
EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google - lotsofmangos
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/02/eu-right-to-be-forgotten-guardian-google
======
munificent
This article is pretty terrible. I think it's great that it's drawing
attention to the problem, but it spends most of the time rallying an angry mob
and pointing the pitchforks in the wrong direction:

> Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

> Editorial decisions belong with them, not Google

> But such editorial calls surely belong with publishers, not Google.

Google has done absolutely nothing wrong here. It is making zero editorial
calls. It's removing links that were flagged for removal by someone outside of
the company, and it _is compelled to do so by EU law_.

In fact, if you ignore the finger-pointing at Google, you'll see that Google
actually tries really really hard to get around this: It informs you when
results were blocked, notifies when results are blocked, blocks only the
narrowest possible search terms, and helpfully points you to google.com which
doesn't filter.

> Publishers can and should do more to fight back. One route may be legal
> action.

No, legal action is the _only_ route. This is a matter of law.

~~~
mccr8
Put down your Google pitchfork. The article is clearly not placing the blame
on Google: "As for Google itself, it's clearly a reluctant participant in what
effectively amounts to censorship." The second paragraph says this is the
result of a court ruling.

If the most concerning thing to you about this article is that it doesn't
spend enough time exonerating Google for their role in this, then I don't know
what to tell you.

~~~
ghshephard
It was a poor article - casual reading of it leads one to believe that Google
is engaging in Censorship. Careful reading of the entire article places the
blame on where it's supposed to be - the Law - but the fact that the article
kept calling out Google, when it should have been repeatedly mentioning the
law that Google was complying with, was problematic.

~~~
justicezyx
Interesting, I have no such feeling of 'casual reading of it leads one to
believe that Google is engaging in Censorship'.

~~~
ghshephard
Title, Introduction, First Paragraph read as follows:

 _EU 's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

Publishers must fight back against this indirect challenge to press freedom,
which allows articles to be 'disappeared'. Editorial decisions belong with
them, not Google

When you Google someone from within the EU, you no longer see what the search
giant thinks is the most important and relevant information about an
individual. You see the most important information the target of your search
is not trying to hide._

My Rewrite:

 _EU 's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been required removed by
law.

Publishers must fight back against this indirect challenge to press freedom,
which allows articles to be 'disappeared'. Editorial decisions belong with
them, not the government.

When you search someone from within the EU, you no longer see what might be
the most important and relevant information about an individual. You see the
most important information the target of your search is not trying to hide._

~~~
justicezyx
Title: EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by
Google

"EU's right to be forgotten", people with context understand this cause.

You are so good at political correctness... That does not matter if you use
"search engine" to generalize google, Google is effectively the "search
engine". You can say that Google has no fault in this incident, but you should
not pretend that Google is not playing a crucial role in this incident...

Wording is just wording, truth is the truth...

------
peterkelly
This law is a very serious threat to freedom of the press, and freedom of
speech in general. While it was (allegedly) introduced for reasons that seem
quite reasonable - avoiding unfair reputations in search results - it could
quite validly be termed as "Right to censor criticism or true facts about
yourself".

Let's take high-profile person X who is found guilty of some serious crime,
like sex offences. They have the money to hire a professional "reputation
management" firm to find all stories in the press about them, and send
takedown requests to Google, who is legally compelled to comply with those
requests. The result is that information that is out there in the public
domain, and that the public arguably has a right to know, is censored.

There's a balance here between an individual's right to be protected against
defamation, and the public's right to know. I don't think this law strikes the
right balance. Furthermore, it ignores the technical and social nature of how
the Internet works - the so called "Streisand effect" that repeatedly gets
invoked whenever someone tries to suppress information. And as technology
evolves and there's even more ways for information to become replicated (think
peer-to-peer search engines and the like), it's like trying to put the
toothpaste back in the tube.

~~~
mattmanser
There's no threat at all to either freedom of speech or the press.

If the guardian publishes something, it will have its day in the sun.

It just will eventually get removed, years afterwards. No press freedoms
impinged, years after you've had your expressive speech.

Whatever freedom that is, freedom of historical reports?, it's nothing to do
with speech or press. If you want to re-report the information, you could, but
it then would likely no longer be for the public good or interest, it would
merely be vindictive.

Unless, of course, you don't believe in redemption or rehabilitation.

~~~
GauntletWizard
Today's BBC article thoroughly disproves your point:
[http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28130581](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28130581)

Freedom of press is about creating a public record. When you remove that
record from the public, when you censor the _past_ of public discourse, you've
infringed on free speech. Real discourse is full of [citation needed], and if
you can preemptively remove those citations, there will be cheating.

