
A list of search results omitted due to the “Right to be forgotten” - afaqurk
http://hiddenfromgoogle.com/index.html
======
hosay123
Perhaps the list would be more representative if it included at least a few
victims of sexual exploitation, or teenagers who previously had trouble
getting naked images of themselves removed from servers hosted outside the EU.
Ideally it would also include a link to every child porn web site on the IWF's
blacklist, as used by at least the UK.

The problem with simply listing known cases where the "censorship" mechanism
has some inefficiencies is that it hides the many cases where it can have a
very real benefit to peoples' lives. The current implementation of the EU
ruling leaves a lot to be desired, but let's not challenge its intent -
restoring an element of privacy and security that search engines have been
strip mining for their own benefit for over a decade.

~~~
Karunamon
Let's definitely challenge its intent. We're talking about public figures in
some cases, here. I'd say the right of the public to know and freedom of
speech (the concept, not the law) trumps "privacy" (aka a weak attempt to
suppress publicly known facts via legislative diktat) on the open internet.

Look at what's being taken down here...

I hope:

* That this site gets mirrored en masse,

* That the EU regulators get a taste of the Streisand effect and how that applies to censorship

* That anyone who filed a censorship request (that's all this is, just dressed up in more flowery language) learns how the internet works.

~~~
nmrm
This is _literally_ the exact same argument as "security trumps privacy".

NSA et al. argue that they need to know about everyone's dirty laundry in
order to protect civil society from terrorists (or whatever).

You argue that the public needs at-your-fingertips access to everyone's dirty
laundry in order to protect civil society from (idk? dictatorship that will
inevitably ensue if sleazy reporters don't get their ad revenue?)

How about this alternative: whenever something actually important is de-
listed, concerned citizens can mirror en masse. But when some trivial bit of
gossipy sleaze reporting that no on cares about is de-listed, we let it die
its rightful death.

I see no reason to Streisand-effect _private_ citizens trying to rebuild their
life after some reporter decided to make a quick buck profiting off of a
single stupid mistake. The fact that you're so gung-ho about contributing to
these people's continued misfortune in the name of your political agenda is
deeply troubling.

~~~
cdellin
I disagree very strongly with your purported equivalence between Karunamon's
argument and that of the NSA.

My primary problem with the NSA is that they (a) use their position of power
to install backdoors in hardware/software/infrastructure, (b) do it in secret,
(c) claim to be in some way "above the law" w.r.t. secret courts, (d) use
public taxpayer money, and (e) motivate their behaviour using bogus anti-
terror claims. None of these infractions exist in the "right to be forgotten"
scenario.

Fundamentally, in the story of the NSA, it is the NSA that is in a position of
power that can and will be abused. In this case, it is the power to scrub the
entire internet of information by imposing centralized censorship which, in my
mind, is simply too much power to put in one place.

~~~
nmrm
The equivalence is in the rhetorical justification, not the methodology. In
both cases, an appeal to security is used to trivialize the importance of
privacy.

For the NSA, terrorism > privacy _every time_. For Karunamon, "censorship" >
privacy _every time_. In both cases, the mechanism is an appeal to security in
order to avoid a more nuanced discussion of the issue.

> to scrub the entire internet of information

And this is where the rubber hits the road. _" Any possible risk of <bad thing
here> means privacy doesn't matter"_. That's the sort of crap reasoning used
by the NSA.

The fact is that the risk of what you're describing is incredibly low, and the
good of the law outweighs even a high-magnitude abuse because effectively
abusing this law in that manner is highly unlikely to succeed.

This is what I mean. After rejecting the "stop <bad thing here> at all costs!"
logic, we can do an actual cost-benefit analysis and take into account the
extremely low probability of <bad thing here> actually happening.

The information is still there, but private citizens don't need to pay
hundreds/thousands to SEO firms in order to get embarrassing gossip sites off
the first page of Google results.

Let's be clear: the dichotomy in this case is between lazy reporter's and SEO
firm's right to profit, and an individual citizen's right to privacy. Since I
view lazy reporters and SEO as parasites anyways, the choice is clear for me.

Reframing this issue as a "security from dictatorial abuse of power" is
playing the same game as the NSA. And worse, it's disingenuous. If the
mechanism is abused, Streisand effect always solves back. But there's no
reason to go around harming private citizens just because _" censorship!"_

~~~
givan
But now an appeal to privacy is used to trivialize the importance of
censorship, both of them are important, what is more important to you?

~~~
nmrm
Not at all! I and other comment authors on this thread have mentioned that
because of the nature of both the law and the internet, abuse is highly
unlikely.

This means that the _100% certain probability_ that people are currently
marginally hurt by search-engine-magnified sleazy journalism far outweighs the
almost-negligible probability of high-magnitude abuse of the law.

Other threads on this story have also dealt with other mitigating factors
which decrease the probability of abuse, such as the fact that public figures
are excluded.

I'm not trivializing censorship; I'm entering a cost-benefit analysis where
the importance of an impact is a function of _both_ its probability _and_ the
magnitude of the impact, instead of attributing certainty to every outcome and
reasoning on impact alone.

Incidentally even the US Supreme Court -- a country where free speech and
anti-censorship are (constitutionally) paramount -- does this sort of
analysis. Libel, inciting violence, and a slew of other exceptions to free
speech have been upheld by that court.

What I'm doing is considering the overall welfare of society, instead of
picking and choosing individual issues that _always much come first no matter
what_. In this case, there's a clear and present good done by the law and the
chances of bad things happening are minimized by safeguards.

edit: my comments are sometimes living documents. Mostly tweaking of the last
2 paragraphs.

