In an unexpected move Europe’s highest court has ruled that Google has to remove privacy related information if a duped individual asks for it.
In this specific case a Spanish citizen whose house was sold because of debts. The auction list was published in a newspaper and got archived by Google so his name was forever linked to these debts. Google will now have to remove that link between his name and the auction list.
Unexpected and unprecedented as the new European data directive establishing that ‘right to be forgotten’ is not even ratified in Europe. The European Court of Justice based its decision on older data protection laws and by doing so lays an extremely strong fundament for the right of private citizens to protect their good name.
Unexpected also because Google always rejected any responsibility for their data collection. They always argued that they were merely ‘collecting’ and not ‘processing’ personal data so they had no legal obligations under existing laws.
No, says the court. Google does much more: they record, organize, store and publish this information. Doesn’t matter if it has been published before (like in this case in a newspaper), Google makes it available and has similar responsibilities as others to comply with data protection laws.
Furthermore the court looked at Google’s argument that they don’t do anything with the data within Europe. It’s Google Inc, the American company who is responsible. A repeating argument in many cases by Google: nothing to do with European laws, we are American.
Nope says the Court, the core of your business is selling ads. You have local daughter companies like Google Spain to contribute to your profits and you collect that information to make better deals within Spain (in this case). So get real and accept that your data-processing is part of the local business and comply with the European laws.
There is more to this case, but holding Google (and other search engines!) responsible for their data collection, the publishing and their local responsibilities is a turning point. Thanks to this decision the right to be forgotten has been firmly established and private citizens don’t have to suffer eternally from an unfortunate moment in their lives or a silly decision in their youth.
P.S. Yes, good that you ask. What about the freedom of information? Don't we, the searchers, the public, have the right to know everything even if the private individual doesn't like it?
Sure says the court, but let's find a balance. A private person rights to protect his data should normally outweigh the interests of the public unless these data are important for a public issue.
http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014-05/cp140070en.pdf
http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=152065&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=19158 #Europe #Politics #Tech
Excellent news!
Not so much as this specific case is hitting Google, but because it suggests that at least some European courts are ready to stand up for the rights of Europeans to privacy, regardless of the opponent.
I think this will undermine the utility of the Internet as a living history of civilization. Being able to selectively erase stuff someone is embarrassed about doesn't seem helpful to society in general.
My concern in this case is that it hit the wrong target.
If we truly have a right to be forgotten, then the source material (the newspaper) should have the data destroyed. Google (and other aggregators) should have to respect that.
But what the court has left us is an awkward balance. We don't really have a right to be forgotten. We just have a right to bury it under the rug.
Fascinating. Nice catch, +Max Huijgen.
What if convicts start demanding all references to their cases to be removed.
+Allen Firstenberg the court wasn't asked to judge on the original newspaper story, nor on removal of the archive.
In lower courts it was already established that the newspaper was correct in publishing at that time.
It could well be that in the future newspapers can legally be asked to withdraw old information. A non legal request is often considered nowadays.
+Craig Froehle that's covered in my PS, but wouldn't you agree that the general interest of the public should be weighted against the often huge effects on private citizens?
We used to have the right to be forgotten before the internet. We just moved to another city.
+Allen Firstenberg The following could in a future case be used against a newspaper on line archive
The Court observes in this regard that even initially lawful processing of accurate data may, in the course of time, become incompatible with the directive where, having regard to all the circumstances of the case, the data appear to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed.
+Able Lawrence in lots of European countries full names of convicts are not published.
Where they are (f.i. in the UK) news papers do indeed remove information linking people to a convict UNLESS the larger interest etc…
What I find interesting here is that the Court ignored the advice of its own lawyer when making this ruling (which cannot be appealed). This is an area which, IMO, has to be settled by legislation so that our representatives can debate and balance properly the need to forget with the right to remember. The information in question in this case was factual and legally published at the time. Is it harmful today? Perhaps. And this issue comes up more and more as records and information which used to be private due to obscurity are digitized and made searchable. At the same time, do we want this to turn into a disguised form of censorship? A process that could allow convicts to delete references to their crimes, or politicians to airbrush their records?
+Alex Grossman the court says (and correctly in my view) that this has already been decided by legislators.
Don't forget that the new european privacy directive which will be the rule in one or two years time will be even more clear on this right to be forgotten.
+Max Huijgen And moving to another city is often how the more undesirable elements of society (e.g., pedophiles, rapists, etc.) got a fresh chance to find new victims.
I assume you've read 1984, so I'll assume you're familiar with the Ministry of Truth's rampant use of historical revisionism.
