
Insights on the First Three Years of the Right to Be Forgotten at Google - scrollaway
https://elie.net/blog/web/insights-about-the-first-three-years-of-the-right-to-be-forgotten-requests-at-google
======
TangoTrotFox
The article omits what I think is probably the most important datum: _' 0.2%
of requesters accounted for 20.8% of all accepted delistings. Many of these
frequent requesters were individuals using law firms and reputation management
services.'_ That's a total of about 214,000 URLS deleted on account of 1000
individuals. The most prolific requester requested 5,768 URLs relating them be
removed. It's unstated how many of these were approved.

The sort of individuals using law firms and reputation management services to
try to erase information about themselves from public access, are generally
going to be the individuals whose information has the most probable public
utility. But they're also the individuals who can most threaten Google with
lawsuits and other difficulties should they not comply.

The internet is something that will live on long after we're all dead, and it
is creating a living chronicle of the times. The more this chronicle is
interfered with, the less valuable this information will be. Einstein's
'marital demands' [1] (not what you might think) of his wife would almost
certainly fall within this 'right to be forgotten' yet they now provide a all
too rare glimpse at the less 'sculptured' life of one of the most important
figures in history. This yin and yang, good and bad, nature of people helps
provide a more balanced, and less idealistic view of actors in the past - and
present.

Perhaps the thing becoming ever more clear is that search is something that
needs to be decentralized. It's all too easy for the player in control to
exploit the data for their own personal benefit, and they also end up working
as a single point of failure for access to said information.

[1] - [http://www.openculture.com/2013/12/albert-einstein-
imposes-o...](http://www.openculture.com/2013/12/albert-einstein-imposes-on-
his-first-wife-a-cruel-list-of-marital-demands.html)

~~~
wmf
Maybe Google can "unforget" after people die.

~~~
hobofan
Does the right to privacy end with death?

~~~
Paul-ish
What harms could happen to someone who is dead?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
You can most definitely harm the family of the dead person.

~~~
Paul-ish
They should send their own request in. The request should be evaluated with
respect to the living individual's circumstance, without regard to the
deceased.

------
cromwellian
To me, the most concerning thing is the level of government officials
requesting delisting. Democracy requires transparency. If you've committed
crimes, had financial judgements against you, or even been accused of sexual
misconduct, I want to know about it.

Powerful or high network individuals or corporations requesting delisting
should have a much higher bar.

~~~
iamdave
_had financial judgements against you,_

You had me with the other two, I don't know about this one. In the absence of
criminal financial malfeasance, or deliberately poor mishandling of
instruments an official had some responsibility over as an individual acting
in the public trust, I can't think of a compelling argument for why _this_
needs to be the public's business.

I can only presume, but I'm with pause to put words into your mouth that this
is probably want you meant?

~~~
Vinnl
I'm not quite sure whether "accused of sexual misconduct" is that great
either. Anyone can accuse anyone of anything, and especially on the internet,
these things have a way of getting a life on their own. And especially in the
case of public figures, these things can be an easy way to blackmail
them/bring them down.

Not that I'm in favour of Google acting policeman, but these things are just
pet peeves of mine that I think we should be careful with.

~~~
lloeki
Given two headlines:

\- "foo suspected of sexual misconduct" @t=0

\- "foo proved to be innocent in sexual misconduct case" @t+1 mo/yr/whatevs

Guess:

\- what people will consciously or subconsciously remember when scanning
through Google results

\- which one will get the most clicks/views/pagerank at various points in time

That is, if they ever continue and look for the second one. And even if it
were the last one, many (most?) people will be subconsciously biased anyway by
the shock effect of the foo <-> sexual misconduct tie, which obliterates the
"innocent" part.

~~~
sincerely
People aren't proven innocent (at least in the US), they're found "not
guilty", which is significantly distinct

------
ocdtrekkie
I am a pretty big supporter of Right to Be Forgotten as a thing, and thought
this was an excellent summary of how it's gone so far! When you add the 89% of
the users being "private individuals", and that the next biggest category,
4.4%, is minors, it seems most of the requests definitely fall within the
purpose intended.

