All European citizens have this right, but where should it be exercised? Is it only valid within the European community or is it a transnational right? Can you bypass filters by going to google.com?
The current implementation by Google is that the right to be forgotten can indeed be bypassed by going to directly to google.com instead of google.de/es or whatever your local redirect is.
Most Europeans -often without realizing – get redirected to their country domain when searching on Google. No problem and the results are correctly filtered.
However when going outside of these domains, directly to google.com f.i. suddenly the 'forgotten' information surfaces again.
After a few months of studying on the implementation details the so called Working Party (representatives of privacy organizations from all EU countries) has decided that the right is universal so the results should be filtered by the search engines whatever the domain name.
Interesting first result (there is more to come this week) as this typical European discussion now gets extended to a global one. The reasoning of course is – as so often – that this is a universal right. For now the working party restricts it to Europeans or people living in Europe, but the universal claim is still there.
Just like f.i. Americans expect their right to free speech to be valid wherever they are, so can Europeans expect their right to be forgotten to be valid independent of the location of the searcher.
However here, these two 'universal' rights clash. The right to free speech (which at least in California seems to stretch into search results), conflicts with the new requirement that google has to filter wherever they present data*
* (and every other search engine active in Europe) #Tech #Europe #Politics
"Americans expect their right to free speech to be valid wherever they are, so can Europeans expect their right to be forgotten to be valid independent of the location of the searcher."
As a U.S. citizen I expect that I'd be held to local laws if I go to another country. I do not expect to get extra U.S.-granted rights.
As a European i also expect my right to free speech to be valid wherever i am. #justsaying
All claims to global validity of local laws need to consider the idea that reciprocal claims will be made. US law enforcement has tended to want to reach out well beyond the borders of the US on a number of issues; now EU privacy enforcement wants to do the same thing.
What "obvious" global enforcement of local laws will China want to have apply?
Can Europe be restricted to only the local versions of Google? No google.com. Will that solve it?
what?
why?
Nope +Scott GrantSmith but without travelling yourself, you would expect your free speech to cross borders. That's internet.
Hmm… +Max Huijgen I expect that if I were to, say, post something defamatory about the leader of one of those countries just north of South Korea that it would be well within the (self-given) rights of that country to block what I wrote. If it was bad enough they could, I suppose, try to extradite me which, I hope, my country would oppose. If I then tried to erase what I wrote (and have Google erase it, too) then travel to the affronted country would I be stupid to expect that 1) what I wrote wouldn't be available and 2) that I wouldn't be arrested stepping off the plane?
You marry a nice girl aged 12 in the US and go on a honeymoon to the UK where this illegal.
Should that right travel with you +Scott GrantSmith? What if she claims rape and you say I'm married. Should the UK accept that status?
Arguments involving North-Korea never make sense 🙂
Msybe we should leave Internet governance to the Chinese government. Only the can provide a harmonious solution and make sure that this whole conflict never happened.
+Max Huijgen, I'd have trouble moving to a different state in the U.S. depending on who I'm married to!
(Agreed, re: the ironically-named DPRK.)
+Max Huijgen But back to the internet. If I tried to send an e-mail to someone in China using the address "FreeTibet@ChinaSucks.us" I think I could reasonably expect that my message would not be delivered.
You are starting to break down the sovereignty rights of nations with attempting to force such measures globally.
You don't have the right to be forgotten. It isn't a right if you've done something you've done it. You have the right to ask for forgiveness.
You don't have the right to go into someones memory and force them to forget. Why do we have the right to do the same to Google?
+Max Huijgen, you can't marry a nice 12 year old girl in America. We have an age of majority here just as you do in Europe. Homosexual marriage would be a better example for what you're looking for.
The so called right to be forgotten is not a legitimate right.
People in this thread may be interested in reading +Luciano Floridi's notes as Google's ethics adviser during the trial. http://www.philosophyofinformation.net/right-to-be-forgotten-a-diary-of-the-google-advisory-council-tour
Rights are defined by statute so "legitimate" doesn't really come into play in my opinion. Statutory rights, then, only extend as far as the state (and related treaties) can reach.
