Perhaps the list would be more representative if it included at least a few victims of sexual exploitation, or teenagers who previously had trouble getting naked images of themselves removed from servers hosted outside the EU. Ideally it would also include a link to every child porn web site on the IWF's blacklist, as used by at least the UK.
The problem with simply listing known cases where the "censorship" mechanism has some inefficiencies is that it hides the many cases where it can have a very real benefit to peoples' lives. The current implementation of the EU ruling leaves a lot to be desired, but let's not challenge its intent - restoring an element of privacy and security that search engines have been strip mining for their own benefit for over a decade.
Not entirely clear why you're conflating the IWF list with the EU Right to be Forgotten. They're different systems run in different ways by different groups.
> This list is a way of archiving the actions of censorship on the Internet. It is up to the reader to decide whether our liberties are being upheld or violated by the recent rulings by the EU.
It cannot present a balanced view of "censorship" to the reader without exhaustively examining examples of the kinds of "censorship" that it's complaining about that are already in use - be it the EU ruling, the IWF watchlist, or the search engines' long documented, voluntary self-censorship of child pornography.
So far, the only examples presented are those where the system is shown to be "inefficient" – if it really wants to be honest and balanced, it needs to find and include all the cases where the "censorship" is functioning as intended.
You are quoting extremely selectively, the sentence right before the one you are quoting says
> The purpose of this site is to list all links which are being censored by search engines due to the recent ruling of "Right to be forgotten" in the EU.
It's not a list of "everything that has ever been censored" (which would be a very long list).
Frankly, I don't think your comment makes very much sense. The purpose of the website is to discuss whether the _right to be forgotten_ ruling, on balance, does more good or bad. If we were discussing marijuana legalization and someone submitted a list of people imprisoned for marijuana possession, would you complain that "this list should include serial killers, they are in prison too"?
The quote covers more than half the text on the page, which is hardly extremely selective, and at risk of going blue in the face, crucially includes the phrases "a way of archiving the actions of censorship on the Internet" and "decide whether our liberties are being upheld or violated" -- the former cannot be achieved without examining all successful forms of censorship, and the latter cannot be achieved without comprehensively listing instances where those forms of censorship are effective, in addition to the instances where they are not.
The site narrowly focuses on a subset of the disadvantages of censorship, and consequently its premise is defective. This isn't very difficult to understand, and therefore I find it absurd how anyone could conclude that it is addressing any issue on balance, as you have done here.
The site lists all known applications of the right to be forgotten ruling, without any further comment. The list maintainer does not exercise any editorial judgement at all, so I don't think there is a narrow focus on disadvantages.
If I understand you correctly, your argument is "this site claims to be about internet censorship, but it only talks about the right to be forgotten ruling. But the right to be forgotten is unusually bad, and there are other forms of more beneficial censorship. So listing just the right to be forgotten cases gives censorship in general an undeservedly bad name".
However, the page is specifically about the right to be forgotten. Even the portion you quoted specifically calls out "the recent rulings by the EU". You are acting as if the page was calling for the abolition of all forms of censorship, but I think the text actually makes quite clear that it isn't.
http://iwfchecker.lightning-bolt.net/ has a crowd sourced list of stuff that is being filtered by cleanfeed. Some of it from IWF list and some from court orders (e.g. Pirate Bay)
Cleanfeed has two filters. Thr first is IP/domain based and if the site is on the list then all the traffic will go through a proxy or deep packet inspection to check each URL accessed against the blocklist. Detecting/Sourcing the second level is much harder.
Let's definitely challenge its intent. We're talking about public figures in some cases, here. I'd say the right of the public to know and freedom of speech (the concept, not the law) trumps "privacy" (aka a weak attempt to suppress publicly known facts via legislative diktat) on the open internet.
Look at what's being taken down here...
I hope:
* That this site gets mirrored en masse,
* That the EU regulators get a taste of the Streisand effect and how that applies to censorship
* That anyone who filed a censorship request (that's all this is, just dressed up in more flowery language) learns how the internet works.
This is literally the exact same argument as "security trumps privacy".
NSA et al. argue that they need to know about everyone's dirty laundry in order to protect civil society from terrorists (or whatever).
You argue that the public needs at-your-fingertips access to everyone's dirty laundry in order to protect civil society from (idk? dictatorship that will inevitably ensue if sleazy reporters don't get their ad revenue?)
