
Reflecting on the Right to be Forgotten - DiabloD3
https://blog.google/topics/google-europe/reflecting-right-be-forgotten/
======
danaliv
I'm guessing very few, if any, people here have ever felt a need to be
forgotten. There was a time only a couple short decades ago when a person who
made mistakes could do the work to make things right, make themselves a better
person, and move on with their life. Now that's extremely difficult if not
impossible. Mistakes are newsworthy and get indexed; redemption isn't and
doesn't. That's not to say that everyone who makes mistakes redeems
themselves. But those who do, nowadays, still have to enter every new job,
every new relationship, with the dark past just a few keystrokes away.

I would like to stress that this is a very new development. As such, I think
it merits discussion beyond a simple black-and-white free speech analysis. I
would urge you all to look beyond abstract principles and consider also the
human impact that these policies have on actual people's lives. Try to
imagine, if you can, what it's like for a person who has done the hard work to
right their wrongs after landing in the news. Don't they deserve to be allowed
to shut the door on their past when it's no longer who they are?

I also think it's important to note that we (in the U.S.) do already recognize
such a right when it comes to criminal records, through expungement
proceedings. We routinely remove convictions from people's criminal records. I
don't think any disagreement with this "right to be forgotten" is complete if
it can't be reconciled with that.

~~~
Taek
I don't think it's practical to expect to be forgotten. Archives will save
webpages, and mistakes are interesting to science.

As tech continues to improve, we will increasingly face a world where there
are no secrets. I don't see this as preventable. Everyone has a camera in
their pocket, and soon it might be on their face a la Google Glass or
Microsoft Holo Lens.

Instead we have to learn to live with it. I think that every single person in
this thread can think of a dozen things they wouldn't want made public. For
each they fear something between judgement and prosecution. The ability to
hide those things is disappearing though.

My thought is that a cultural shift towards leniency and forgiveness is going
to be by far an easier path than enforced privacy. Not that shifting culture
is an easy path. But I don't see fighting technology as a battle that can be
won.

Cameras will be everywhere, streams will be accessible to everyone, and it's
all going to be archived and remembered. And not just physical life, but
digital life as well.

~~~
edblarney
"As tech continues to improve, we will increasingly face a world where there
are no secrets. I don't see this as preventable"

It's absolutely preventable, we just have to make the choice to do that.

Of course - there are 'some bits of data' that will get persisted here and
there, but by enlarge, there's ways to do this:

1) Policy 2) Common ethics 3) Regulation 4) Architecture 5) Law

If it became 'policy' at most companies to address this issue, there are a
number of things they could do.

If it there was awareness about this - and it was framed as a moral issue,
large swaths of organizations might simply make do.

Identity/Software/Systems architecture may be able to enable this - i.e. being
able to make online transactions without actually identifying oneself.

Responsible regulations and responsible law could urge companies to do this.

Obvious, it will never be fully thus - but there are a lot of things that we
could do.

Starting with: any account you open, you should be able to close and have all
relevant information erased, unless there is some special requirement
otherwise.

This is law in some places and it's not entirely unreasonable.

If we collectively made the choice we could make the internet 'mostly' a
private experience for people.

~~~
wav-part
> _... any account you open, you should be able to close and have all relevant
> information erased, unless there is some special requirement otherwise._

> _This is law in some places and it 's not entirely unreasonable._

Its absolutely unreasonable (eg) for HN. And this is just one form of
information processing.

~~~
edblarney
I don't agree at all.

It's neither unreasonable nor entirely impractical from a mechanical
perspective once it's thought through a little bit.

Because comments are made here effectively anonymously, I don't see the issue,
but it's not at all unreasonable that comments could be removed given a
mandate.

~~~
wav-part
Giving every HN user power to delete all his comments will make HN unreadable.
To understand a comment, access to all ancestor comments is needed.

~~~
therealidiot
I don't know, I often encounter [flagged] or whatever it is that happens to
bad comments in the middle of a thread. It leaves me wondering what was
actually said.

So it happens already, just for different reasons...

~~~
DanBC
You can turn on [showdead] in your profile to see flagged comments.

~~~
therealidiot
Ah, I hadn't realised that!

------
zmmmmm
I'm ambivalent about RTBF when it's confined to a particular country - I can
see arguments in favor and against. But I think having one country's laws on
free speech extend out of that country is a massive bridge too far. Anybody
advocating for this needs to consider reciprocity - will they accept other
countries laws regulating what they can see, publish, read and hear?