Potential logical fallacies aside, I don't want historical facts to go away. Opinions, on the other hand, I think there could be a convincing argument that there are cases where one should have some power (e.g., cyberbullying is just a pox on humanity). But, something like the fact that Joe's house was foreclosed on could be really important to, say, a creditor considering loaning Joe money. Has Joe learned to manage his money better? Maybe, but historical events should be used to inform that lender's risk equation. The fact that humans forget shouldn't be looked on as a model that all of reality needs to emulate. We have the potential to record and store information for eternity…let's use it.
+Able Lawrence, at least in Germany, and, as far as I know in other european countries too, records of convicts get deleted after a specified time. What means, if no other convictions add up, after a specified time, all records get deleted and someone could become innocent as a newborn again. The time depends on the punitive sentence and ranges from 3 to 20 years. There are only a very few cases, e.g. life time sentence, where the records will stay forever.
+Max Huijgen This is too important, and far reaching, an issue to be left to the Commission to decide through the privacy directive. It needs to be true legislation from the broadest representative of society at large, a legislature such as the European Parliament.
I don't have any hope of a law like this coming to america. At least not any time soon.
Unlike God, Google actually exists, though. Generally they do good, too… generally. Recording data is sketchy, though, no matter who you are.
I was reading elsewhere about this, earlier. The thought that occurred to me is that if people are enabled to expunge embarrassing events in their past, what effects will that have on the veracity of digital background checks for loans, employment, vetting for political or leadership roles in society, or a concerned parent wanting to check into the past of a boyfriend or girlfriend their child is becoming very serious about?
Placing the burden on aggregators like Google to implement a social policy like expunging records strikes me as seriously flawed. Requests will naturally increase the digital divide when saavy individuals burnish their reputations by knowing how to manage successful requests and scruffy businesses take down critical references. Food poisoning from that tasty paella? That was so last week.
Of course, now that corporations are people, can we expect those pesky corporate scandals to be eliminated from the public memory, too?
"I don't buy GM cars…they handled that ignition switch debacle badly."
"Really? I don't remember what that was about."
[Googles]
"Hmph…nothing at all…I bet you're making it up."
Legislation sets ground rules. Court practice may further specify and/or clarify the scope. This case is exactly that: court practice.
Banks and gov't bodies have (for all the understandable reasons) straightforward access to an individual's debt/credit rating and history. In order to gain a limited-level access to such info individuals (natural or legal) have to apply with gov't registrars specifying the reason for their request, the eligibility of which is then appraised per regulations.
When it comes to personally compromising information which are of no public interest (other than gossip), no one should be allowed to uncontrollably dispose of any such information for any given individual at any given time – no matter how it found its way out in the open. Otherwise, any operator in charge of any database may be able to release – at their own discretion – all sorts of B.S. in public. Tabloids are sufficiently liberal as it is already.
Shooting big & aiming high at the likes of Google et al. are the right way to deal with this. Small steps are just heads-up.
There seem to be 2 things that people are conflating. Search results and user data.
It seems to me that for search results, your issue would be with the owner of the original site/publication, not the search engine. For user data, everyone is free to stop using Google products, but I would prefer to work with companies that would allow me to revoke my consent to using my data at some point if I change my mind.
+David McMeekin It seems that you're conflating "your information" with "information about you."
I am struggling to connect this to Google in all honestly. First this affects all search engines and not just Google and second as they have rightly said, the data is not theirs or kept by them. All they have done is provide a way to find it. Even if they remove the result from search the article is still on the Internet. It is the source which need to be removed and not the link too it which would die anyway after time.
This is nothing more than asking search providers to censor the Internet. Where does this censorship end and begin and who decides?
This seems tangentially related here:
mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours
+Craig Froehle How am I doing that?
+David McMeekin Never mind…I misread your comment. Sorry…carry on. 🙂
Ok, I've been reading more about this issue, and while I don't feel like I have a good sense of all the issues in this case, specifically, some things confuse me. I hope you can help me understand some of it, +Max Huijgen.
For starters, it sounds like Europe (or many countries in Europe) have some form of this "right to forget" already in place. So you can petition the court to have old records of you removed already. (I'm fuzzy on the criteria here, but do I sound correct here?)
In this case, it sounds like the Petitioner went through this process in a Spanish court to get the information removed from the newspaper's archives. That was denied. He then requested that Google remove the information, and that was approved by the court in Luxembourg.
I've heard at least one person explain this dichotomy by saying that under the data protection laws in Europe, a person has a right to control how their information is distributed. That makes some sense. But it seems odd to be able to say that a public record (a newspaper article) can be restricted in its distribution.
Am I following things? Or did I miss something?
You have the right to ask the deleting of a link or page or your data removed from databases of any ad bombing company. Plus to know what data they colected on you, dont confuse this with your jail sentence and such, that has nothing to do with anyone else but you and the state (in france). Those things are not accessible yo anyone, only thing they can ask as eg: employer is your record to verify if you had jailtime +Mark McKinlay.
a.) I have a European Background
Personally I am pleased with this decision, Google needs to comply with Laws of the Country in which they operate.