How about this alternative: whenever something actually important is de-listed, concerned citizens can mirror en masse. But when some trivial bit of gossipy sleaze reporting that no on cares about is de-listed, we let it die its rightful death.
I see no reason to Streisand-effect private citizens trying to rebuild their life after some reporter decided to make a quick buck profiting off of a single stupid mistake. The fact that you're so gung-ho about contributing to these people's continued misfortune in the name of your political agenda is deeply troubling.
I disagree very strongly with your purported equivalence between Karunamon's argument and that of the NSA.
My primary problem with the NSA is that they (a) use their position of power to install backdoors in hardware/software/infrastructure, (b) do it in secret, (c) claim to be in some way "above the law" w.r.t. secret courts, (d) use public taxpayer money, and (e) motivate their behaviour using bogus anti-terror claims. None of these infractions exist in the "right to be forgotten" scenario.
Fundamentally, in the story of the NSA, it is the NSA that is in a position of power that can and will be abused. In this case, it is the power to scrub the entire internet of information by imposing centralized censorship which, in my mind, is simply too much power to put in one place.
The equivalence is in the rhetorical justification, not the methodology. In both cases, an appeal to security is used to trivialize the importance of privacy.
For the NSA, terrorism > privacy every time. For Karunamon, "censorship" > privacy every time. In both cases, the mechanism is an appeal to security in order to avoid a more nuanced discussion of the issue.
> to scrub the entire internet of information
And this is where the rubber hits the road. "Any possible risk of <bad thing here> means privacy doesn't matter". That's the sort of crap reasoning used by the NSA.
The fact is that the risk of what you're describing is incredibly low, and the good of the law outweighs even a high-magnitude abuse because effectively abusing this law in that manner is highly unlikely to succeed.
This is what I mean. After rejecting the "stop <bad thing here> at all costs!" logic, we can do an actual cost-benefit analysis and take into account the extremely low probability of <bad thing here> actually happening.
The information is still there, but private citizens don't need to pay hundreds/thousands to SEO firms in order to get embarrassing gossip sites off the first page of Google results.
Let's be clear: the dichotomy in this case is between lazy reporter's and SEO firm's right to profit, and an individual citizen's right to privacy. Since I view lazy reporters and SEO as parasites anyways, the choice is clear for me.
Reframing this issue as a "security from dictatorial abuse of power" is playing the same game as the NSA. And worse, it's disingenuous. If the mechanism is abused, Streisand effect always solves back. But there's no reason to go around harming private citizens just because "censorship!"
Not at all! I and other comment authors on this thread have mentioned that because of the nature of both the law and the internet, abuse is highly unlikely.
This means that the 100% certain probability that people are currently marginally hurt by search-engine-magnified sleazy journalism far outweighs the almost-negligible probability of high-magnitude abuse of the law.
Other threads on this story have also dealt with other mitigating factors which decrease the probability of abuse, such as the fact that public figures are excluded.
I'm not trivializing censorship; I'm entering a cost-benefit analysis where the importance of an impact is a function of both its probability and the magnitude of the impact, instead of attributing certainty to every outcome and reasoning on impact alone.
Incidentally even the US Supreme Court -- a country where free speech and anti-censorship are (constitutionally) paramount -- does this sort of analysis. Libel, inciting violence, and a slew of other exceptions to free speech have been upheld by that court.
What I'm doing is considering the overall welfare of society, instead of picking and choosing individual issues that always much come first no matter what. In this case, there's a clear and present good done by the law and the chances of bad things happening are minimized by safeguards.
edit: my comments are sometimes living documents. Mostly tweaking of the last 2 paragraphs.
> In this case, it is the power to scrub the entire internet of information by imposing centralized censorship
That is a bafflingly bad reading of what has actually happened.
Nothing has been scrubbed from the Internet. Some articles are harder to find if you include a person's name - but you can still find those articles with that search term if you use google.com with ncr.
"You argue that the public needs at-your-fingertips access to everyone's dirty laundry in order to protect civil society from (idk? dictatorship that will inevitably ensue if sleazy reporters don't get their ad revenue?)"
Actually he argued much more narrowly that the public needs access to the dirty laundry of public figures. And I'm inclined to agree. This narrow argument is very different from the broad argument you're casting it as - I didn't see anywhere that OP said "everyone's dirty laundry".
That's not how I understood the granparent's comment (operative word is some).
In any case, the EU policy specifically excludes public figures. So to the extent that you're correct, s/he's reacting to an fictional interpretation of the law.