But even with that aside, I don't think having the laws spread out of an
individual country reflects the spirit and intent of RTBF laws. The essential
problem is that people's privacy is violated because it suddenly becomes
trivial to find out negative, inaccurate and out of context information
incidentally. That is, you find out by accident, through casual browsing and
not because you specifically desired to research negative information about
that person. It has always been possible to find out about people's past if
you put in specific effort. Doing that is an essential activity for all kinds
of reasons. Going out of your way to use a VPN or a dedicated other-country
search site demonstrates an explicit attempt to research a person beyond mere
casual informational purposes.

So I think extending these laws out of their country of origin not only is a
terrible idea for free speech, but it doesn't even reflect the spirit of the
laws themselves.

~~~
smoyer
I agree with your opinion that it's ludicrous to extend RTBF beyond a
country's borders but I feel that even RTBF within a country or collection of
countries could be detrimental. If you do something newsworthy enough to make
it into a newspaper, I can go find out what you did (unless RTBF also requires
printed papers to go redact your information from each copy). Isn't this
collective knowledge part of what keeps society running? And doesn't this
provide incentives to behave (to those who are thinking about misbehaving)?

~~~
Silhouette
If you're thinking along those lines, you might consider that reputable
newspapers (and TV news shows) do issue retractions when earlier reports have
been incorrect or misleading. There is also some debate about how certain --
perhaps less reputable -- newspapers will print a big front page article that
is wrong, and then issue a tiny retraction on page 17 a few weeks later. The
concern is very similar to the arguments for RTBF online: disproportionate
coverage can leave the wrong impression with readers. Also similar to RTBF,
there is talk of stronger regulation, such as requiring retractions to be
printed or announced as prominently as the original story.

~~~
smoyer
I don't disagree with you ... if someone publishes incorrect information they
should own up to it and issue a retraction. And it makes complete sense to
make sure the original incorrect information is at least deprioritized.

------
lisper
Let us not lose sight of this: the enforcement of the "right to be forgotten"
is a form of censorship. This is not about enforcement of copyright, or
defamation, it's about an individual's ability to censor true information
simply because that information happens to be about them. And it can only be
effective if enforced globally. If the EU succeeds in enforcing the RTBF
globally it would set a catastrophic precedent for freedom of speech.

~~~
Silhouette
_This is not about enforcement of copyright, or defamation, it 's about an
individual's ability to censor true information simply because that
information happens to be about them._

No, it isn't. In fact, the original CJEU ruling was quite clear that the right
to be forgotten is _not_ absolute and _does_ have to be balanced against
competing considerations like freedom of expression on a case by case basis.

However, data protection laws in Europe are much stricter than in some places
when it comes to things like incomplete or out of date information. A key
detail in the right to be forgotten ruling is that it is not only the original
source of such information that bears responsibility for it, but also search
engines that make such information easier to find.

The point is that while such technologies are useful for finding good
information, they can also greatly magnify any damage caused by bad
information. A search engine that links to a newspaper article describing how
someone was accused of rape won't necessarily also link to the follow-up
article describing how the key witness later admitted in court that they made
the whole thing up and was found guilty of perjury themselves. And yet, a
prospective employer or girlfriend or whoever else might have reason to look
that person up by name won't know that and might reach entirely the wrong
conclusion if they only saw the first article. More significantly in this
hypothetical scenario, thanks to modern searching technologies, _every_
prospective employer or girlfriend or whoever else might have reason to look
that person up by name is likely to see the same article with the same missing
follow-up, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the entirely
innocent subject's life.

That's an easy example that surely no-one is going to seriously argue against,
because it's very clearly misrepresentative and the potential harm is obvious.
Once you get into information that is factually correct but either no longer
fairly represents an individual or is concealed for good reasons anyway,
things tend to get more complicated. There are reasons that justice systems
typically regard even most criminal convictions as spent after a certain
period of time and no longer require disclosure beyond that point. There is a
reason that courts sometimes order the identities of people involved in cases
before them to be concealed. There are many other good reasons for
confidentiality and privacy protections. In any of these situations, while
whoever is disclosing the information in the first place may be the original
cause of any resulting harm (and may be punished accordingly under the law),
it remains the case that a search tool making the information much quicker and
easier to find magnifies any resulting harm considerably.

~~~
wav-part
> _That 's an easy example that surely no-one is going to seriously argue
> against,_

This is ineffective legal solution to social problem.

Internet lies. Be cautious when placing trust especially on Internet. Two very
good advice people will eventually have to learn.

~~~
Silhouette
_Internet lies. Be cautious when placing trust especially on Internet. Two
very good advice people will eventually have to learn._

That will bring little comfort to the person who was wrongly accused of rape
in my example, when they are turned down for ten jobs in a row after HR search
for their name online and find only the reports of the malicious accusation.

