
Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case - zeveb
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43752344
======
danShumway
This is kind of a trend I've been noticing, where Europe will try to fix a
valid technological problem, but pick the most problematic or poorly
implemented solution to do it.

It's not clear to me what the difference is between a government censoring
someone directly and a government making it impossible for anyone to find a
piece of information. Right to Be Forgotten only works if it becomes
prohibitively expensive for a company or individual to locate past articles.
So who cares whether or not the original source has been taken down?

It's not clear to me why it's not troubling to European citizens for their
government to be in charge of what information is and isn't relevant to the
public. Whenever I ask people about this, I get the response "well, that's why
we have courts." I dunno, Europeans must trust their courts a lot more than I
trust mine.

It's not clear to me why this problem couldn't be solved more elegantly by
creating anti-discrimination laws around criminal records. If a company gets
90% through the hiring process, runs a background check, and then immediately
says "no", then you sue them.

It's also not clear to me that this will be enforceable in the future. I
consider distributed site indexing to be an unsolved problem, but I don't
think its _unsolvable_ , and people are actively working on it. If for some
crazy reason a distributed web search starts getting used on par with
DuckDuckGo in the next 5 years, what do you do about that? Ban the technology?

~~~
summerdown2
> It's not clear to me why it's not troubling to European citizens for their
> government to be in charge of what information is and isn't relevant to the
> public. Whenever I ask people about this, I get the response "well, that's
> why we have courts." I dunno, Europeans must trust their courts a lot more
> than I trust mine.

I think we trust our governments much more than US citizens trust there
government. There's a line from Ronald Reagan that goes something like:

"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the
government and I'm here to help."

The great preponderance of people in Europe simply do not think like this. For
a huge range of issues that statement would actually sound reassuring in
Europe. Essentially, if you believe in the rule of law and democracy, the
government is simply ourselves, getting collectively together to fix
something.

Note that this doesn't mean we like any particular politician. We despise many
politicians. But the idea of government as a force for good still remains in
Europe as far as I can see (UK). Sometimes I think the difference between
Europe and the US is that we despise our politicians and quite like the non-
political part of our government (civil service, NHS, etc). The US appears to
hate the non-political part of it too.

~~~
theseatoms
> Note that this doesn't mean we like any particular politician. We despise
> many politicians. But the idea of government as a force for good still
> remains in Europe as far as I can see (UK).

Coincidentally, this is how most Americans seem to feel about their
government's foreign policy.

------
CobrastanJorji
> Explaining the decisions made on Friday, the judge said one of the men had
> continued to "mislead the public" while the other had "shown remorse".

Okay, great, so Google's now required to judge right to be forgotten requests
based on whether the criminal has "shown remorse." Yeah, that's not arbitrary
or even a little impossible to do at scale.

Let's grant that there are good cases for removing pages from a search index.
If this is going to be the rubric, we should let the courts figure it out, and
then an order should be issued to search engines to remove the content. This
thing where you tell each search engine to remove content, the search engines
decide based on, I dunno, court precedent or gut feeling or whatever, then you
sue, then you appeal, I just don't see how that can work.

Eventually Google will just start granting every single request regardless of
merit because being challenged will get too expensive.

~~~
talltimtom
Yes, google can’t immitate the courts. So they just have to honor the request.
Besidde people heavily intetsted Nopone gests hurt g

~~~
jtbayly
Wait. Nobody get's hurt when a politician asks Google to "forget" (fill in the
blank), and Google just does it because they requested it? That's not right.
Everybody gets hurt by that.

------
Elessar
We're rapidly moving to a point where an official (government) criminal record
is not important to folks you want to interact with -- landlords, employers
etc. They will instead turn to Google. As such, Google might as well be the
official record for many people.

And if one put themsleves in the shoes of a victim, or even a criminal who has
served their time, Google's pagerank is doing them a disservice.

I don't know if expunging records is the right thing to do, but it's worth
discussing. There's no guarantee that searching a criminal's name will bring
up the recent history where they've done their time, shown contrition, and is
contributing to society. Instead it'll be the most highly cited -- likely news
about their crime.