A case that i have been involved with ( although may not fall within this, or it could under .. the irrelevant, incorrect section )
A friend based in the Netherlands had someone post that he was Bankrupt on blogspot. This was on a .nl tld.
A court order was applied for the removal of the blog and granted and Google complied by removing the article on Blogspot.nl. However the article then reverted to the nearest tld in belgium on blogspot.be.
Again a court order was applied for in Belgium for the removal and granted. Google complied but then allowed the same article to revert to the .com tld.
So, there was no way in hell that my friend was going to fly to the states to apply again for the removal …. and it remains in the SERP's
An interesting and unexpected discussion. I expected people to react the new responsibility of search engines and the loss of Google 'immunity' by hiding behind US legislation.
However the debate on the right to be forgotten versus the right of the 'internet' / public to know everything about individuals seems to be full on.
I wonder if this is a culture clash being Europe being protective of citizens privacy versus the US freedom of expression. Often seen as censorship versus freedom of speech.
Clash of cultures? In view of the above comment: would you care to state your point of view in terms of background: US, Europe or other? Please plus the a/b/c comments or describe it in your own comment.
+Noze P. +Tim Capper +Allen Firstenberg +Craig Froehle +Alex Schleber +David McMeekin +Mark McKinlay +Bruce Byrne +Marijan Dzima +Christopher Bajor +Alex Grossman +Jo Dunaway +Trevor Brown +Wolf Weber +Able Lawrence +Susanne Ramharter +Alex Grossman
a) I have a European background
b) I have a US background
c) My background is different
I have a US background and have also lived briefly in Italy and England. I can see a right to be officially forgotten as far as government record is concerned, but trying to force private parties to "forget" seems impractical at best and wrong/censorship at worst.
I am an American, but I don't see it as a free speech issue at all. While I can certainly understand people wanting to be able to bury embarrassing facts, I just don't understand (a) how the public (i.e., the rest of humanity) is best served by letting them, and (b) why these autocrats believe that they can somehow "eliminate" stuff from the Internet.
I have an American background, but also don't see it as a free speech issue at all, either. It's a privacy versus public right to know issue completely from my viewpoint.
I have an American background and for me this issue is about the interplay between free speech and privacy rights.
+Max Huijgen I am a bit unclear about how this would work in real life. It sounds like the court just created a whole new world of bureaucratic nightmare. Would a petitioner have to go to the court each time to get a judgement against a particular url(s) to get that blocked from one particular search engine's results. This cannot be an unregulated process where Google has to censor results just because someone says so. Politicians would love to have that. If this has to be regulated then a court has to make a decision for each individual url and that will cost time and money both for the petitioner and the court system. Would there be different time limits for different types of information?
This also creates kind of a catch-22 situation. All these new reports about this court verdict also mentions that the individual had issues with debt. So now do all of these stories also need to be suppressed from the search results?
What if that content has information about other people? Would they have a say in the matter? Lets say that John was trying to rob Melissa, but Melissa heroically fights back. News articles are written about it. Now John wants folks to forget about his actions, but Melissa would like to have that news out there because it benefits her. To make matters complex lets say John lives in Europe, Melissa is in US. What is stopping Melissa from going to a US court and getting a stay order?
Here is another scenario, if the individual has died, would the heirs have the same right to get the search results censored?
I am not trying to be difficult. I work in IT and news like these always gets me thinking about how the solution could be designed and implemented. And right now I don't see any solution which does not need a lot of manual intervention.
Most excellent points, +Souvik Kar !
Im from europe , however im from a very different era, i lived under russians in the block. Still this is nothing new tho for me. In France , court already ruled vs google underlining their responsibility in links. It was a sex video of a school teacher, and she won making google erase every link existant and future link to the famous video. So this isnt first time. Do not confuse this as i said earlier, with anything like a jail record and such.
I've an European background. Folks there seems to be a lot of confusion. This is not simply about, "Hey, I didn't want to se that link about me" It's merely about the fact, that even a criminal record or court material of someone will be totally erased from all the court and police systems after a specified time, though anyone else still will be able to dig it out forever and ever via Google, or other search engines without any effort.
The whole thing is about human rights and the fact that human clearly has the right that things he or she was involved in at the the age of, lets say, 15, should not longer be of any concern if that person has become 20 years older.
Would you like to see the one and only 50 ct chocolate bar shoplifting you did at the age of 12 still hold against you at the age of 50 and you won't get that job you apply for, because of doing stupid once at 12? Would you like to see all the details of the rape your daughter was a victim of, when she was 17, only a mouse click away as long as she lives?