Which would be somewhat ironic, given that the premise of grandparent's argument is that an informed citizenry is crucial to the security of civil society.
The baffling thing about this argument is that the EU apparently doesn't think that this information is so terrible that it can't be published--just that we have to suppress links to it. And since the ruling only concerns older material, it's built into its logic that these articles are things which the public once deserved to know but now must forget. So your talk of sleazy reporters has no place here.
> We're talking about public figures in some cases
The decision explicitly lists that as a legitimate exemption: search engines may reject removal requests for information concerning someone who has a "public role". If Google took down information pertaining to a public figure, it is probably their error. Now you can argue that this decision will in practice lead to many such errors, but that's a slightly different attack on the decision (arguing that it's impractical to implement accurately vs. arguing that it's in principle wrong, even when implemented accurately, are at least conceptually different criticisms).
If Google is the one making the call about whether or not someone is a public figure, where exactly do you expect them to draw the line? Do you honestly expect them to draw a line in the public interest?
Personally, I'd expect them to do everything they can to minimize the cost of compliance (where that cost primarily includes the cost of processing requests and the risk of being hauled into court again). In principle, they also care about search quality, but, as long as they deal with the most blatant cases, I think the impact on perceived (not actual) search quality will be small and the impact on relative search quality might even be positive (in other words that the best-case scenario for Bing is matching the precision of Google's blocks and they might do worse).
In practice, I think that means wild overblocking of results that should be public because the cost of refusing a request is larger and more immediate. And so far as I can tell that's what we're seeing so far.
The fundamental problem without a "right to be forgotten" is that missteps and deliberate mischief are not covered equally by journalists. the news making process is not a perfectly efficient system (ie. not all cases get covered equally) - some cases simply get covered because they are funny, just filled a remaining gap in the newspaper, were especially bizarre, were very embarrassing, etc. other missteps (of similar gravity) do not get covered. this law allows such people to counter their misfortune, while the cases which are actually important to the public still remain to be seen for everybody. If you look at hiddenfromgoogle.com, it links to quite a few of such cases. They are to a large extent mundane and exaggerated stories (which are typical for dailymail and the guardian). They carry no/very little importance for the general public - however can be very incriminating for the individual itself.
When I'm searching for a academic's name I am more likely to be interested in that person's work than some theft they committed years ago.
I guess this shows the flaws in Google's algorithm and the destructiveness of shitty SEO. Irrelevant information is pushed to the top of Google's first page and useful information is dropped. (People who need to know someone's criminal record status can use existing mechanisms to get that, so long as they're complying with the various laws about rehabilitation of offenders. Google should not be your method of getting reliable conviction or arrest information about a person.)
Why would the site need to be mirrored? If it's run by an American, hosted in the US, and doesn't do business in the EU then (not a lawyer) it's US law not EU law that applies. And (again, not a lawyer) under US law posting facts like this is completely legal.
I think the site can still be useful without being balanced. Highlighting collateral damage/silly consequences of a law is a useful service as the public (in my experience) tends to have a low tolerance for too much collateral damage regardless of the intent or positive outcomes of a law.
In this case the EU's ruling "leaves a lot to be desired" is nice way of saying it's unworkable given the complexities of the real world. I don't know what the proper solution would be but I do appreciate someone highlighting silly or potentially harmful consequences of an existing law.
Did you read the articles on the site (tone o fcuriosity, not indignation)?
* The Daniels-Dwyer article serves no obvious public good.
* The post-it thing is a huge wtf. No idea why anyone would even care.
* The train thing is embarrassing; again, reporting on this amounts to gossip mongering for cash and serves no public good.
* The Osborne thing seems like a politically-motivated intrusion into the private life of a politician's brother. Again, trash reporting.
So unless you disagree that these all amount to unhelpful gossip mongering (well, except to the wallet of a lazy reporter/news agency), a little less than half of the unbalanced results demonstrate no harm to the public good.
edit: tone clarification. Also, I agree with your last paragraph.
The first link currently on the site is about the BBC Merril Lynch article. While the site says the censored name is unknown it links to an article that {edit} starts off {/edit} clearly says that O'Neal is being protected. Yet the article is searchable using O'Neal as a search term. The actual censored name is one of the people who left a comment. The only way you don't find the article using Google is if you include that person's name in your search terms.
You're way off track, and I guess it's because you're not European and thus not privy on the laws dictated by the European Parliament. The right to be forgotten is one of those rights that put the power of having factually incorrect information changed or retracted in the hands of citizens. A news site reporting about a teenage girl having her naked pictures all over the Internet isn't covered by the right as long as the information reported is true and verifiable. The same holds for your other examples.