~~~
Spearchucker
And yet those [citation needed]s haven't disappeared. I can and do still find
them using duck duck go and Bing. Information will be free. There's an agenda
at play here because I can't imagine how the people behind this law couldn't
have foreseen this. I wonder whether Google is being set up because of its
market-dominating position. If not, why weren't the other search engines
similarly constrained?

~~~
magicalist
> _If not, why weren 't the other search engines similarly constrained?_

They are if they operate in the EU.

But there's no universal place to submit takedown requests. People would also
have to send them to Bing (according to this article DDG doesn't operate at
all in the EU so is not subject to the ruling).

------
junto
Google is playing this ruling really cleverly. They will just blanket accept
every single request for a "right to be forgotten" that they receive.

Once swathes of valid journalism disappears down the toilet, the shit is
slowly going to hit the pan.

You could use this for some nefarious purposes I'm sure.

I have a client that wants a page removed because of a court case that painted
them in a bad light. This ruling just made their year.

~~~
Terr_
> the shit is slowly going to hit the pan

I can't tell whether that's less appealing than the usual idiom.

------
ganeumann
It won't take long before a UK search for Dougie McDonald shows the article
talking about how the articles about Dougie McDonald have been removed from
Google, and what those articles are about.

Google tells the media which articles are being expunged, the media writes
about the articles Google expunged and then Google indexes these pages in
their search results. Interesting process.

~~~
rudimental
That process is happening right now, and it is interesting. But will it
continue, aka is it a viable long term workaround? Articles being removed is
new and in a sense exciting for the press, Google, and the public- that
probably won't be so in a few months or years.

~~~
ganeumann
Maybe every media company should have a summary page for each of their
articles that have been removed from Google. And Google should prioritize
those summary pages in its searches.

~~~
rudimental
That would be great. Can this easily be automated so companies don't have to
do anything and the result is there, helping people?

------
adamconroy
I don't know it there is a good solution to this problem. I personally had an
issue about 8 years ago, when at the time I started looking for a new job. I
couldn't understand why recruiters weren't contacting me after I had applied
to many jobs, most of which I was sure I was a good candidate, good enough to
at least warrant a phone call or email in response. Eventually I rang one
asking for feedback, and he told me off the record that he had googled me and
my name had appeared on news group posting that associated me with hard drug
use. I had posted something on a newsgroup in 1996 about a band I had seen in
concert, and the thread descended into a discussion about the band's drug use.
When googling my name, the search results certainly looked bad. You had to
read the whole thread to realize the context.

Anyway, at the time google had an automated (or semi-automated) service where
you could ask them to hide news group postings. You had to declare you were
the author and give a reason and so forth. I went through the process, and
actually lied because the post that caused me problems wasn't posted by me but
it was just a stupid one liner by some idiot which just had my username buried
in the header somewhere, asked for it to be deleted because it was causing me
problems getting a job, and thankfully they did it.

It pretty much saved my career, at least for now because I do live in fear
somehow it will resurface.

------
objclxt
The BBC also received notifications from Google today that some of their
articles had been hidden from EU search results -
[http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28130581](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28130581)

~~~
ascorbic
Inevitably, searches for [stan o'neal] now return stories about this in the
first few results. They should call this the Streisand law.

------
UVB-76
Bravo to the Guardian for instigating the Streisand effect in this instance.

By way of example, I knew nothing of the Dougie McDonald scandal until this
article, which not only brought the scandal to my attention, but also suggests
someone (presumably McDonald himself) doesn't want people to find out about
the scandal.

~~~
smoe
The question is, how long will this effect last? These are the first cases,
where the right to be forgotten is used against news sites and the outrage is
of course big. But what about in a few months, a year? I doubt that every case
will end up on the front of hn and similar.

------
The_Pherocity
I once thought that I could tell my children that I was born in a world
without the internet. But if governments and corporations keep on this path,
my children won't have one either.

------
phantom784
It'd be interesting if the Guardian simply changed the URL to the articles
slightly when they go the notice from Google. It'd turn the whole thing into a
cat-and-mouse game.

------
lelandbatey
To focus on something else: I'm incredulous that people believe we have the
"right" to be forgotten. Maybe it's just that I've grown up being told
everything I do will be recorded forever and never forgotten, and my behavior
has changed as a result? But I truly don't feel as if we have any kind of
_right_ to be forgotten.

