
Google Search Results: Dictator Not Found - danso
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/05/dictator-not-found.html
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jrockway
[http://www.bonkersworld.net/forgetting/](http://www.bonkersworld.net/forgetting/)

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axanoeychron
For the EU requirement to check if information is in the public interest, we
have to have guards against the system being abused, such as wealthy people
removing information about themselves.

This implies some sort of public record - to provide transparency of the
requests and check for abuse. This could not be indexed either because it
would reveal the information that people were trying to stop being revealed.

Dilemma.

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Crito
Are these guards against abuse anything like the "guards against abuse" that
the English presumably have to prevent abuse of super-injunctions by multi-
millionare footballers?

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axanoeychron
It would seem that applying a law in spirit is incompatible with human nature.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_and_spirit_of_the_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_and_spirit_of_the_law)

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turbohz
The proper way to handle such mess would be a "right to be forgiven", not a
"right no be forgotten". But then, some things are easier to forget than to
forgive.

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bowlofpetunias
The only connection with "such a mess" and the EU court ruling are the word
"forgotten" and a Spaniard.

The rest of the article is just manipulative association that would make
Godwin blush.

The EU court does not disagree with you, no matter how hard the anti-privacy
lobby tries to make it look that way.

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kghose
What about internet archive, then?

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axanoeychron
Good question.

While the right to forget is socially beneficial for society, there are
technical problems that make it inconvenient. There is the problem of whether
it is censorship to force a neutral party whose mandate is merely to store
historical copies of data to remove it. Or is it Google's responsibility to
just 'forget' that the copy exists in the web archive?

Do defaced websites get indexed by the internet archive? Does illegal
information get removed from the internet archive?

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abruzzi
What exactly is "illegal information"? In the US for the most part, we have a
distinction between the information and how it was obtained. Daniel Ellsberg
may have done something illegal when he released the Pentagon Papers, but once
it was in the hands of journalists, the US could not stop its publication.

I also disagree that the "right to forget" is socially beneficial. It may
benefit individuals who have negative thing about them that they want
expunged, but for society as a whole, we are the worse off because if everyone
can have their image cleaned of their past, predators and destructive people
will have an easier time hiding and preying on others.

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shiift
I feel like this could be abused to remove competitors' content from Google
results. Couldn't this be a problem?

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bowlofpetunias
Baseless scaremongering by the New Yorker. That's really a new low in American
anti-privacy propaganda.

The first paragraph alone reads like the kind of paranoia I would expect from
the Tea Party.

 _" Google has to scrub any material that a user wants taken down, as long as
removing it doesn’t hurt the public interest."_

It's a lot, a lot more nuanced than that.

Also, the EJC is nowhere near the equivalent of the US Supreme Court. The EU
is not a federal state.

The rest of the article basically goes into a Godwinesque directions, only for
this occasion we're using Franco's fascists instead of Hitler's Nazi's.

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YokoZar
The Spanish high court deferred to the European Court of Justice, and there's
no one for them to defer to after that. That makes the Supreme Court analogy
pretty apt as far as judicial rulings are concerned in this matter.

If you read the entire article, you'll note that the post-Franco era
discussion is mostly backstory for how the whole issue of public forgetting is
particularly relevant in Spain, and in fact why this test case came from
Spain. The article itself then goes on to mention how no fascists have (yet)
asked for a Google scrub, however it does imply that someone might eventually
try.

And it's a good point to raise, as all this "nuance" will require some sort of
system of rules and arbitration to decide what is "in the public interest" on
a case by case basis. Such a system could be quite burdensome, or prone to
abuse.

In contrast, countries with strong free speech protections have a rather
simple set of rules for when you're allowed to force others to remove true
statements from the internet: you dont.

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axanoeychron
This is a strawman argument.

It's blatantly obvious that a historically significant event such as a
dictator needs to be kept as part of the history books because of the impact
it had on many different people.

At the end - the argument that anything that is published and is true as a
reason why we should not allow people to delete things about themselves is
deeply disturbing and sets a dangerous precedent. Just because something is
true does not mean it should be broadcast for everyone to hear and see. If you
go to the toilet and leave a big dump - not everyone needs to know this, when
you did it, its mass.

Lossless public record is something that people do not understand the full
implications. I am predicting a collision course with the precedence from this
case with anonymous gossip sharing applications like Secret. No good comes
from allowing people to publish things about others with the intention to harm
and no recourse for victims.

What the forgetting laws is for is to help a young person delete embarrassing
content from the modern day equivalent of Geocities or Bebo. People are
screened for employment online - why should a child whose transgressions in a
previous generation would have been transient be stored for eternity? What
utility does that provide?

EDIT: If you disagree - use the reply button.

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tantalor
> People are screened for employment online

The solution here is to regulate hiring practices, not access to information.

For example, in the US, it is not legal to base a hiring decision on whether
an applicant is married. Anybody can search newspaper archives for marriage
announcements, but we don't ban newspapers.

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croggle
You can't regulate this. How do you know why I didn't _really_ hire you?

~~~
tantalor
The legal system,

[http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/qanda.html](http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/qanda.html)

[http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/lawsuits-based-the-
hi...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/lawsuits-based-the-hiring-
process.html)

[http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/employment_discrimination](http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/employment_discrimination)

~~~
croggle
My point still stands. How do you know that I didn't hire you because I hate
gays but I tell everyone I didn't hire you because of that one Java question
you got wrong. It's very very hard to prove and can be expensive to take to
take to court.

People like you with your rosy view of the world make it hard for people with
real problems to get by.

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lightyrs
Just wait until the first Facebook-generation presidential candidate — the
right to be forgotten will be considered a 'human right'.

~~~
dublinben
Unfortunately, this likely won't be the case. Millennials I know who harbor
desires to run for president some day are so boring, that they have nothing
incriminating on their social media accounts to even be worried about. They
will just use this kind of information against their potential and actual
competitors. I suspect that it will take at least another generation before we
are willing to accept a candidate whose colorful youth comes to light before
they're elected.

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happyscrappy
It is bewildering that Europeans think this is a good idea or even remotely
workable. Maybe some EU company would like to take a stab at operating under
these kind of capricious rulings.

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vacri
_It is bewildering that Europeans think this is a good idea or even remotely
workable._

It is bewildering that you can't see why Europeans might think that personal
privacy might be a significant issue.

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koepked
I think personal privacy is a significant issue, but I also think this is a
bad idea, and not even remotely workable.

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vacri
I'm not saying I agree with it as an idea, but Google has a history of doing
hard things (indeed, was founded on a hard thing), and what about the American
'can-do' attitude when it comes to hard things?

As for personal privacy, new-world Anglo countries (where I am, and where most
of the people on this site are) don't hold a candle to the history of pogroms
that old-world countries have had, with the exception of treatment of first
peoples. It's not just the Nazis and the Holocaust here, but a long history of
terrorism and vigilantism. Europe still has wars (and similar) based on
ethnicity - for example the Balkan states in the 90s, or eastern Ukraine going
on right now. The last significant internal conflict in the new-world
Anglosphere was 150 years ago. Europe has had a significantly different
experience, which should be taken into context when understanding their
decisions around privacy.