------
userbinator
This reminds me that sometimes search results will have "results were removed
from this page due to DMCA complaint, click here to view it" and then you can
go through and see the whole list of URLs that were removed... and they're
often the torrent/warez sites with the real pirated content, so it's almost
like they added a "pirate mode" filter. (I don't pirate anything these days,
so I don't need it, but still a little amusing that Google is basically taking
the "removed from search results" rather literally.)

~~~
leni536
Actually the DMCA complaint list is quite useful and I used it many times.
However since duckduckgo is quite good and does not give a damn about these
DMCA complaint lists I don't need to use google's DMCA lists anymore.

------
x1798DE
I imagine this won't be a popular opinion, but I don't see why it is necessary
for this site to populate the list using javascript when server-side scripting
would suffice.

Maybe they're trying to fool search bots so their site won't get delisted? I'm
fairly sure Google at least has a bot built on Chrome (or rather Chrome was
built around their search bot) that executes JS just fine.

Unfortunately, all it does is make a site that doesn't degrade well with
scripting turned off.

------
buzzkills
The Stan O'Neil one is incorrect. Google spokes persons was on BBC Radio the
other day and stated that it was one of the commenters on the article that
requested the removal.

Here I found a source: [http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/07/04/google-
takedown-requ...](http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/07/04/google-takedown-
requests/)

~~~
joosters
I heard this too - this site needs to be careful that it isn't pushing false
information. Could it viewed as defamatory, I wonder?

------
RexRollman
Out of curiosity, how is Bing handling this same situation? It applies to them
as well, correct?

~~~
logicallee
They actually handle this really well! You can never find anything.

------
chton
This is going to unleash hell when it gets big enough to be near the top
google search results. Not only will anybody googling somebody know what they
did, they'll know the person wanted it removed.

I wonder how long it will take for google to de-list the site.

~~~
ISL
An interesting problem -- is Google forced by the EU ruling to de-list
anything related to the de-listing of a page?

~~~
_delirium
Not simply for commenting on the de-listing, but if the page is republishing
information that's considered a violation of privacy in the EU, it's still a
violation of privacy. This would be clearest in the case of e.g. compromising
pictures of high-school kids or other such non-public figures. If you started
a site reposting those pictures after Google delists the original sites that
published them, obviously your site would also be subject to delisting.

------
krick
So the moral is simple: in the 21th century you have _no_ right to be
forgotten. Not sure if it's actually fine.

~~~
dragonwriter
The "right to be forgotten" is the "right" to suppress true speech by others,
and is in fundamental opposition to the right of free speech. Its a close
cousin of the forms of libel laws where truth is _not_ a defense that suppress
true and accurate criticism, and the recognition that you can't have that kind
of thing and free speech at the same time isn't a 21st century observation.

Its also, from a pragmatic standpoint, about equivalent to attempting to
command the tides by law.

~~~
gaius
OMG they're stealing my rights!!!

Except not really. Google, despite what many might like to think, is not an
"official" entity, it's a private company. They aren't disseminating
information for the public good, whatever that is, but so they can slap an ad
on it and make some profits. So what if Jo(e) Bloggs did something
embarrassing a decade ago? If one of your friends was constantly bringing up
things from years ago, you'd get tired of them doing so pretty quickly. Why
should Google get to do it to make some money off of it? And what sort of
_gossip monger_ even wants this to be possible?

~~~
hyperpape
So the New York Times isn't a private company then? Just repeating "private
company" is meaningless as a justification for well...just about anything.
You'll have to find a different point to argue.

~~~
gaius
The NYT did the work and wrote the story and the editor decided it was worth
publishing. The don't just dredge it up, slap an ad on it, and call that
adding value. And if a newspaper gets something wrong, it does retract it.

------
unhammer
So now it's a "Right to a Streisand effect"

------
givan
Most of the things I see in the comments from the supporters of the law are
selfish arguments, what if Joe couldn't delete his ugly story from the past,
everyone wants this tool, maybe they want to remove something in the future
about themselves, it might come in handy, they want it so badly that they are
willing to sacrifice freedom of speech, maybe Joe should be more careful
instead of trying to bury what he did to get away because Joe might become
someone important and we should know things that otherwise will get buried.

------
maccard
This page is almost 1MB downloaded, including 5 fonts, bootstrap, angular, and
jquery. It does not need to be this complicated. My facebook homepage,
including images, is smaller than this site.

------
fragsworth
So if this list is published, won't this have kind of a Streisand effect for
people who request to be removed from Google search results?

------
kghose
Let's face it, this is simply an attempt to make it harder for Google to
operate in the EU. It's probably mainly normal bureaucratic nonsense,
encouraged along by some nationalism and probably a bit from european
corporations hoping to gain some market share away.

------
known
Google's search removal request URL 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#)

------
known
Netcraft Risk Rating is 10/10
[http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://hiddenfro...](http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://hiddenfromgoogle.com)

~~~
personZ
Because it's a brand new domain running on AWS.

------
itamarhaber
LOL - so now google.com + hiddenfromgoogle.com == the entire internets!

~~~
Torn
I wonder if google indexes hiddenfromgoogle, or if they'll exempt them

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Indexed [1]. Even comes complete with the "Some results may have been removed
under data protection law in Europe" message.

[1]
[https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ahiddenfromgoogle.co...](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ahiddenfromgoogle.com+Dougie+McDonald)