As a society, we approve of jail being the mechanism to "forgive" a person's
crime. As such, isn't it horrible that Google's pagerank will only turn up
what they've done wrong in the past? Again, I don't know if expunging the
records is the right thing to do (in fact I believe it's wrong), but I do
think it's worth debating.

~~~
jasode
_> As a society, we approve of jail being the mechanism to "forgive" a
person's crime._

That's not really true. Serving prison time is neither a way to _" forgive"_
nor a way to _" pay debt back to society"_. Those are just common phrases
_some_ people use.

If felons were truly _forgiven_ , they would have their right to vote
restored. They wouldn't be denied a passport to travel abroad or denied a
firearms license. Convicted felons of financial crime will be denied officer
positions such as CFO in public companies. A sex felony will be a lifetime of
reporting on the sex offenders registries.

Society has never perceived jail time as truly resetting the scarlet letter
back to zero. Therefore, the debate is whether "Google results" is in the same
bucket as "sex offender list". For many in society, they think it's wrong to
remove those results from Google.

~~~
izacus
This is not how a lot of EU countries function - which is why there's friction
there. The American "You are a criminal for life and will eternally be
punished!" attitude is clashing with an EU mindset of being able to start a
new life. Permanent records are hugely damaging for persons livelihood in
these cases.

~~~
TomMarius
I (an EU citizen) want to keep my right to think whatever I want about a
criminal - and that includes looking at or keeping records. I feel like this
'right to be forgotten' hurts my safety - I don't want to forget that someone
murdered someone or raped someone, these things are unforgettable and
definitely unforgivable - and I want to know about them, and I want employers
to be able to look them up.

~~~
cavanasm
No one is getting murder or rape convictions removed from the record. This is
considerably smaller scale stuff, and the story itself mentions that two men
jointly fought to have news of their conviction removed, one who got 6 months
in jail, and one who got 4 years, both non violent white collar type offenses,
and only the guy who got 6 months actually won. The second guy lost.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
>No one is getting murder or rape convictions removed from the record.

Story about German murderers suing to get their names removed from a Wikipedia
article about the victim.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13wiki.html?_r=0](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13wiki.html?_r=0)

~~~
tallanvor
But German courts ended up ruling against them.

~~~
jacquesm
It's almost as if judges aren't stupid.

------
eclat
"The right to be forgotten is meant to apply to information that is no longer
relevant but disproportionately impacts a person," said Jim Killock, executive
director.

"The Court will have to balance the public's right to access the historical
record, the precise impacts on the person, and the public interest."

I feel like every single comment on here has missed the point. This isn't
about removing relevant information, it's about removing information that
disproportionately affects an individual and is of no public interest. For
example, if someone famous puts a gerbil up their bottom and gets sentenced
for animal cruelty, and that gets widely publicised, it might be true but it
affects that person extremely negatively at no cost or benefit to the rest of
society. This is the case here: a man served his time and the court ruled that
his case was not sufficiently relevant for the public interest to still be
publically accessible - he cannot be descriminated against because of his past
action. In developed countries this would never happen when the case is
relevant for that person or society, for example a high ranking corruption
case or if the person becomes a convicted paedophile.

~~~
oculusthrift
Uh, i think society deserves to know that man abused an animal and is
potentially dangerous/mentally unstable. If you’re a young woman about to go
on a date with someone i’m sure you’d want to know about that incident

~~~
kotajacob
I agree that it should stay public, but because giving the government the
power to destroy information and erase history in any sense is a very slippery
slope. That said in the above case the man in question would have served his
time and be by all counts considered to have been rehabilitated. So it
shouldn't be able to be used to discriminate against him. If for some reason
he isn't rehabilitated that's a problem with the justice system.

------
cromwellian
I have a feeling one day public titles, marriage, and criminal records will be
in a blockchain ledger, and it'll be impossible for government to order them
expunged. The way the governments are handling this is trying to impose
secrecy with security through obscurity. But the public records exist
somewhere, and anyone wanting to do a background check will eventually be able
to track it down.

Imagine this case was instead about a Wikipedia article about this guy, and
Wikipedia lost the case and was ordered to revert the article and expunge all
edit history. Due to the way Wikipedia is cloned by many sources, and
preserved by many archives around the world, it will become increasingly
problematic to erase information.