I've been on the other end of this as sysadmin for a social network and had to deal with requests for allegedly libelous content to be removed that was posted by 3rd parties on our site and then indexed by Google. I don't believe this is Google's problem but rather that of the source and hosting site.
If somebody wants something removed they should inform the site hosting the information. The host should remove it, return a 404 with no index and no follow for that URI and then request a re-index of that page from google and other indexing sites that they allow via robots.txt. That includes archive.org.
The Internet Archive raises the issue of cached copies. This should also be dealt with via the 404-noindex-nofollow. Good caches should always respect the 404 and delete their cached copy.
This approach recognises that a piece of data on a URI may be copied repeatedly all over the web not just by search engines or by some future technology that makes that data visible. There needs to be a protocol for saying "It's gone as if it never existed". And sure enough, there is. It's 404.
There is a problem though that perhaps this EU ruling deals with. It's not normally possible for a 3rd party to tell Google to re-index a URI where they're not the webadmin as recognised for Google's webadmin tools. The source may have disappeared and 404 but google still has a record. It should be possible for the courts or a private individual via the courts to force Google to re-index that URI.
Of course it gets worse when the data at issue is on a Google run social network like G+ or Googlegroups.
And it's been pointed out that in this case you get a sequence over time with some major holes.
– Court case
– paper based Newspaper report of said case
– Digitising and posting of the newspaper article on the web
– Indexing of the internet post by Google.
Try putting some 50 year delays into that process and then see if there's still a natural right to get Google to remove the index!
This isn't about free speech, or the right of people to know. This is about ownership of data. About the right of people to decide themselves what is available about them online. It is a landmark case in my opinion. It tells companies they do not own the data they collect from people, the people do and they have the final say about what happens to it. Finally, we the people, get back what was silently stolen from us by Big Inc™ but what has always been rightfully and intrinsically ours.
The courts also were wise and diligent enough to protect the right of the people to know, but including a section that public interest can outweigh a persons right to their data. For normal people though, this will hardly ever, if ever, be the case. I just means that public figures or rich people can't muzzle the press by making news disappear.
There are many questions to asked about the way the EU and its laws, but this is not one of them. This should be heralded as the greatest victory of common people over corporate $$ since the inception of the Internet.
A delighted EU citizen.
I think there must be limits on what can be removed. Fact and public interest should be factored in. [India]
There's quite a good description of the ruling and problems here
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/abridy/google-spain-and-the-right-to-be-forgotten/
Crucially, the person was unable to get the newspaper to remove the truthful reporting of an actual case removed. So is trying to get Google to stop pointing at the newspaper's online report. No matter how you feel about big business and ownership of data, this seems wrong to me. I can't see any difference between Google providing a link to that report and you or I doing it. IMHO, Linking to public URIs should not be restricted.
+Gijs van Dijk, well said!
No, I don’t think this court ruling is simply about cultural differences and stereotypes ‘Irrelevant and outdated’ is very vague and far too broad. It has opened up an enormous can of worms and has major legal and logistical repercussions not only for Google but for all search engines, for all online media publishers and online archives.
+Julian Bond Superb analysis, thanks for posting the link.
+Julian Bond, thanks for the link, but opposite to your comment, it wan't an actual case but a 15 years old case the plaintiff asked to remove.
+Julian Bond this is not about removing data from the internet, it's about information just popping up at a random search.
In this particular case, the man had a big debt problem 15 years ago. Over the course of those 15 years, the man solved his problems but thanks to Google regurgitating a 15 year old and now irrelevant news article, the man was hindered in his lawful social and economic life. And as such, thanks to Google, punished until today for something he did wrong ages ago.
When someone does something they shouldn't do, our justice system is such that if you are convicted and you have completed your sentence, the slate is essentially wiped clean and you have fulfilled your debt to society.
If such a person's name is continuously and indefinitely associated with what they have done in the past through Google and other indexers and as a result is not able to get a job, a loan, a place to live, etc, that's like paying your dues to society and then for good measure being kicked to the curb over and over until you die. That's like getting a life sentence for stealing a candybar.
I am sorry, but as usual the naysayers focus on how something can be abused – everything can and will be abused – instead of what it protects. Let me remind you that our rights and laws were not defined to punish the bad, but to protect the good. And that is a very significant difference.
It should be about removing data from the internet though. This information is still on the internet whether it is removed from Google or not. The newspaper has already refused and won a court case not to remove it. This is like telling the map maker not to include a road to a place but the place still exists, its just harder to find or deleting a page from an index but the page is still there. For me the argument here is not about right to be forgotten but where should the information be excluded from. I personally believe it is not Googles job but the newspapers job to remove the information. Of course this is much more difficult since in this case the newspaper seems to have much more protection than Google does.