Lies about a person can be extremely damaging. Even sharing the truth about
certain things that we normally consider private can be extremely damaging.
Unfortunately as a society we are nowhere near the state where everyone allows
for all information we find from any other source potentially being incorrect
or misleading and treats such things in an objective and considered manner.

I'm not sure reaching that state is even possible, in general. For example,
how long should a reasonable, responsible person spend looking for corrections
or retractions that might or might not exist before believing an article they
read online?

That is why we have defamation laws and that is why we now have related
protections like the "right to be forgotten".

------
intralizee
I find it funny when people can easily take the side, news or records should
stay permanent online forever.

Many lives are ruined daily by the law and the ruined lives can be innocent of
the crime accused of committing.

These people have to wait years to expunge in some cases and are not living
the easy life with a job that makes anything close to what software engineers
make.

The US does not care if you were not found guilty of the crime or what you
were accused of was dismissed. People will just see whatever in a background
search and close all doors without asking the other party.

A very horrible world for some people.

~~~
philipov
Only people earning less than X have a right to be forgotten.

~~~
usrusr
Which would be exactly the opposite of even the most optimistic "right to be
forgotten" scenario, because enforcing that right would certainly be a rather
expensive luxury.

------
dkarapetyan
Really weird dichotomies they're drawing. Clearly the intent behind the right
to be forgotten is to be removed from whatever indexing Google does to display
results regardless of where the query comes from. Trying to map national
boundaries over data is why this person is having such a hard time trying to
make a convincing case.

Data does not care about countries and national boundaries since clearly the
google servers doing the indexing could be in space. In which case would they
be allowed to not comply with any requests by people to be removed from their
indices? Or would they be compliant depending on which continent the servers
happened to be over at the time? Bordered data is an absurd concept and this
person is being very disingenuous by framing the argument in those terms.

~~~
jayajay
If you think bordered countries make sense, then bordered data should make
sense, right? Can't we trace packets back to a physical emitter?

I don't think this is a non-issue at all. If we replace "data" with "nukes",
it's obvious that borders matter. Neither nukes nor data care about borders,
but people do.

I think the last sentence sums it up really well:

"...should the balance between the right to free expression and the right to
privacy be struck by each country—based on its culture, its traditions, its
courts—or should one view apply for all?

~~~
dkarapetyan
Google is mis-directing here. It is obvious what I mean when I say "Delete me
from all your servers". I don't care what country those servers are in. This
is not a freedom of expression vs privacy issue. This is people being in
charge of their behavioral and historical data that google has locked up in
their data silos. Framing it otherwise is disingenuous. I'm still free to
express myself however I want on whatever forums I choose. Whether google gets
to freely index and profit from it is the real question except their lawyers
are trying to make it sound like they're champions of freedom of expression.

~~~
jodrellblank
It's obvious what you mean, but it's not obvious how or why an EU law means
Google has to change data in their datacenters in the USA for someone
searching from Brazil.

What if Australia ruled that Google must keep all data on all people worldwide
and forbid deletions. Should that override all other country laws? If not, why
should the EU law affect other countries?

> This is people being in charge of their behavioral and historical data that
> google has locked up in their data silos.

It's not "their" data. People clicked "I agree", and it's someone else's data
now. People aren't in charge of it, they never have been.

~~~
danieldk
_It 's obvious what you mean, but it's not obvious how or why an EU law means
Google has to change data in their datacenters in the USA for someone
searching from Brazil._

It is very simple. A country (or union) can require businesses that operate in
their country to fulfill a set of rules. One of the rules could be that it
should be possible for any user of the service to remove their data.

Although a country cannot enforce these rules globally in the strict sense, it
can forbid the company to operate in that country until it operates within the
boundaries of the law. Some companies will relent to get access to that
market.

(Whether this is a good idea is another question.)

~~~
zigzigzag
Yes, and France runs the risk of Google saying "well, FU France" and closing
its offices and presence there. If they try to enforce at the EU level, same
thing.