Do you have a source? My impression from news stories is that the right to be forgotten applies to events no longer pertinent. "Factually incorrect" doesn't seem to be part of the standard.
Actually, "factually incorrect" tends to already be covered by libel laws. You can sue a newspaper that maligns you with false facts.
Whereas, the right to be forgotten would seem to cover things such as nude photos, which in most cases are no longer pertinent.
"(53) Any person should have the right to have personal data concerning them rectified and a 'right to be forgotten ' where the retention of such data is not in compliance with this Regulation. In particular, data subjects should have the right that their personal data are erased and no longer processed, where the data are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which the data are collected or otherwise processed, where data subjects have withdrawn their consent for processing or where they object to the processing of personal data concerning them or where the processing of their personal data otherwise does not comply with this Regulation. This right is particularly relevant, when the data subject has given their consent as a child, when not being fully aware of the risks involved by the processing, and later wants to remove such personal data especially on the Internet. However, the further retention of the data should be allowed where it is necessary for historical, statistical and scientific research purposes, for reasons of public interest in the area of public health, for exercising the right of freedom of expression, when required by law or where there is a reason to restrict the processing of the data instead of erasing them."
It's really nothing more than an update of a directive that has been in effect for almost 20 years, it's just that media like to spin every news to find something to talk about.
I agree that most reporting on this are completely ignoring the upside. My mother was wrongfully accused of a crime nearly ten years ago. It took eight years of fighting the charges (going bankrupt in the process) before they were finally dropped.
However, you can still find the charges as soon as you type her name into Google, and that's all it takes. She was a lawyer; now she can't get anything but the most menial work. I wish she could exercise her "right to be forgotten".
The target is wrong. Your mother (and the other people in the EU) should be targeting the newspapers and other places that actually have the information.
Not the search engine.
A newspaper would probably refuse to remove the story altogether, but they might be willing to add a note saying the charges were dropped.
There's a difference between removing false or misleading information (like in your case) and trying to hide your true history (like most of the EU cases I'm hearing about).
I don't disagree with you in principle but, in reality, it wouldn't matter. You can already find that the entire case was dismissed, but the newspapers won't print anything about that, and I doubt it would make much difference if they did. Many people associate charges with guilt, and I can't say I wouldn't be biased against an applicant who was charged with a felony.
I don't know what the right answer is. For me this is admittedly an emotional subject.
Unfortunately, if I'm trying to get an idea of the trustworthiness of a person, I'm probably just going to skim the search results and reject them as soon as I see something related to a crime. It's an imperfect filter, but dismissing someone who has done nothing wrong is less costly than trusting someone you shouldn't.
Even many of the sites currently on the list seem like "not a big deal". E.g. petty theft by private citizens, gossip, etc.
The only reason some of the currently listed sites even exist is that some reporter figured they could make a few bucks of ad revenue and didn't care about other's privacy. Removing them does absolutely no harm to society; I have no problem with starving sleazy reporters out of their jobs.
edit: the law is clearly unworkable, but I'm a huge fan of its intent.
I agree. Since it would also be unethical for them to include cases of abuse or the naked images, the premise of the site is flawed. They want to show us the good and bad sides of the ruling, but can only show the bad side without doing bad themselves.
Censorship is bad no matter what it tries to hide, all the elements in the sentimental list you compiled falls in the category of either illegal or something for which is easy to get a court order to remove.
The HN population is usually very skeptical about matters related to censorship. What I see here is a 50-50 proportion of agreement. It's startingly enormous for a law about the internet.
These sites are hiding in the deep web on purpose. Google doesn't index sites that don't want to be indexed. It respects a site's robots.txt, for example.
This reminds me that sometimes search results will have "results were removed from this page due to DMCA complaint, click here to view it" and then you can go through and see the whole list of URLs that were removed... and they're often the torrent/warez sites with the real pirated content, so it's almost like they added a "pirate mode" filter. (I don't pirate anything these days, so I don't need it, but still a little amusing that Google is basically taking the "removed from search results" rather literally.)
Actually the DMCA complaint list is quite useful and I used it many times. However since duckduckgo is quite good and does not give a damn about these DMCA complaint lists I don't need to use google's DMCA lists anymore.
I imagine this won't be a popular opinion, but I don't see why it is necessary for this site to populate the list using javascript when server-side scripting would suffice.