The right to free speech isn't an American right, it's a universal human right declared by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
The right to be forgotten, as far as I know, is exclusively European. A region can't simply declare a right for its citizens and expect other jurisdictions to follow it. The Universal Human Rights, however, should be respected by all member states of the United Nations.
+Max Huijgen if you look at the list of the URLs that Google's being demanded to 'forget' (mostly stuff where people did things they shouldn't have) I deem the "right to be forgotten" a BS concept, especially if it's just Google doing it, and not your Telco, your Hospital in which you had your last surgery in, the Police or your CreditCard holding Bank and what not else. What's worse, the content that Google's demanded to forget, still exist and can be found via different search means
Godwin in 4. Impressive!
+Scott GrantSmith Legitimacy does not depend on law, but on morality. A government can be illegitimate, and any or all of its laws can be illegitimate, if those laws are contrary to natural justice.
+Bruce Attah and where, pray tell, can I look up the definition of "natural justice"?
+Scott GrantSmith You could start with Wikipedia. It's a fundamental concept of jurisprudence, particularly in the common law system, and in legal and political philosophy more generally. I am shocked that an American is unaware of the concept, given that American law is founded on it. I thought you guys were proud of your constitution?
What people seem to forget in these discussion is that today 'relevance' is no longer decided by the natural course of history, where things that matter get to be remembered and everything else disappearing into obscurity, but instead relevance is decided not by people or event, but by Google.
It is Google that decides which results get shown on the first page. And people automatically assume a result is relevant when it shows up there, even if it is not.
So we now have a company that has the power to set relevance on events or people, set public opinion by the order they display results and essentially rewrite history to suit a purpose. If that does not scare you, it should.
People worry about NSA and such, and rightfully so but the truth of the matter is that companies like Google are much scarier. They know more about you than you know about yourself, they can predict your behavior and response with near certainty based on the profiles they build of everybody and they can manipulate your opinions and decisions how they see fit by how they set up their algorithms.
If you think all this is just tin-foil conspiracy crap and that Google 'does no evil', let me remind you that Google is a listed public company that has only one allegiance and purpose for existence: their shareholders. They will do whatever it takes to secure the interests of their shareholders.
Make no mistake about it. If Google wanted to, they could decide who is going to be the next POTUS or where the next war is fought. And all the people would think they made an independent decision to make it happen.
The right to be forgotten seems a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the power companies like Google have over us and our societies. It may not be the best way to do it, but there sure as hell need to be more effort to put ownership back where it belongs: the people. Companies like Google are as much a threat to democracy as bad governments ignoring constitutions and wanting a surveillance state.
The effect of this appears to impose a Right to be Ignorant, and a predisposition to dumbing down?
I, for one, welcome the EU attempting to export some of their laws to the USA. Since the USA has been trying to export their laws to the rest of the world for some time[1].
And BTW, IMHO. The right for people to demand that data that exists on the web should be hidden within search engines is just silly. Go after the source, not the aggregator.
+Julian Bond this isn't about removing information from the internet, it is about people being able to tell Google to not promote irrelevant or outdated information into perceived current relevancy.
+Gijs van Dijk
Perhaps then; what my address this is a rating system to draw attention to possible issues and to display a prompt one-line? I do not think that a general exclusion of information is a good idea, as what is relevant can be somewhat subjective, and there could be issues with source languages and translations?
+Ben Thomas We tend to overestimate the intelligence of people. Individuals are smart, people are stupid. So, people think the higher up a result is, the more relevant it is regardless of how old or how factually accurate it actually is.
And yes, relevancy is subjective. In the analog world, this is no problem as between people in real life holding on to relevant information and purging of less important or irrelevant information or the weighing of information based on age etc is automatic and fluid. This would be difficult to implement into a computer algorithm, while at the same time people stop weighing and judging themselves as they assume Google has already done so.
Simply put, people perceive the first hits in Google to be relevant, accurate and factual. This becomes a problem when something is accurate and factual (which computers excel at) but not relevant.
If I got into financial trouble 20 years ago and had my house taken away and lawsuits files against me to claim my income to pay for debt, that could be factual and accurate. But it may not be relevant.
If today I have a 6 digit income without debt and a perfect credit score, that information is not relevant today and just a note in my personal history. If I now am unable to get a mortgage for a new house because Google is making it perceived relevant, it is becoming a big problem.