~~~
danieldk
Google will comply before pulling out of the EU. The EU is simply a market
that is too large.

~~~
zigzigzag
"Pulling out" of the EU means closing a few small offices (except for Dublin).
It has no significant staff presence outside of Ireland in the EU once the UK
leaves - the offices in France and Germany are really small.

If Google decides to start moving staff out of Dublin, the EU would lose its
last leverage over it.

The EU could then do a China and attempt to force ISPs to block Google
services at the network level. Given how much the web relies on Google
servers, that would break the EU internet. The EU is struggling already,
there's no way they're going to shoot themselves in the head economically like
that.

------
Silhouette
I'm a strong believer in personal privacy, and I also think that there are
reasonable arguments for "forgetting" (in the sense we're using it here)
information about individuals under some circumstances, sometimes even if that
information is correct.

However, this article makes a valid point. When operating in Europe, of course
you have to comply with the European legal framework, and the meaning of
"operating in Europe" is reasonably clear and has absolutely nothing to do
with accessing data via a European national TLD. However, absent relevant laws
or other agreements, I see no reason at all that what information people in
one nation provide to people in another nation should be constrained by the
wishes of people in a third nation. That sort of extra-territorial influence
would set a very unhealthy precedent, for exactly the kinds of reasons the
author set out here.

------
wyager
I think "The Right To Be Forgotten" is misleading in its use of the passive
voice. A more accurate description would be "The Right To Force Other People
To Forget".

~~~
dkarapetyan
How's that? How is asking google to remove me from their indices forcing other
people to forget? Where exactly is the "force"?

~~~
wyager
> How is asking google to remove me from their indices forcing other people to
> forget?

"Asking" is very different from "legally compelling".

If we buy the use of the "forgetting" terminology, it is quite clear how
forcing google to expunge someone from all records is "forcing other people to
forget". This isn't a complicated analogy, so I'm not sure what you're
confused about.

> Where exactly is the "force"?

EU Law. Is that not manifestly obvious?

~~~
dkarapetyan
Your analogy is flawed. Being removed from a google index because of a court
order != being wiped from peoples' memories by force. As far as I know the
technology for wiping memory doesn't exist yet and unless you are equating the
google index with some kind of exo-cortex and even then the analogy is quite a
stretch.

~~~
wyager
Obviously the "people" in this case are the proprietors of news websites, web
indexers, etc. If we look at the intent of the law (causing someone to be
erased from public view), we could also argue that the public is being forced
to forget in a moderately less concrete sense. I use the "memory wipe" analogy
because the people advocating for censorship are using the euphemistically
passive "forgetting" analogy. Not my choice, I'm just keeping it consistent.

------
heisenbit
This really is about Google putting a foot down on territorial limits of
enforcement. Without those we will be living in a lowest common denominator
world.

The stance they are taking is important beyond this specific issue e.g.
warrants wrt. data stored in foreign data centers and law enforcement hacking
foreign computers.

~~~
wheelerwj
No it's not. This is about google wanting to maintain control over someones
data just because they are in a different jurisdiction.

If google succeeds, the only thing that will happen is more walled off
sections of the internet as countries move to control the flow of data.

------
bambax
Although French, I tend to agree with Google. Bu what does this mean:

> _Aside from anything else, it’s plain common sense that one country should
> not have the right to impose its rules on the citizens of another,
> especially not when it comes to lawful content._

Lawful content? According to whom? By saying that, Google seems to agree that
there is such a thing as a universal lawfulness, which is the point the CNIL
is trying to make.

If there was a country that considered child porn to be completely ok (and
there may be), would Google let American citizen visiting that country search
and find child porn on the local Google?

~~~
zigzigzag
The "right to be forgotten" does not apply to illegal content. If it was
illegal it could just be removed from the origin servers (if in the EU) and
the publishers punished. The right to be forgotten applies to legal, true
content which nobody will be punished for, but which the person it's about
would prefer to go away.

------
Tharkun
Google should be entirely irrelevant when it comes to the right to be
forgotten. That right should be used to allow users to delete content from
websites. Who or what points to those websites is irrelevant. This is a broken
piece of legislation based on a broken understanding of how the internet
works.

There are alreadt laws about defamation etc which could be used to
censor/remove defamatory articles aimed at your person or business.

So RTBF shouldn't apply to content _about_ you, only to content _by_ you.

------
aub3bhat
Google is right on this one, what French are effectively doing is European
Imperialism 2.0. This is far far worse than whatever Russia or Chinese great
firewall does. Worse if Google does implements this worldwide then its game
over for internet as we know it. The next hot business would then be building
platforms to allow governments to interfere with tech companies under false
pretense of "privacy protection".

~~~
wav-part
You absolutely hit on all points. Great Firewall of China sound sane in
comparision.

------
tent
Police Google as much as you like. They can remove their results worldwide,
but not the data itself.

I'm confident that there will always be a search engine available that gets
around this law. Perhaps we will even see some specialized tools to show
_only_ results hidden by Google.

~~~
amelius
I think this argument is flawed. Analogy: there will always be people who
steal stuff; this doesn't mean we should accept the practice, and discard any
preventive measures.