If the government can go around ordering archives to expunge truthful public
or historical records, it's very problematic IMHO. The notion of truth and
objective reality is already under assault since the 2016 election, and the
deep fakery and trolling bots will only get worse. What few institutions we
have online that can try to weed out and present consensus truth would then be
suspect if governments gain global jurisdiction to make edits.

~~~
lerpa
And that's how we went back to book burning, again.

------
BadassFractal
I once got contacted by a female account manager from a well known job boards
company in the Valley. I googled for her to find her linkedin so we could link
up, since we were going to be doing business together, likely for a while.

What shocked me was that the first result that Google returned was a smear
page against her from her ex boyfriend, something like janedoesisaslut.com or
janedoecheats.com with a long essay about what she did, and a bunch of photos
of her on it. It was about how, when they were together in college, allegedly
the woman had slept with other guys, and the boyfriend got pretty upset about
it.

It was mortifying for me to run into it, and I can't even imagine how she must
feel when the n.1 Google result for her name is that, forever. This must have
happened over 10 years ago, and yet it kept haunting her to that day.

I talked about this with a few lawyer friends and my understanding is that you
can't actually be sued for it. Apparently, if you're not lying and just
stating actual facts about what happened, you're not liable, and don't fall
under defamation/libel category. You could start a
JohnDoeWillGiveYouGonorrhea.com and that's totally legal. The person trying to
take the site down would have to clearly prove that their lives were seriously
impacted by its existence, and quantify the damages, which would be pretty
hard to pull off.

Real odd legal corner case.

~~~
danso
I wonder how this would be treated under the EU law? It doesn't involve a
legal conviction or something that has a codified statute of limitations. It
may contain facts, but it also contains opinions, opinions which the site
creator may still hold.

~~~
krageon
The way it would be treated is the domain would be taken down (if that were
requested by the victim). I'm not sure if that is EU law or something local. I
am fairly certain a lot of EU countries have local provisions that effectively
mean the same.

------
mattnewton
I think that simply deleting references to information is a crude way to solve
this problem. People who want to continue to bias against ex-convicts (like
landlords and employers) will use background check services that aren’t
regulated here, but the general public will be deprived easy access to
information. This seems ripe for abuse, especially for government officials.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Wouldn't it be far worse to delete the original information? It's better to
just make it harder for someone's life to be ruined by it, don't you think?

~~~
pitaj
Yes it's not as bad as deleting the information, but it's still much much
worse than just doing nothing about the information.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Worse for who? Allowing Google to render someone permanently unemployable
based on ancient or false information is definitely not "better".

~~~
mattnewton
Employers go to Google to find this information because it is free, not
because they are randomly searching or because Google is pushing this
information to them. I believe many (maybe even most) will simply switch to
other services that provide background checks. IANAL but I don’t see how this
ruling anticipates this. Now, you could argue that services like that will be
less susceptible to false information. I don’t know why that would be the case
and there seems to be some evidence against it on the recent “checkr” funding
thread on hacker news[0]

This is a blunt technological tool to fix a delicate social issue. The
information is still there, but behind a service. I believe deleting the
information is already not in the public’s interests [1][2], and it looks like
the law agrees to an extent[3], but the solution they came up with effective
puts a tollbooth in front of it.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16822093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16822093)

[1]
[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27423527](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27423527)

[2]
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3156779/More-280-000...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3156779/More-280-000-people-
ask-Google-right-forgotten-request-MILLION-pages-wiped-search-engine-s-
results.html)

[3] see paragraph 3 [http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-17-right-to-
eras...](http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-17-right-to-
erasure-'right-to-be-forgotten'-GDPR.htm)

------
comboy
It's absolutely insane what they are doing (EU). Should libraries remove
newspapers with my name if I don't like what's written there about me? It's
pure censorship. It all stems from the fact that society hasn't yet adjusted
to the reality that not everything on the Internet is true. People share
between themselves lots of false beliefs. The Internet is just another medium.

The problem is that if I put up a billboard that says John is a thief, they
can find me and sue for defamation. If I do a website and use SEO, then it's
not so easy, even though it serves similar purpose.

But that is how the world works now. We are able to send information to many
people, anonymously, often in a targeted way. That's how politics work, that's
how ads work, that's how HN works. The problem is not the information, the
problem is trust. It's not easy to solve, but it's doable.

~~~
karmajunkie
What if the problem is not that society hasn't adjusted to this new space we
call the Internet, but that the people in charge of the internet (or rather,
the things on it) haven't figured out yet that they still bear some obligation
to the rest of the world?

