
Google bows to EU privacy ruling - AJ72
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/b827b658-e708-11e3-88be-00144feabdc0.html
======
blazespin
Oh those poor search engines, making billions of dollars having to have the
decency to let private individuals not have to have their lives opened up to
casual searches on the internet 24/7\. What a tragedy!

I for one have NO DESIRE for my children to grow up in a world where they do
not have control over information about themselves on the internet. I can only
pray this sensible law makes it to North America.

For those downvoting - are you a shill for Google? Try reading the form itself
to appreciate how exceedingly reasonable it is:

A recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union found that
certain users can ask search engines to remove results for queries that
include their name where those results are “inadequate, irrelevant or no
longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were
processed.” In implementing this decision, we will assess each individual
request and attempt to balance the privacy rights of the individual with the
public’s right to know and distribute information. When evaluating your
request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information
about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information—for
example, information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal
convictions, or public conduct of government officials.

~~~
ars
People aren't complaining about the idea of removing private information.

They are complaining that you are just removing it from _google_. The info is
still there!

And not only that, it's only removed from google.co.{eu*} google.com will
still have it.

Which makes it as stupid of a law as the one about cookies: Make it look like
you are helping privacy while actually doing nothing of any value.

Anyone from the EU who wants the full scoop about someone will just use the US
google site, making this a completely pointless exercise.

~~~
MzHN
>it's only removed from google.co.{eu*} google.com will still have it

Where is this information from? Sounds a bit strange, but I guess it could be
true. It's not the first time big companies say "f u" to these rulings.

~~~
mike_hearn
Given the disaster this is likely to inflict on search results if scaled up,
and the fact that it's not required in America, do you really think they'll
make the whole global search engine work this way? Or do you think they'll do
the same thing as done in every other case where some stupid country requires
censorship: block based on domain name or IP address?

Historically, for Europe it's been done via domain name. Doing it via IP
address would not be any more effective though: there'd immediately be dozens
of proxy sites set up running in the US that simply forward the search to the
US Google and return the results.

Short of building an equivalent to the Chinese Great Firewall and blocking all
encrypted traffic, or forcing Google to apply European cenorship globally,
there's no way to stop Europeans who want regular results pages from getting
them.

------
tuukkah
This is the actual form "Search removal request under European Data Protection
law":
[https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_eudpa?product=we...](https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_eudpa?product=websearch)

------
cyphunk
Larry's request at TED a few months back that we have more faith in
corporations shows how much we have already lost to the hands of an
increasingly commercial internet. When it is clear that there is no neutral
party to trust any more (gov nor corp) balkanisation through enforcement of
new laws is a needed and natural effect.

------
arrrg
I don't know why, but this creeps me out. This seems like such a hard balance
to get right and also too much of a burden for search engines. Also, there is
potential for abuse.

~~~
danieldk
Sure, it is a hard balance to get right. But privacy is an important right and
we should not throw it away because it creates some extra effort for a multi-
billion dollar company.

I also find it weak that Page plays the 'think of the startups' card. In fact,
I think that since the Snowden leaks, there are far more opportunities to
create privacy-aware or privacy-protecting services. E.g., I am pretty sure
that Duckduckgo, a startup in search, benefitted tremendously from the recent
attention to privacy issues.

~~~
cbr
DuckDuckGo certainly has benefited from privacy becoming more salient, but
this ruling is probably negative for them. Each of these removal requests
needs manual review to keep people from requesting takedowns of other people's
stuff. There are ~500M people eligible to request takedowns under the ruling,
and if 1% of them ask for one link removed per year that's 14k requests per
day. If each request takes 5min then you need 143 people working full time.
Which high but doable for Google, but at ~20 employees this would be an
enormous burden for DDG.

These numbers could be higher if someone puts out a campaign that goes viral
and gets lots of people submitting requests, and there's nothing that stops
people outside the EU from submitting (invalid) requests.

One thing in DDG's favor, however, is that that at first people are probably
only going to send these requests to Google.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, on open source software.

