

Hidden From Google - e15ctr0n
http://hiddenfromgoogle.com/

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minaandrawos
The issue here is two fold: if you committed a simple offence like -say- shop
lifting at some point of your life, get caught, get punished, regret it then
you try to make things right and get back to society. Having a permanent
record of that in the internet can pretty much destroy your life even though
you didn't kill anybody. We are all humans, we all make mistakes. On the other
hand, if it is okay for courts to make things "disappear" from internet gates
like Google then any ambitious politician\lawyer with zero concern for public
interest can make the internet his pet by hiding some of his history from the
public and any dictator can mask everything they do even if their citizens use
proxies to bypass their firewalls. In my personal opinion, the most practical
way to address this is to prevent publishing names on newspapers for offenders
in minor offences as opposed to hiding Google's search results.

~~~
incision
_> 'The issue here is two fold: if you committed a simple offence like -say-
shop lifting at some point of your life, get caught, get punished, regret it
then you try to make things right and get back to society. Having a permanent
record of that in the internet can pretty much destroy your life even though
you didn't kill anybody.'_

Not necessarily.

Exactly such a conviction didn't stop at least one guy from becoming in some
sense the most notable CIO in the US and VP at a major SV company.

Of course, I expect he was better equipped than many to mitigate such things,
but not exceptionally so.

Ideally, we would - as a society stop discriminating against or wholly
shredding each other over petty bullshit. We'd acknowledge a whole range of
stuff that currently is called at best an indiscretion or lapse in judgement
as actually perfectly average, human behavior.

Obviously, that's not to say any and everything is simply 'OK', particularly
if it is habitual or done with malice.

It's simply getting back to a reality where we try to hold each other to such
squeaky clean ideals that someone representing them would either be so bland
as to have little in common with the rest of the world or more likely, have
done a great job of covering it all up.

Moving forward, I actually think we get to that point one way or the other. I
don't think information security has much hope of keeping up with our
increasing connectedness, sharing (intentional or otherwise) and growing trail
of digital footprints.

Eventually it's all just noise.

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Vik1ng
12 listings... Well, that seems to work really great considering google is
complaining about thousands of requests.

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jpgvm
Alot of these people seem to have found themselves in trouble they would
rather forget. I can understand that.

However, it doesn't work that way. Just because Google might forget you
doesn't mean DuckDuckGo and friends will, how about Usenet and news aggregator
sites like HackerNews?

No matter how much these people want whatever happened to go away that can't
and won't happen, it's only a matter of time until this new law is abolished
too.

~~~
Vik1ng
The ruling applies to every search engine.

90%+ of Europeans use google. How many use DuckDuckGo? So not having that
stuff on google is pretty effective.

    
    
       how about Usenet and news aggregator sites like HackerNews?
    

Who uses that stuff when looking up someone?

~~~
joosters
It only covers EU 'based' search engines. If DDG has no servers in Europe, I
don't think they have to do anything to comply with this ruling.

~~~
Vik1ng
And that works because they are pretty much irrelevant right now. I doubt they
could get aways with no presence in on of their biggest markets, if the reach
something like 25-50% market share.

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r721
Previously discussed:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7994613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7994613)

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caiob
Well, this website kinda defeats the purpose, no?

~~~
matchu
That's the purpose. These folks aren't Google, but _are_ actively trying to
undermine the EU ruling forcing Google to remove these links.

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chippy
How many man hours at Google went on to develop the feature for this, I
wonder?

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randywatkins
What is the ostensible reason these things are being hidden?

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splintercell
"Right to be forgotten" \- I am sorry but these positive rights are getting
ridiculous.

~~~
explorigin
Seriously? How can we expect legislation to protect our privacy but not the
privacy of those that we don't like?

Your comment is exactly like Eric Schmidt saying "If you have something that
you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first
place." and then pushing for drone control to keep his own privacy.

~~~
bad_user
I don't think you know what _privacy_ means and I'm not defending Eric Schmidt
here.

Getting busted for drunk driving, with a news story as a side effect - that's
public information, not private. And if indeed you prove your innocence with a
blood test, you can always ask the newspaper to retract their story or sue for
defamation. But again, getting caught drunk while driving, that's public
information, not private, so privacy doesn't enter the picture.

Just to be clear, lets try some samples:

PUBLIC: a picture with you drunk done by somebody else

PRIVATE: a selfie with you drunk that's stored on your laptop or DropBox or
GDrive

PUBLIC: a record of you being at a Starbucks at 12:00 this Monday

PRIVATE: your track record of where you've been hanging out every day at 12:00
in the last month

PUBLIC: your face

PRIVATE: your social security number

PUBLIC: your sexual orientation

PRIVATE: your sexual orientation

Can you spot any differences? As a hint - privacy is the right to protect
private information about yourself, but it's definitely not the right to hide
information that's already public.

Of course, I can see the rationale behind the "Right to be Forgotten". I could
agree with it. Except for the fact that I live in a country in which
corruption is a problem - and this right will be used for censoring acts of
corruption and I have a problem with this.

~~~
JadeNB
> PUBLIC: a record of you being at a Starbucks at 12:00 this Monday

> PRIVATE: your track record of where you've been hanging out every day at
> 12:00 in the last month

This seems problematic. What is it about the aggregate information that makes
it private? That is, at what point does a collection of individually public
data become private? (I agree that it _should_ , but would have trouble
defining the precise point at which it _does_.)

> PUBLIC: your sexual orientation

> PRIVATE: your sexual orientation

I guess that this was intentional, but I think that I don't understand. Do you
mean that sexual activities that are undertaken in public (I can't come up
with a good way to phrase that—I mean innocently, things like dating and such)
are public, and sexual activities that are undertaken, say, in the bedroom are
private?

~~~
tredontho
I'd guess that the point is your sexual orientation is both since it isn't
really anyone else's business, but obviously your partners (even if they are
super secret partners) will know, making it public?