~~~
untog
I actually disagree. We live in a world where so much of what we do is
recorded permanently, and that's a very new thing. I absolutely support the
idea that we have a right to be forgotten.

This execution, however, is absolutely awful.

------
zmmmmm
It's shocking that this is being applied to articles from 2010. It shows how
quickly a small crack in free speech is expanded way beyond its intent. I am
sure no reasonable person would argue that the intent of the EU ruling was
that something that happened 4 years ago is no longer "relevant". The
reasonable intent was for things that are decades old, perhaps from a time and
context either at the individual level or the societal level that are likely
to cause a read to seriously misinterpret or misunderstand the material.

I don't think Google should escape criticism here. Yes they have to follow the
law, but they should be aggressively pressing to the minimum boundary of what
they have been asked to do. They should be declining cases like this and
wearing the law suits that result until the real line and intent is hammered
out. It sounds like they are taking a DMCA-like approach and taking things
down by default, and that is very very worrying.

------
patio11
The interesting part of this, for me, is that the Guardian believes that a)
Google has the power to put the genie back in the bottle (dubious, but
reflective of Google's _massive_ control of Internet navigation) and b) the
Guardian would have the power to put the genie back in the bottle (absurd).

~~~
vilhelm_s
What do you mean by "putting the genie back into the bottle"?

~~~
patio11
The Guardian believes it has the capacity to make the editorial decision to
unpublish an article (true) and by consequence make "the Internet" forget
about facts in the article (false).

------
Shivetya
I really really do not like this. Who needs government to create an Orwellian
future when we are more than willing to do it to ourselves.

I am especially distressed that people can remove all the wrong they do from
sight. What is next? Deny the holocaust? (yes hyperbole)

------
alex_duf
The fact that this law is going to be applied blindly as a technical solution
to a human problem is the issue. There is one missing piece here : a judge.
Add a judge , and this whole problem goes away.

------
bliksem
We should simply provide a searchable resource to add and record the 'removed'
articles. Not a search engine. Simply a searchable list.

------
nothxbro
Whats especially troubling is that this is spilling over to other countries
now. I always felt that despite having relatively lax laws in regards to the
internet, russia is starting to turn into a seriously unfriendly place for the
internet. Being a expat in moscow makes it especially awkward as I have tasted
the koolaid on the 'free' side.

------
porker
I wonder what the effect would be if everyone submitted removal requests for
all articles on prominent politicians (let's take the UK Prime Minister David
Cameron as an example).

Methinks the law would be quickly changed. Especially with an election coming
up next year.

Of course I am in no way encouraging anyone to do this, or condoning such
behaviour.

------
pertinhower
This is, among other things, a terribly confusing situation. Who's to blame?
The person who asks to have results expunged? The law that requires Google to
comply? Google for complying? Or no one—is the right thing being done, the
"pen" of the Internet being dulled back into a pencil?

~~~
munificent
> The person who asks to have results expunged?

Yes.

> The law that requires Google to comply?

Yes.

> Google for complying?

No! How can you blame a company for doing something they are _legally
compelled_ to do?

> Or no one—is the right thing being done, the "pen" of the Internet being
> dulled back into a pencil?

The Internet has always been written in pencil. Pages stop being served all
the time. The only difference is that now the index of the Internet is written
in pencil, and every EU citizen has been given an eraser.

~~~
zorbo
> How can you blame a company for doing something they are legally compelled
> to do?

They're not legally compelled to take action on every request they get. It's
just that it's too expensive to look at each request individually.

~~~
marcosdumay
How is that not compelling?

They have three choices. One leads to censorship, the other two lead to
bankruptcy. Choose.

------
runn1ng
I am from Czech Republic (part of EU) and I cannot replicate the described
effect.

Plus, most results about those individuals are now the articles _about the
censorship itself_. Which is funny. Will the mentioned folks block _those
articles_ too?

------
paul_milovanov
Buy the ticket, take the ride.

------
lucb1e
Well I never thought it would take more than a few days for this to happen...

~~~
tobias3
It is just annoying that google has to put in so much work just to prove an
obvious point. So inefficient...

------
jackgavigan
Google's hiding Guardian articles? That's outrageous! The Guardian should stop
paying Google to index their website and display their articles in search
results!

Oh, wait...

~~~
walshemj
so how long till the news papers run their own search engine or google buys
news papers I bet the independent is for sale