My background is from the US, tho I have a pretty strong privacy advocacy position and usually end up supporting European perspectives of privacy.
+Gijs van Dijk – I think a big part of my concern here is that I'm not sure what the difference is between "removing information from the Internet" and "it popping up in a [targeted] search".
In this case, the data will still exist in the newspaper archives. If someone goes to the newspaper and asks for articles about his name, his financial history will still come up. The court in Spain affirmed that and the court in Luxembourg did not rule on that aspect.
All that will happen is that Google has been told that it must remove links to that same story. It doesn't change who can get access to it.
So it isn't clear to me why one organization that sells advertising and aggregates public data is allowed to provide it as part of their search results, while another organization that sells advertising and aggregates public data is not.
Oh, as for +Max Huijgen's surprise that this isn't about Google's "we're a US company" defense… I think it is pretty clear to everyone that was a poor argument. They follow the laws in the countries they're in, and they've had to do so in many many cases in the past.
Tho as has been suggested, I wonder if this means that these results will vanish in Europe only. It won't mean that the data itself will be removed – just that it will be removed from any European data center.
+Max Huijgen I think this is a really backwards step to delete information, already you can remove personal stuff from Google, but the new decision is removal of public interest stuff, it is censorship. It resembles being able to go to a newspaper pre-Web to enforce them to remove all historic articles regarding A, B, or C. It is a vile detestation of knowledge-info. There is already a big problem on the web with #linkrot and the new ruling will only make things worse. The ruling is anti-intelligence.
+Max Huijgen My main concern is that Europe as a whole seems to want to become a Switzerland of information. I find it somewhat ironic that there is such widespread praise in Europe for Edward Snowden's purloining and exposing of information that he obtained privately and yet when it comes to their own "castles," the EU wants them to be inviolate. There are many implications to this, but most of all it will likely make the European economy less competitive.
Sorry, this ruling is both idiotic and horrible for a number of legal, technological and ethical reasons. Google should refuse to comply, the US government should refuse to force them to and if Europe wants to kick Google out over it let them. They'll only be hurting themselves.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140513/06385627215/dangerous-ruling-eu-says-google-must-help-people-disappear-stuff-they-dont-like-internet.shtml
+Singularity Utopia this has nothing to do with censorship. No information is being deleted. If you want to stretch what censorship is to the limit, it will be self-censorship and that's something everybody does at one time or another, everybody has a right to and in some cases even has a moral obligation to. Just because something is on the web doesn't make it public property. This is not about other people or groups deciding what can be found on other people or groups. This is about individuals being able to decide what is available about them, and it has to be weighed against public interest.
+John Blossom your assertion is completely out of wack. These two issues are not mutually exclusive, they are in fact inclusive and complimentary.
We value our privacy here and when we find out that our supposedly biggest ally considers every living human being an enemy of the state so they can collect every little bit of information there is to find and then store it, because if we aren't an enemy, we might be in the future, or just if we become a PITA to the USA they have collected enough dirt and privacy sensitive information to publicly discredit them, then we are upset. And don't tell me, its 'only metadata'. One of your senior officials as recent as last week admitted that 'if you collect enough metadata, you know everything there is know about the person. The content becomes irrelevant'. And your resident loony Gen. Alexander, who confirmed that statement and added 'we kill based on metadata'. Anyone who marginalizes what the US government is doing and what it means to peoples rights is either an idiot or didn't think it through completely.
If then big corporations are forced to give us back control over our information and our data that they collected without asking permission in the first place, then yeah, we're pretty excited too.
+Dennis Heffernan I am sorry, but that's a typical American response.
Great debate so far! It's good to hear from all those people who hold (very) different views from my own.
+Wolf Weber
it wan't an actual case but a 15 years old case
Sorry, misunderstanding. I used the word "actual" to mean that the case was real and accurately reported even if it was 15 years old. As opposed to heresay or opinion.
Nobody's denying that the case took place. The newspaper is allowed to report on it and place that reporting on the web because that's journalism. But Google is not allowed to point at that web article because that's a carrier for advertising. So where do we draw the line? What if Wikipedia point to the case as a citation in an article about EU data protection law? What if I point to it (as a private individual) in a Tweet out of badness?
+Gijs van Dijk I think it's important here that we distinguish between user data, data and content created by an individual, and data about individuals, which is not created by the individual in question. I would think it's safe to say that many of us would be in agreement that all users should be able to control their own data and content and that firms and the law should respect this principle. What people are concerned about is handling factually correct information about individuals. If it was false, then libel and slander laws could handle it, as they do now. But that's not the case here. What we are dealing with is an individual's desire to have other people not know something which is factually correct about him. In this area, I do not think that there should be an absolute right to forget. It's important to balance an individual's desire to move on from society's need to know things so as to be able to make informed decisions.
