing being done, the "pen" of the Internet being dulled back into a pencil?
No! How can you blame a company for doing something they are legally compelled to do?
> Or no one—is the right thing being done, the "pen" of the Internet being dulled back into a pencil?
The Internet has always been written in pencil. Pages stop being served all the time. The only difference is that now the index of the Internet is written in pencil, and every EU citizen has been given an eraser.
I am from Czech Republic (part of EU) and I cannot replicate the described effect.
Plus, most results about those individuals are now the articles about the censorship itself. Which is funny. Will the mentioned folks block those articles too?
Google's hiding Guardian articles? That's outrageous! The Guardian should stop paying Google to index their website and display their articles in search results!
> Guardian articles have been hidden by Google
> Editorial decisions belong with them, not Google
> But such editorial calls surely belong with publishers, not Google.
Google has done absolutely nothing wrong here. It is making zero editorial calls. It's removing links that were flagged for removal by someone outside of the company, and it is compelled to do so by EU law.
In fact, if you ignore the finger-pointing at Google, you'll see that Google actually tries really really hard to get around this: It informs you when results were blocked, notifies when results are blocked, blocks only the narrowest possible search terms, and helpfully points you to google.com which doesn't filter.
> Publishers can and should do more to fight back. One route may be legal action.
No, legal action is the only route. This is a matter of law.