Maybe they're trying to fool search bots so their site won't get delisted? I'm fairly sure Google at least has a bot built on Chrome (or rather Chrome was built around their search bot) that executes JS just fine.
Unfortunately, all it does is make a site that doesn't degrade well with scripting turned off.
The Stan O'Neil one is incorrect. Google spokes persons was on BBC Radio the other day and stated that it was one of the commenters on the article that requested the removal.
I cannot find it on Microsoft.com or bing.com, but apparently, their position is: "We’re currently working on a special process for residents of the European Union to request blocks of specific privacy-related search results on Bing in response to searches on their names. Given the many questions that have been raised about how the recent ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union should be implemented, developing an appropriate system is taking us some time. We’ll be providing additional information about making requests soon."
This is going to unleash hell when it gets big enough to be near the top google search results. Not only will anybody googling somebody know what they did, they'll know the person wanted it removed.
I wonder how long it will take for google to de-list the site.
Not simply for commenting on the de-listing, but if the page is republishing information that's considered a violation of privacy in the EU, it's still a violation of privacy. This would be clearest in the case of e.g. compromising pictures of high-school kids or other such non-public figures. If you started a site reposting those pictures after Google delists the original sites that published them, obviously your site would also be subject to delisting.
The "right to be forgotten" is the "right" to suppress true speech by others, and is in fundamental opposition to the right of free speech. Its a close cousin of the forms of libel laws where truth is not a defense that suppress true and accurate criticism, and the recognition that you can't have that kind of thing and free speech at the same time isn't a 21st century observation.
Its also, from a pragmatic standpoint, about equivalent to attempting to command the tides by law.
There's a distinctly 21st century flavor to being able to store all the banal life mistakes indefinitely, to dig them up later if we ever need dirt on a particular person.
Before it was varying levels of unprovable (ie, not photographs or verifiable sources) and bandwidth limited (people could only store so much information; sources weren't interlinked for quick queries).
So it's actually quite likely that when we drafted our laws, this was an implicit right by the nature of technology, and considered a natural part of the bounds of specifically enumerated rights.
We should make sure, as technology removes traditional limits on what we can do, that we adequately adjust our laws to reflect that change.
Except not really. Google, despite what many might like to think, is not an "official" entity, it's a private company. They aren't disseminating information for the public good, whatever that is, but so they can slap an ad on it and make some profits. So what if Jo(e) Bloggs did something embarrassing a decade ago? If one of your friends was constantly bringing up things from years ago, you'd get tired of them doing so pretty quickly. Why should Google get to do it to make some money off of it? And what sort of gossip monger even wants this to be possible?
So the New York Times isn't a private company then? Just repeating "private company" is meaningless as a justification for well...just about anything. You'll have to find a different point to argue.
The NYT did the work and wrote the story and the editor decided it was worth publishing. The don't just dredge it up, slap an ad on it, and call that adding value. And if a newspaper gets something wrong, it does retract it.
I have to say, I often find myself at odds with taking a rights-based approach to this sort of thing first. It may not be possible to be forgotten on today's internet, and whether that's a good or a bad thing, it obviates the need to discuss whether you have a right to such a thing.
(That said, having links posted on a website about forgotten links is probably way lower impact than having them show up on the first page of a google search for your name. I imagine that most people would be satisfied with this level of obfuscation of their past.)
Most of the things I see in the comments from the supporters of the law are selfish arguments, what if Joe couldn't delete his ugly story from the past, everyone wants this tool, maybe they want to remove something in the future about themselves, it might come in handy, they want it so badly that they are willing to sacrifice freedom of speech, maybe Joe should be more careful instead of trying to bury what he did to get away because Joe might become someone important and we should know things that otherwise will get buried.
This page is almost 1MB downloaded, including 5 fonts, bootstrap, angular, and jquery. It does not need to be this complicated. My facebook homepage, including images, is smaller than this site.
Let's face it, this is simply an attempt to make it harder for Google to operate in the EU. It's probably mainly normal bureaucratic nonsense, encouraged along by some nationalism and probably a bit from european corporations hoping to gain some market share away.
The problem with simply listing known cases where the "censorship" mechanism has some inefficiencies is that it hides the many cases where it can have a very real benefit to peoples' lives. The current implementation of the EU ruling leaves a lot to be desired, but let's not challenge its intent - restoring an element of privacy and security that search engines have been strip mining for their own benefit for over a decade.