What is really at the heart here is that the old privacy through obscurity is now gone due to the digitization of information. Used to be that if you wanted to find something out, you had to spend a lot of money to go search through archives, visit different archives, etc. This meant that your information was "private" for the general public but not "private" for those individuals and firms with means. The digitization has democratized things such that now it's easy and low cost for all people to do a search. One of my fears here is that this type of ruling will serve to only recreate this divide, impairing the general public but not preventing the wealthy or corporations from finding out what they wish.
Ooops, Barbara Streisand…
http://hemeroteca.lavanguardia.com/preview/1998/01/19/pagina-23/33842001/pdf.html
+Julian Bond – I think at least part of my confusion about the issue is related to your statement "The newspaper is allowed to report on it and place that reporting on the web because that's journalism. But Google is not allowed to point at that web article because that's a carrier for advertising."
And yet… newspapers are carriers for advertising first and foremost. (Right +Dan McDermott?)
In this case, the newspaper didn't even do any "journalism", it sounds like. They just reprinted an auction notice.
So what is the difference between what the newspaper did and what Google did?
It's so tempting to just tell him to do some SEO. ie. Flood the web with articles about his name until the offending article moves to the 2nd page.
I'm Canadian, and while I agree with the right to privacy, I think this ruling is not a step in the right direction for several reasons. It appears that the ruling would allow someone to request that truthful and accurate data related to their person be removed from search results, not just slanderous or libellous information (slander and libel should be covered by other laws not specific to the Internet). Also, the ruling does not seem to state that the website operator will be forced to remove the page, only that Google and other search engines remove the listing from the results, which means the information remains accessible, as long as it's indexed in some other fashion.
As others have stated, the process of removing the information from the internet will most likely involve time and money for the person making the request. Does this mean that rich people will have an easier time removing undesirable results than poorer people?
To clarify +Raphael Schmidt No request has been made to the European Court of Justice to remove the content from the original website.
The demand for removal from the news paper was turned down by the Spanish Data Protection agency and hasn't been appealed.
What the Court did was abstract from the specific case and answer the question if – regardless of the legality of publishing on a web site- making this information accessible through a search engine could violate the rights of an individual.
Basically they state that 'third party publishers (web sites) could be outside of the jurisdiction of the EU privacy laws, OR be protected by their 'journalististic purposes'.
Nevertheless a search engine has its own responsibility in re-publishing and the individual can request take down of the link.
(also pertinent to +Allen Firstenberg and +Julian Bond's discussion)
+John Blossom you may not realize that our privacy concern goes way back before the allmighty worldwide web existed. This is all coming from WW2 and what happened those years with all the filing of people. Hence the reason why we are "grumpy" about this, not to mention shitz like stasi and all those services in eastern block that kept files on every person. My own cousin is still filed as a criminal cause 25years ago he illegaly ran away from russians. Google has already complied to deleting stuff even blocking access to buttloads of sites. The only thing they want to avoid is paying taxes.
+Allen Firstenberg Newspapers are a vehicle for advertising but more than that. We believe what we are doing to inform the community is important. Otherwise I'd have gone into billboards, etc. Your first point is correct. Google is simply accurately pointing to various sources on the web, based on a quality weight algorithm. To force them to remove legitimate links would cause Google to be reporting inaccurately through omission. Could the descendants of Hitler's relatives (if there are any) petition to scrub any links to his Nazi activities? Should a Google search of "Hitler biography" merely highlight that he made the trains run on time, got married shortly before his death, age, jobs held, etc? Does a prospective employer (or mate) have a right to know if the person they are considering hiring or dating/marrying has a history or lying, stealing, violence, etc. that had been documented in credible media sources? Or should the lying, stealing, violent person's right to privacy trump those concerns?
+Noze P. I understand your concerns, and you bring up a very good point. In the U.S., we come largely from the other extreme – until 9/11, we barely kept track of anyone except a few powerful or threatening people. But it would seem that democracy requires a certain amount of public "knowing." Thus, I cannot say that I am happy with our U.S. Supreme Court defending the right of very rich people and corporations to donate anonymously to political causes and campaigns in virtually unlimited amounts. Hopefully there is a good balance to be found in all of this.
+Max Huijgen And what that means is the court in question has no actual understanding of how search engines in particular or the Internet in general work, and thus had no business taking the case in the first place.
We have a real problem on both sides of the Atlantic with stupid old men who live in the 19th century legislating, litigating and judging the technological apparatus of modern society.
+Dennis Heffernan, before you continue to spread bullshit, you may inform yourself first.
Why not starting with some information about the court and the system behind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Court_of_Justice
+Dennis Heffernan Y'mean the Interwebs is not a set of pipes?