~~~
jamescostian
I believe your analogy might be flawed. When theft is prevented, the downside
is that "thieves" don't end up with more things. But when you have the right
to be forgotten, you may also remove other things. For example, in an
election, a candidate's running mate could easily decide "I hate this person,
I want all of my work with them to be forgotten", which would severly hurt
that candidate's media coverage (sure, you can still find articles about that
candidate on some archives, but many voters do not work that hard to educate
themselves)

But that isn't even what your parent comment was talking about. They were
talking about how the whackamole game of censorship. If you put a law in place
to prevent theft, it's not like thieves start coming up with places for all
other thieves to come steal. On the other hand, if you censor Google Search
results, there's a good chance you'll see, e.g. employers, moving to another
search engine specifically for finding results people have requested to be
forgotten

~~~
amelius
Well, granted, my analogy might be flawed, but to second order approximation.
The original argument, however, is flawed in the first order.

------
id122015
What is annoying about Companies House in the UK, is that when you open a
company, and even after you close it, they make your Name, your Address and
your Date of Birth public on the internet, inviting thus Identity thieves to
fraud you. It wouldnt be enough to publish just the name of the company name
and your name. Moreover they pass these details to third parties for over a
decade.

Search engines should ban these websites: beta.companieshouse.gov.uk
duedil.com companycheck.co.uk companyformationuk.co companieslondon.com

~~~
cJ0th
Similarly, when you publish a website in Germany you have to disclose your
name and address on your website.

The idea is that everyone is responsible for what they are publishing. Sadly,
the danger of fraudsters wasn't taken into account when this law was made.

------
chrisdone
> Google believes it should not.

It's always funny to see someone write that a company "believes" anything.
It's a party line. With a company as big as Google of 10,000 it's downright
strange.

------
wheelerwj
Dear google, maybe if your data collecting hadn't gotten so incredibly out of
hand, this wouldn't be an issue. But people are starting to see how little
control they have over their information, and they are beginning to freak.
the-fuck. out. Now, you have to reign it in.

Before, being a giant global company meant only mean more customers and more
places to hide your profits. But now, there are global consequences too.

So don't try to make us feel bad about your regulatory issues. We have our
shit to worry about.

------
sjg007
It is absolutely a fundamental right to be able to be forgotten. By court
order especially.

------
greglindahl
The Right to be Forgotten is a huge barrier to entry for new search engines.

------
aftbit
I'm really not a fan of the new brand gTLDs. It's very pro-centralization. :(

------
oliv__
.google??? Really?

------
aphextron
>"That’s why, for much of the last year, we’ve been defending the idea that
each country should be able to balance freedom of expression and privacy in
the way that it chooses"

It's clear now that Google's motto of "do no evil" was a cynical joke. They
left out the preceding lines: "see no evil, hear no evil".

------
quickben
Another take on this is that Google, an advertising company, is regretting
removing about 780k links of potentially very interesting content. This is a
very slippery slope for them, because it threatens their core business.

------
dlandis
> Aside from anything else, it’s plain common sense that one country should
> not have the right to impose its rules on the citizens of another,
> especially not when it comes to lawful content.

That's just not true. A country has the right to impose it's rules on you if
you want to do business in that jurisdiction. Of course no one is forcing them
to do business there, which they did not mention in the post.

------
Annatar
_To be clear: we are not disputing that Google should comply with the right to
be forgotten in Europe. We have worked diligently to give effect to the rights
confirmed by the European Court of Justice. We have delisted approximately
780,000 URLs to date and have granted fast and effective responses to
individuals who assert their rights._

But you haven't done that for the United States, which makes it clear Google
wants to play Big Brother, where legally not disallowed to do so. Else, Google
would have proactively implemented this for everyone across the board, and
where that is not legally possible, Google would have diligently lobbied the
authorities like it does when it is in Google's interest.

The whole thing is a farce; if Google weren't legally pressured, they would
never do this because it cuts into their business model of living off of
people's privacy. Clever opinion manipulation attempt with "every country
should be able to choose", but not clever enough; there should be no attempt
at manipulation to begin with, Mr. Global Privacy Counsel. As a _privacy_
counsel, You shouldn't even be making these arguments, Mr. Global Privacy
Counsel!

~~~
pitaj
The RTBF is not a valid right, is censorship, and is at its core contrary to
free speech and the freedom of the internet.

~~~
Annatar
So you are saying that if Google finds, indexes and caches my private
information without my explicit permission or knowledge, it is okay for that
data to be available to everyone indefinitely?

Well I disagree vehemently, especially in cases where a third party, such as a
for-profit corporation violates a fiduciary relationship without my knowledge,
sells that data, and Google mines and makes that data available. That's just
wrong!