To use your example, whether I put up a website or a billboard with defamatory
information is irrelevant. We have laws that protect us, which declare that
defamatory speech is not protected. Why does it matter that the speech is
online or not when considering the essence of the law? As you stated, if you
put up a billboard they can find you and sue you for defamation. Why shouldn't
the same be possible online? If I get an injunction against a billboard with
defamatory speech the owner of the billboard is required to take it down. Why
shouldn't an online provider be equally obligated?

~~~
openasocket
Except, in this case, the article isn't defamatory. It correctly depicts
actions of genuine public interest that happened. The only argument to remove
them is that they are old. I'd also note that the website itself is still up,
containing the article in its entirety.

~~~
contravariant
It's not entirely clear to me that there's no defamation going on.

Does running an add linking to the article for anyone interested in that
person's name count as defamation? And if so, why would it be different if
google chose included it prominently amongst the search results?

I'm not entirely convinced that this should count as defamation, but there is
room for debate.

~~~
openasocket
Information has to be false for it to be defamation, it's in the definition.
The news article they are trying to de-list does not contain false
information.

~~~
karmajunkie
It doesn't have to be false for it to be defamatory. It has to be intended to
ruin someone's reputation in an unwarranted manner.

~~~
openasocket
Not in any legal jurisdiction I'm aware of, and certainly not the EU Courts.
Truth is an absolute defense against defamation.

~~~
karmajunkie
Truth is an absolute defense, except when its not.

[http://www.aaronkellylaw.com/truth-and-
defamation/](http://www.aaronkellylaw.com/truth-and-defamation/)

------
volak
Entering into a deeper relationship with someone (employer/employee,
landlord/tenant, etc) you want to know everything about the other person. This
is not because you are some nosy person - its because breaking that
relationship means risking lawsuits or damage to your property or a whole
eviction process which can take months to years...

Its a dangerous thing to "trust" someone when they'll have that level of
control over your future so people use government records and google to know
if they could possibly have an issue.

This isn't a privacy issue its a minimizing risk issue.

If you give people better options for minimizing risk then google results will
matter less and less. For instance I'd be happy to hire a convict if I could
a) pay him less than I normally would (initially) and b) fire him at any time
for any reason.

Same for renting. If we draw up a contract with a no-drugs no-weapons clause
and allowed me to inspect the place once a month for the first year or so I'd
be happy to rent to him.

But these things sensible precautions are illegal. There may be good reasons
because of them "evil corporations" blah blah. Sensible or not that's reality
- so people understandably discriminate against people based on google
results. Its a fairly understandable precaution given the amount of risk
involved due to regulation.

Therefore the fix isn't to make google "forget" things - that only increases
risk dramatically. The fix is to make these relationships less risky by
allowing business owners and landlords more control over their own personal.

~~~
toomanybeersies
So a convicted criminal should be eternally punished by losing any employment
security and being paid less than their peers?

That doesn't sound like a society I would like to live in.

The other alternative is that these restrictions would begin with convicted
criminals, and spread to the rest of the population. Just because someone
hasn't been convicted doesn't mean they aren't a criminal with drugs and
weapons in their house after all.

~~~
stevenwoo
How do you handle someone like this guy after he gets out of prison:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/our-
tim...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/our-time-com-con-
man/554057/) If we erase his past from the internet - that kind of enables him
to do his scam again immediately. It's a difficult question.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
> It's a difficult question.

Not at all. It's up to the legal system and law enforcement to handle this.
Not up to citizens, and for good reasons.

~~~
will4274
> law enforcement

At least in my country, law enforcement has no obligation to handle anything.
Legal systems punish criminals after-the-fact, it's up to individuals to
prevent crimes. [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-
rule...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-police-
do-not-have-a-constitutional-duty-to-protect.html)

------
SirensOfTitan
A human is multifaceted. In previous decades, disagreeing with a person
politically did not disqualify their friendship--today that is increasingly
the case. People tend to flandarize real people (that is, reduce them to
singular elements) nowadays in a way that makes me skeptical most people would
use information on crimes in productive ways. A person should not have to pay
for their mistakes years and years after they've paid the price (in this case,
jail time).

As a generalization: the push against the right to be forgotten seems like a
case of information bias. Does more information really help society make
decisions? And even more importantly: how do we, as a society, process
information like this in a way where it could be helpful (in the common case)?

------
zeveb
Note that this case involved a criminal who wished to expunge his conviction
from search results.

> ‘The right to be forgotten is meant to apply to information that is no
> longer relevant but disproportionately impacts a person,’ said Jim Killock,
> executive director, ‘The Court will have to balance the public’s right to
> access the historical record, the precise impacts on the person, and the
> public interest.’

‘The public’s right to access the historical record’ seems to me to be an
incredibly Orwellian phrase. It seems to me that there is an absolute right to
access factual historical information.