As a reality check: Google is already removing content on a daily basis (25 million requests last month alone) based on complaints, court orders, illegality, copyright violations etc. Google honors over 90% of the requests.;
+John Blossom 'Course not. Everyone knows it's TUBES! 🙂
+Dennis Heffernan to the contrary this court as well as the legislators drafting these laws and directives understand the reality of internet. F.i the massive disclosure of hitherto archived information thanks to OCR and the ease with which information can be retrieved has been central to the European argument that there should be 'a right to be forgotten'.
If they lived in last century, they wouldn't concentrate on the role of search engines in findability and hence re-publishing of formerly restricted information.
Agreed +Bruce Byrne – – already happening re: digital divide and burnishing reps.
+Max Huijgen Google removes content as in: stuff in the Play Store, YouTube videos, blog entries in its Blogger service, etc. Search engine results are not content and expecting Google to block them is a technological and logistical nightmare.
The people you want to go after are the actual sites posting the material. Expecting Google or any other search engine operator to censor search results is just shooting the messenger, which in this case doesn't even stop the message, which is still out there just harder to find.
(This isn't even discussing the "right to be forgotten" which is complete Bovine Stuff too, but that's a separate argument.)
+Dennis Heffernan, just to make it clear, Google is removing search results and even search terms for more than a decade now, based on the respective laws of over 150 countries around the world, including the US of A.
+Dennis Heffernan I took the numbers from Google's own transparency report which states "This data consists of the copyright removal notices received for Search' *'It does not include requests for products other than Google Search* (e.g, requests directed at YouTube or Blogger)
+Alex Grossman to counter that argument: my blood pressure is a factual statement, but I don't want to see it on a search for my name.
If it got on the internetz due to an over eager amateur reporter for the local sports club in 1999 and recently got OCR'red by Google's efforts I don't want to see it and I feel I have the right to have it removed EVEN if the local magazine no longer exists, is out of my jurisdiction or was correct in publishing it AT THAT TIME.
American perspective, and also as a person who has dealt with a large amount of takedown requests. This will be a nightmare.
Either you takedown everything that someone asks about. This is cheap but will be massively abused. Or you have to research each inquiry at a huge cost and then operate under some Ill defined set of guidelines for what to grant and what to deny.
In my experience, 80% of requesters are uninformed assholes that think they understand freedom of speech and invasion of privacy. But of course they don't. Now this ruling makes it even messier.
Not saying I don't like the ability to correct wrongs, just that this is going to cause wrongs too.
See my comment above you +Jeff Jockisch Google already handles much larger numbers than are expected to derive from the European laws.
I see +Allen Firstenberg disagrees that holding Google responsible under European law is a break-through decision. It really is Google's opinion that they are NOT if the activities are carried out by Google US. It's not my view, but their explicit statement.
They repeat that statement in every court case on European soil. Not only here, but f.i. also when the French privacy regulator addressed them or at the time UK customers complained about cookie violations on Safari etc.
Not sure those takedown requests are equivalent, +Max Huijgen
Google has stringent guidelines especially for DMCA. This sounds like it could turn into the 'I don't like it, so take it down' doctrine…
Not equivalent, but Google already knows how to handle the volume, didn't go broke by doing so and the web is still intact +Jeff Jockisch
+Max Huijgen Then the recourse, for violation of your privacy under local law, is to go after those who are posting the material, not the search engine. This really becomes a slippery slope. Are ISPs no longer to be treated as common carriers and are they responsible for the material posted or shared by their customers? Are telephone companies liable for what transpires on phone calls made on their lines?
Ya
+Gijs van Dijk deletion of search engine information is deletion of information. This could be abused easily by politicians and normal people could use this censorship they are considering entering politics. Politicians were normal people at one point. News should not be censored, if you are in the news then such news reports are public domain and should be indexed by search engines without restriction. People have the right to remove private and abusive information but news reports should be inviolable, the reports are part of history. Don't underestimate this censorship it could easily be a slippery slope to 1984.
+Dennis Heffernan I agree 100% with your comment: "Sorry, this ruling is both idiotic and horrible for a number of legal, technological and ethical reasons. Google should refuse to comply, the US government should refuse to force them to and if Europe wants to kick Google out over it let them. They'll only be hurting themselves."
+Max Huijgen Not equivalent and the volume of those requests isn't relevant. Because it will go up by a lot and the requests themselves will be much more complex.
Somewhat related. Musing on the way geotagging in the EXIF data of photos posted on the web can endanger threatened animals.
http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/25ll1v/does_a_rhinoceros_have_a_right_to_be_forgotten/
Perhaps we need a new http code. '420: Endangered animal present'. So websites can return "420, NoIndex, NoFollow, NoKill" for images of them.