Without going into the details, 43% delisting rate seems likely quite fair, it
doesn't seem like it's being over-implemented by any means, but a good number
of requests are indeed being approved, this is a lot better than I expected,
to be honest.

~~~
userbinator
I'm the exact opposite: I believe that history should _never_ be rewritten nor
forgotten. The increasing "transientness" of information is, quite frankly,
extremely scary --- when future historians looking back may see only a
whitewashed representation of what things were really like.

Besides, Google forgets enough even without being told to:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840)

~~~
Xylakant
Why should history not be forgotten? It used it be that way all the time
before we managed to build information storage large enough to capture this
huge amount of data. And at what cost does it come that we never forget? Not
all too long ago (1993-1997), there was a large trial against 25 people for
alleged child abuse in germany. (1) All were eventually cleared, one person
died while in prison before the trial ended. It was one of the largest case of
false accusations for child abuse. The names were all over the press. Should
those people not have the right to have that memory fade? To have history be
forgotten at some point?

> Besides, Google forgets enough even without being told to:

That was not the case when the laws were drafted and enacted.

(Wormser Prozesse, sorry, german only
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormser_Prozesse](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormser_Prozesse))

~~~
aeorgnoieang
Should those people have the 'right' to be remembered, falsely, as child
abusers? Should anything and everything every written about the case be
expunged? Should individuals be responsible for purging their diaries of such
information too? Why not? Someone might upload it to the Internet in the
future and, because everyone else officially 'forgot', who will remain to
remember that this is officially prohibited information?

------
sjroot
I have been following Elie and his team's work for a while now, and enjoyed
this read, but I am curious as to why it was posted on his personal website as
opposed to Google's Research Blog
([https://research.googleblog.com](https://research.googleblog.com)). He is
one of four authors and this was clearly not a personal effort of his. Not to
mention, it would reach a larger audience if shared by Google directly.

~~~
ebursztein
Hey :)

We did have an official post today: [https://www.blog.google/topics/google-
europe/updating-our-ri...](https://www.blog.google/topics/google-
europe/updating-our-right-be-forgotten-transparency-report/) that is focused
on the improved transparency report rather than the research paper and I am
sure it will reach a larger audience. You will recognize the infographic that
I borrowed from it :)

When we make a paper public I have the habit to share a short summary
(sometime with a delay thus) of what the paper is about on my personal blog.
Kurt, Luca and Yuan helped with the summary on a personal capacity which is
why they are co-author of the blog post.

Bottom line this is not the official post, we do have one, it is just a
summary a few authors of the paper wrote in personal capacity to share some of
the finding we found the most interesting.

~~~
sjroot
I didn't see the Google Blog post - thank you for pointing me in the right
direction! And great work.

------
forapurpose
I've been wondering: How will Right To Be Forgotten be implemented in
blockchain products, where forgetting is supposed to be impossible? Am I
misunderstanding something fundamental about blockchains?

~~~
mikekchar
Indeed, this is an excellent thing to consider when you are using immutable
databases. GDPR is another such requirement that people are now having to
struggle with. Essentially, you need to be able to rewrite the DB with the new
information. For merkle chains that are in the public record (like Google's
scheme to to publish certificate requests so that CA shenanigans are obvious
to anyone that looks -- the name of which escapes me at the moment), it's not
going to be reasonable. It's not so much the merkle chain, but the fact that
the data is _already_ distributed. Getting everybody to resign the chain would
be pretty hard, but getting them all to delete the data is unreasonable...
"Pretty please. We got asked by a judge, you know!"

So essentially, you need to make sure you don't put that kind of information
in that kind of DB.

(P.S. It's a bit of a shame that you're getting down voted for such a good
question, but I suggest you substitute "merkle chain" for "blockchain" when
you want to ask technical questions of this sort.)

~~~
e_d_e_v_at
I believe the program you're looking for is Certificate Transparency. To be
honest, write-permanently databases have been around for a while (for example
pgp keyservers that peer and distribute keys relatively quickly). Basically,
it is a problem unsolved except by having seriously smart people who do this
stuff for its own sake, hacking at the data directly, and are distributed
across and able to effectively communicate from many jurisdictions.

------
mirimir
So are there any search engines that ignore RTBF?

Edit: Public ones, I mean. I'm sure that major TLAs do.

------
dantheman
We need to be careful with our words. There is no "Right to be forgotten".
Framing[1] denotes the battlefield terrain, if you accept the frame you've
already lost. A better title might be: Insights on the First Three Years of
European Censorship of Google.

1 [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/the-framing-
wars....](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/the-framing-wars.html)

~~~
onion2k
_There is no "Right to be forgotten"._

In the context of Google's search results, according to the European Union's
"Data Protection Directive" that's based on an interpretation of the OECD's
definition of privacy, yes there is. You can't just declare there isn't such a
thing as the Right to be Forgotten as fact. You may choose not to recognise
it, but there definitely is such an _idea_ that many people believe is a
right.

In a wider context there are many countries where case law implies there is a
Right to be Forgotten too, including the US.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten)