~~~
onion2k
_It seems to me that there is an absolute right to access factual historical
information._

This isn't a comment about the case, or the right to be forgotten, but
something quite important nonetheless - Google's search results are not "
_factual historical information_ ". They're an index of webpages that anyone
and everyone can create, saying whatever they like. Google claims their engine
ranks pages that more reputable higher than others, but without any
transparency around that we can't know whether or not we agree with it's
decisions.

~~~
zeveb
> Google's search results are not "factual historical information". They're an
> index of webpages that anyone and everyone can create, saying whatever they
> like.

I'd argue that _the fact that_ a webpage says something is itself an
historical fact, and shouldn't be forbidden to be said.

------
emiliobumachar
Meanwhile, when governments want to check the background of someone before
hiring them into a position of trust involved in national security, they'll
send agents to investigate.

Methods include interviewing them hooked up to a polygraph, and asking their
neighbors questions face to face.

All for reasons that seem to me less important then the safety of my child
while alone with a babysitter.

~~~
walshemj
Because a dodgy spy can cause more damage kim philby lead to the deaths of a
large number of people.

And its more likely that a family member is a danger to you child - than say a
babysitter who got busted at 15 for smoking pot behind the bleachers with her
bf.

~~~
barsonme
> And its more likely that a family member is a danger to you child

"X is worse than Y, therefore you shouldn't worry about Y" is a fallacy.

------
mcfedr
Seems crazy that this is brought to Google, the results are there because it's
on the internet, go to the source and get them to remove it.

Which coinsidently would probably be a much harder case to bring because these
are generally reputable news sources and not a big US company everyone seems
to have a bit of a problem with already.

------
davesque
I'm a bit surprised at all the negative reactions I'm seeing here in response
to this. This really seems like a win for individual rights which the tech
community is normally all about.

As I see it, the heart of the matter is that the average person is _really_
bad at placing any random fact they learn about someone (or something) in its
proper context. So that means people should have some legal leverage when it
comes to all the information (accurate or not) that is available about them
online.

~~~
ythn
To me it seems like Yet Another Barrier To Entry For Tech Startups (TM). I
remember the good old days (re: 10 years ago) when you could make all sorts of
cool things without being bogged down by regulations. I guess that era is over
(at least for certain categories of tech like search engines).

Also, your right to be forgotten seems to be infringing on my right to
remember.

~~~
ben_jones
Are you serious or do you yearn for the days when cars didn't have seat belts
and paint still contained lead? Start-ups will adapt or they don't deserve to
exist.

~~~
ythn
I'm not saying all regulation is bad. But some regulation is has a major
stifling effect on innovation and startups simply because the cost of
compliance is too high for new players (but manageable for established big
boys).

------
TheMagicHorsey
Why does anyone have a right to be forgotten after committing a crime or
defrauding others?

Others bear the cost and you get the luxury of starting over? After seeing so
many serial scammers on the Internet getting away with crime time and again by
finding new, naive victims after we catch them, it gets really tiresome when
the government gives the scammers tools to force us to take down reviews and
warnings.

~~~
wannabedevelopr
Justice systems work differently in Europe than in the States; Rehabilitation
and reintegration being key not throwing someone in a hole and loose the key.

------
enitihas
I am just curious, what about the edge cases? What if a person commits acts of
domestic violence with their romantic partners, and then gets Google to remove
that record. Don't their future partners deserve to know? What if someone
commits legal but shady acts in dealing with people. Why should they have a
right to remove it from the public record?

~~~
F_r_k
What if they stole cookies ? Shouldn't store managers deserve to know ?

Where do you put the limit then ?

~~~
794CD01
The manager can make the decision whether they care that the person stole
cookies.

------
spullara
It is odd that this is google's responsibility. Why isn't this directed at the
original source?

~~~
lovich
Because having this information wasn't the problem. The problem now is that
anyone anywhere can have access to all the data about you at any time. The
scale of the ability has changed the behavior. The same issue comes up with
cops tracking cars.

It was never an issue for society for a cop to tail someone driving on public
roads because they could only follow a few people given the resources
necessary to tail someone. Now they can buy a few cameras that track license
plates and have real time tracking of _everyone_ on the road with the ability
to store the data forever until they decide it's useful, which is has changed
the actual results of cops being allowed to track people.