~~~
danieldk
_There are ~500M people eligible to request takedowns under the ruling, and if
1% of them ask for one link removed per year that 's 14k requests per day. If
each request takes 5min then you need 143 people working full time. Which high
but doable for Google, but at ~20 employees this would be an enormous burden
for DDG._

You are making a mistake in your math here, since a sizeable portion of that
500M people use Google, but probably only a fraction of a percent uses DDG.

In other words, if DDG's usage is currently 1% that of Google (which would
surprise me), that's 1.43 people. If you are a search company of 20 people, it
seems reasonable to me to have at least a few people working on keeping your
index clean.

~~~
cbr
For my privacy to be protected in this way it doesn't matter what search
engine I use, it matters what search engine the people who are trying to look
me up use. If I want a fact about me to not come up when people search for my
name I would need to remove it from any search engine others might look in.
This is a lower barrier than usage, but you're right that at least for now
people probably won't bother submitting these to DDG.

Unless someone makes a single form for submitting a removal request to
all/most search engines? Though I guess then the search engines could pool
together and do some kind of centralized processing of these requests?

------
porcogordo
This is great for google, they have the manpower to do it, creating barriers
to entry for the potential future competition.

~~~
rnnr
But.., but.., what about our rights??? /retard

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k-mcgrady
I actually have what I think is a valid reason to use this.

Years ago I created a friendfeed account. I used their Twitter signup button.
Now years later I would like to close my friendfeed account to remove that
information from the internet. There's nothing particularly bad about it but
it's old, useless and I would rather it was deleted. The problem is I can't
login into my account as I authorised through Twitter and I've since deleted
my Twitter account. I also can't get in touch with anyone at friendfeed since
they've shutdown but left their site up.

This ruling gives me a way to hide that friendfeed page from people.
Unfortunately it will still be up but it's unlikely anyone will find it
'accidentally' if it isn't on Google.

~~~
higherpurpose
I also agree that for reasons such as this (deleting an unwanted account) the
ruling is useful. The real problem is demanding _Google_ or other services
like theirs to delete data that appears from _other_ services, that Google has
nothing to do with, other than indexing them. Of course you'd have to believe
that once the data is gone from the parent host, it disappears from Google's
cache, too, automatically.

But just asking Google to get rid of it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and
I think it unnecessarily punishes them, too. Think about the tens of millions
of such requests they'd have to respond to every year in the future.

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andybak
Will these take-downs at least make it to www.chillingeffects.org? I do hope
so.

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globalpanic
why does the link go to ft.com, rather than google.com (the domain listed
after the link)

~~~
jve
When you search Google and copy a link from results page, thats what you get.
Links are going through google.com and redirected to the site.

This is probably what author did. :/

~~~
dang
It's a clever trick. Unfortunately, it breaks the referential integrity of the
post. I don't think we can allow it as the submission url, for the same reason
we don't allow link shorteners. People who are already posting links to Google
searches in comments, though, might want to post these instead.

For those reading this later, the submitted url was
[http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCoQqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F2%2Fb827b658-e708-11e3-88be-00144feabdc0.html&ei=mSOIU6bcOITvoASx54LgCA&usg=AFQjCNHUMgpLy_trccfJHij-
yjxxqAo52Q&bvm=bv.67720277,d.cGU)

~~~
Tomdarkness
The only problem is now when you click on the submission link you can't view
the article because you need a FT subscription. If you clicked the link that
sends you via Google you can view the article due to the FT allowing limited
free views via search engines.

~~~
dang
Yes—that's why the trick is clever. But this has been the situation for a long
time, and much as we're all annoyed by the annoyance, it would clearly be
inappropriate to have all paywalled links show up in HN as "google.com". If
people want to post links like this in comments, that wouldn't be a big
deviation from current practice.

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hellbreakslose
Google bows... Misleading title by Financial Times that doesn't bow under laws
eh? Funny how the media can manipulate the wording and judge someone.

It's called LAW! You don't BOW to it, you OBEY.

What would FT do in Google case? form an army and go fight against the EU?...
Sick of reading articles like that.

Its sad that the EU is voting those laws, but its not Google fault of trying
to be a legal company...

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happyscrappy
Only Europeans will have their data censored. Good for businesses hosting
VPNs.