Which raises the issue. The newspaper didn't have to remove the data. It could have just returned NoIndex, NoFollow in the headers. There's the technical fix. Except that there are other bits of information about other people on that page that ought to be indexed.
+Julian Bond good point, and lol NoFollow NoKill, yes the newspapers are responsible for engines indexing, or not, their pages, thus inclusion in a search engine is a type of publishing where the webmaster submits articles for publication to the engine-index based on their code-instructions. Perhaps Google lawyers could use this as a defense. Google is a publisher of an index where authors are free to include or not the articles they want to be published.
Google is the 176th largest company in the world but that still is not big enough to win a legal battle with European law representing 740 million people +Max Huijgen .
I'm late to this discussion, tyvm +Alex Schleber for the hint. I just want to add a few thoughts, perhaps by playing the devil's advocate.
First of all: +Gijs van Dijk, +Wolf Weber this court decision is not about the ownership of data, it's about the free and unimpended access to data, somehow it's about #netneutrality . (edit: If it would be about ownership, it would be about deletion, control and existence). The hidden data still exists, legally owned by the website. But the normal user, who depends on the help of a public search engine will no longer be able to find it.
And that's the problem.
If you are not depending on a public search engine, you will be able to access all the data that is hidden from the public. If you are an information broker, a credit information agency, a bank, a recruitment agency or even the tax office and if you can afford to run your own crawler (for example an Facebook API crawler) you will always have more informations than the public.
This may lead us to a two-tier informed society, where big companies and affluent or technically experienced persons will have and extend an information advantage towards you, me or a small company.
So, +Gijs van Dijk, if you ask me to focus on what this court decision protects than i'll answer you that it protects an disparate access to the world's most valuable thing: information. This is a very sneaky sort of censorship.
+Bernd Rubel, that court decision has a much broader influence than only limiting search. The major point wasn't the fact that Google and with that a search engine, was the defendant though that Google was considered to be an entity "processing and storing data", just like anyone else who build up data bases and collecting data. With that a search engine has to follow the data protection laws and rules just like any other company.
With that decision the next step is to go to the company who holds the data and let them delete them as well.
The verdict has a much wider influence than the media and press, concentrating on the big name only, are talking about. It reinforces the already existing principle of data reduction and economy still existing in the data protection Laws.
It's not about sneaky censorship but about strengthening the already existing laws. For example, it's not longer possible to easily dig that one and only moment in YOUR life you failed after even your own government, police and courts cleared all the records about.
Most excellent discussion, +Max Huijgen . thanks for bringing it up.
+Wolf Weber This was the trick the court used, abusing a ten year old law that is under heavy discussion at the moment, right? The link to the original data was raised to be "the data" itself. The entity that leads to the original data was considered to be responsible for the existence of the data. This is sick.
The next step is to go to the company who holds the data and let them delete them as well? No, this was the first unsuccessful step of the Spaniard, because all the courts judged that he is not authorized to remove facts. That was the reason why he concentrated on Google now, trying to put at least a cloak over the data.
You're wrong, it IS still possible to easily dig that one and only moment in your life when you failed as long as the data exists. Not for the public, but for everyone who can afford the digging without the help of a public search engine.
So, where is the broader influence than only limiting search for the public? I can't find it. There is no data reduction. And the non-public data economy, all the credit information agencies and information brokers are laughing their ass off.
+Danny Sullivan wrote a comprehensive Q&A about this court ruling on http://searchengineland.com/eu-right-forgotten-191604 – perhaps this will help to understand. There's a second link to +The Guardian, too. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/14/explainer-right-to-be-forgotten-the-newest-cultural-shibboleth
+Bernd Rubel,a comprehensive Q&A based on the view of an US of A marketeer, having zero knowledge about European laws and the law system itself. His Q&A seem to be a little bit biased. C'mon, get clear…
By the way, did you ever read the whole verdict, or is your opinion based on press and media stuff only?
+Wolf Weber As far as i know +The Guardian is based in Great Britain (Europe), +Charles Arthur is the technology editor. +Jeff Jarvis isn't a marketeer, too.
No, i didn't read the whole verdict. But if my opinion would be based only on biased press – you as a reader of german newspapers like the +FAZ.NET – Frankfurter Allgemeine or +Frankfurter Rundschau will know – my reaction would be a standing applause.
My opinions and concerns are based on my 20 years experience with news, data, search engines and attempts to suppress access to informations for the public. You know, keywords like #netneutrality , #informationsfreiheitsgesetz , #leistungsschutzrecht
+Max Huijgen: +David Amerland covered this topic and another thought provoking point of view in his #davidamerlandsundayread here https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DavidAmerland/posts/METhLQZuyhg
Will check it +Bernd Rubel