This right to be forgotten used to exist simply because you had to put effort
into finding out data about people. People could move to another town and
restart their life. The courts in this case appear to be trying to reset tat
status quo

------
BurningFrog
What I hate the most about this is the cute Orwellian euphemism for
censorship.

------
microcolonel
Your "right to be forgotten" is my "duty to be misinformed".

------
sandov
And people downvoted me when I said the EU was an enemy of freedom...

~~~
brynjolf
What freedom? The freedom of the individual to be forgotten? Or for the
corporation? What freedom is EU the enemy of? I think the fact of the matter
is this will give more freedom to those that need it.

------
chunkyslink
Hmm. This is interesting.

I can see how a non violent criminal who has served their time and been
punished might not be able to move on with their life when they are only found
in Google for the ONE bad thing they did.

This should never be applied to violent criminals.

~~~
zaarn
What if someone was a violent criminal in the past, like due to an Alcohol
addiction, but went through therapy in prison and is now a peaceful citizen?

Serving your time in jail is sufficient to pay for your crimes, IMO. Unless
there is a good reason, ie public interest as the law states, we shouldn't
rubberstamp all criminals as evil (or all violent criminals).

Part of getting them back into society is rehabilitation which means we give
them another chance to integrate and follow the law.

~~~
chunkyslink
I just think that a violent crime is not excusable in any circumstance. Yes
they have served their time, but if someone is capable of violence even once,
it should not be possible to hide this information.

------
blauditore
How does Google "remove" entries? Do they just exclude certains pages from
results? If so, that's not really a solution since that information is still
publicly available.

It would make much more sense to remove all web pages (from newspapers etc.)
containing the actual data, and ideally Google would forget about it as well
soon. But then again, that would be a lot of work and it's easier to just take
down the gateway. But it's ridiculous.

------
Paul-ish
Can people use proxies through other countries to see unfiltered results, or
are the results removed in all countries?

------
hartator
> The man, who has not been named due to reporting restrictions surrounding
> the case

I can see the win for freedom of speech there.

------
jradd
Perhaps Google the service provider or ISP or carrier could censor search
results according to the specific geo the query originates from. i.e. in many
states it is not illegal to conspire to intercept communications so long as
one of the parties are aware, or if this is a place of business.

------
M2Ys4U
Here is the full judgment: [https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2018/04/nt1-...](https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2018/04/nt1-Nnt2-v-google-2018-Eewhc-799-QB.pdf)

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known
Is right to be forgotten applicable in Court Judgements?
[https://indiankanoon.org/court_case_online.html](https://indiankanoon.org/court_case_online.html)

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timmytim
Every company that is fighting DDPR needs to fire legal and compliance. It
literally says 'blah blah <stuff none of them want to do> by
this/specific/date, NO EXCEPTIONS'

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walshemj
Interesting that the one that won NT2 (conspiracy to intercept communications)
looks like one of those dodgy PI's that the tabloids / News international
uses.

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datburg
Google and the confusing umbrella phoeniecisms

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codesnik
Right to be remembered about being forgotten.

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baxter001
Sounds vaguely like Glenn Mulcaire

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nordras
well, they also won it

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Somaia
ashik526

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Somaia
Ashik526

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Crontab
I find this result disgusting.

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JonnyNova
Can you elaborate?

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jayd16
I would say that in the US we mostly consider right to free speech more
important than the right to be forgotten.

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lallysingh
A judge heard the case for two individuals. That's a pretty fair way to do it.
Americans also believe in the rule of law, versus the rule of the powerful.

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jayd16
The reason we have the freedom of speech in the US is because its the powerful
that abuse the ability to censor.

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lallysingh
Which powerful entity do you mean? The people who want things unlisted, or
Google?

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dingo_bat
The government.

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lallysingh
I don't understand your point. I read this as similar to libel or truth in
advertising laws.

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lovetrump
Once a criminal, always a criminal... even if you get it expunged from your
record?

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justherefortart
Your record just shows you've been caught.

I don't know anyone that hasn't broken laws. Hell, they make new laws every
day for us to break.

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dingo_bat
Fuck the courts that rule in favor of censorship. I hope this makes every
European employer check Google.com before hiring a single person.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
Maybe this opens up a opportunity for a new search engine that excludes people
from the EU and allows a much less censored view of things.

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hartator
I think that's already the case, isn't US results not affected by this?