Doesn't mean it should not be findable, but it does probably mean it should not pop up as the first result after typing in my name.
Perhaps if Google showed you how old an article is, it would already be less of a problem however I personally doubt people would read that far.
+Chrono Tata freedom of expression is a UN supported right, but free speech in the absolute meaning it has in the US not. In most countries it's limited f.i. to prevent hate speech, but the list is much longer.
What the state of California recently did by dismissing a complaint against Google search results just because it was considered an attempt to limit Google's free speech right, would be impossible in most countries including Europe.
+Max Huijgen Hmm, I'm not familiar with this recent news with California dismissing a complaint against Google, and a quick search didn't yield any obvious result. Do you have a link for an article?
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/18/google-search-judge-free-speech +Chrono Tata
Thanks +Max Huijgen. Seems that this ruling is related to the search ranking issue and how it's accused to be anti-competitive.
Anyway, I assume that, even if the Californian court has ruled against Google, the change would have been forced to be applied to the .com version of Google only, and the other versions of Google outside the US version wouldn't have necessarily been affected. While I can't speak for them, I don't see any indication that the American court would demand that Google has to implement the change through all its versions, including the foreign ones.
+Bruce Attah Shocked, eh? 🙂
I am aware of the concept and a bit of it's history but also aware that it's not used directly in U.S. jurisprudence. It's a long and storied debate:
http://www.nlnrac.org/american/u.s.-supreme-court
Anyway, I looked up "natural justice" on Wikipedia as you suggested. While bias – and avoiding it – certainly has it's place in U.S. law historically, as a term of art it's more relevant to current British law than U.S. law. "Procedural justice" (same source) seems more relevant. Laws in a human context are always a matter of interpretation (and reinterpretation ad nauseam).
the key in California was that the judge refused to look at the case citing free speech +Chrono Tata
It was an argument to show that free speech has an almost sacred status in the US contrary to most of the rest of the world.
Unless you are a whistleblower…
Related to this discussion https://plus.google.com/u/2/112352920206354603958/posts/PCWGmNvCAcH
The Chinese must be watching this one closely. If this gets passed, surely, the Chinese can make us forget "June 4th", "May 35th", "Tibet", "umbrella", or anything the Chinese people does not want us to remember or claim did not happen.
+Max Huijgen This nonsense of a right to be forgotten is judge-made law, which by itself might not be a bad thing, but the ruling that made the law is the product of an incompetent, or possibly malicious, misinterpretation of a law that pertains to confidential information stored in databases, not as per the court's interpretation, old news.
To censor old news on grounds of "irrelevance" is not permitted in European law or any sensible law, but the vicious/stupid judges in this case found a way to do it by misapplying a law that was designed to protect confidential data from abuse.
This so-called right to be forgotten must never be accepted. It must be fought until it is repealed. It is an act of blatant tyranny by a bunch of scumbag bureaucrats who are abusing their power for no better reason than that it makes them feel important. It provides no benefit to the public, but instead functions as a criminals charter, since it enables crooks to hide news of their old crimes.
Is there an argument in this rant? +Bruce Attah
+Max Huijgen Yes.
+Max Huijgen You don't have to take it from me, though. A cross-party committee of the House of Lords described the ruling as "misguided in principle and unworkable in practice". http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/lords-select/eu-home-affairs-sub-committee-f-/news/right-to-be-forgotten-report/
+Max Huijgen I definitely agree with you, not so much that free speech is more sacred in the US than the rest of the world, more that the US has a more… broad definition of that freedom, while most other countries tend to apply greater restrictions to it, rightly or wrongly.
Anyway, my point was that I don't believe that the US has interest in imposing its definition of freedom of speech on foreign or foreign-based businesses. For example, I don't see US regulators forcing Google to apply the same standard of search displaying in Google.com to, say, Google.cn. Likewise, I don't think the EU has any business to force foreign entities to apply its rules on the right to be forgotten on non-Europe-based websites.
No one has a right to be forgotten, but only a right to forget or get dementia . Memory is history and those who forget history are bound to repeat them.
+Bob Chan Good example. I don't want to forget about "4th June" or "Umbrella". Even if Chinese government demanded its right to be forgotten, I think I have the right to remember these things.