“Google has already started to see a stream of new requests to be digitally ‘forgotten,’ following a ruling by the European Court of Justice on a complaint by a Spanish man seeking to have results related to his name and a property closure removed from the search engine were successful,” Darrell Etherington reports for TechCrunch.
“It’s not a good sign for Mountain View; these requests could quickly become a big new headache for the search provider to deal with, especially if these initial requests are representative of what’s to follow,” Etherington reports. “Critics of the decision, which include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and numerous anti-censorship and free speech organizations, say that the ruling has too much potential for abuse, and give leverage to those who would see information suppressed from public view.”
“Also related to the ruling, Google has said it will implement a mechanism for the public to make such requests in just two weeks time, according to Germany’s privacy protection authority,” Etherington reports. “That indicates that while the search engine described the result of the European court’s ruling as disappointing earlier this week, it’s moving quickly to implement a means to comply with its implications in EU member countries. Overall, this looks like it has the potential to snowball into a huge headache for Google, which already deals with millions of link removal requests per week due to copyright violations. ”
Read more in the full article here.
Related article:
Top European court: Google must remove links to personal material under certain circumstances – May 13, 2014
This is such nonsense, it’s really unbelievable. On the one hand, I’m glad that Gaggle is having to deal with this ruling, but from a technical perspective, the solution they come up with can never satisfy the courts because of the algorithms involved. What is really being removed? A reference to a website will no longer show up in a search? What about other links to the same content? How does anyone know who the subject of the material is in fact? It’s all a bunch of BS.
Google is evil. If Google can’t obey the law then they should close business. I want this ruling passed in the USA. Unfortunately, Gaggle and the NSA and the secret oligarchy that runs the country are bedfellows.
“…, Google has said it will implement a mechanism for the public to make such requests in just two weeks time,…” wink, wink.
My initial reaction to this was supportive, along the lines of support for people’s privacy.
However, upon closer inspection, there is a distinct smell to it that I don’t like. The law, as it is, requires Google to remove search results that point to currently existing web sites that contain information that can be construed as objectionable to a private person.
There are too many ambiguities in this definition to be allowed to exist as a law of the land. What exactly is objectionable, and who is the authority to rule on this? And besides that, the law doesn’t require the site that actually contains the ‘objectionable’ content to take such content down; it just requires “Google” to remove their links to it. In other words, the site remains, but cannot be easily found using Google. This makes very little sense (one goes to Bing and finds the content anyway). In addition to this, what should Google do when Silvio Berlusconi requests that links to ‘objectionable’ material be removed from Google? By some interpretations, they’d have to remove so much that when you google him, you’d get nothing at all (and I’m sure he’d be fine with that). What happens with the free speech? You can talk as much as you can online, but your microphone has been taken away, so now nobody can hear you anymore.
I don’t think this thing has anything to do with people’s privacy. There is information that you consider private and that should be kept private by entities and business you trust to keep it so. Then there is information ABOUT you that in many cases is publicly available or accessible (whether court or public records, or similar) that wasn’t created by you and is not controlled by you. It may or may not be objectionable by you (for example, court fines for speeding, or driving without a license, or bankruptcy information). In the original case that brought about this ruling, someone sued Google for providing search results, when his name was looked up, that pointed to a newspaper article about re-possession of his home (pursuant to mortgage default). None of the information in the newspaper was illegally obtained, nor did it violate privacy laws of Spain (which are much stricter than US, by the way); yet, the court decided that, while the newspaper can keep the article online, Google must remove links to it.
As a result of this new ruling, doctors have started asking to remove links to bad ratings from patients, politicians are now asking to remove links to articles about bad behaviour, paedophiles are now asking to remove links about convictions (after serving their sentences)…
This is a floodgate and presents a rather dangerous outcome. Let us see where it goes, but I don’t like the current direction.
It is a primary right of citizens to be able to ask a company – any company – to remove the information the information they hold about them, unless such information is legally required to be public (and even then it should come with a time limitation)
People talk a lot about how this will potentially be used to save politicians from embarrassing situations, but those are niche cases. The genuine cases – e.g. people who were wrongly incriminated – far outweigh those.
This is a particular problem with Google since it’s algorithms tend to prefer the initial, most outrageous and link baity reports and rarely the truth.
The problem I see is human’s must be making all these decisions about what to take down or not. How can that scale up to billions of people in the world? Its easy to implement a request form. It won’t be so easy to sift through them and choose the right response (ignore or implement) for each request. As with anything, this will be abused by both the requesters and the new bureaucracy making decisions.
Google just needs to hire people to process these. It’s unrealistic to think that billions of people – or even millions – will be requesting to be deleted and definitely not at the same time.
How long does each request take anyway? 5 Minutes if that.
Volume shouldn’t be an excuse not to do it. For Google it’s the cost of being a big business.
You are very silly. If it became the law in the US, I would request to be removed from all search results on Goofle. As far as I know, I don’t turn up on much right now, but I would do it because I can. Every other American that shares my name is out of luck.
There is libel law out there to protect against wrongful incrimination, and it works reasonably well. This rule seems to be allowing people to ask search engines to suppress ANYTHING that can be construed as offensive.
When you sell your house to someone else, that transaction becomes public record and remains so. When you are charged with endangering the welfare of a child (by leaving him in your car for 2 minutes alone, while you run into 7-eleven to buy toilet paper), that becomes permanent public record. When you give a statement to a reporter in the street about something and he publishes your statement, you have the right to challenge the quote (if it was inaccurate), but if you fail to do this, those words are now a public record. If a reporter writes an article about your preferential hiring practices in your company, you have the right to tell your side of the story. If he lets you tell it, or if you decline to do so, the article remains public and you have no right to request its removal.
In most developed world (and especially in America), free speech is one of the most fundamental and most significant civil rights. In many instances, it trumps some other rights.
And when people are wrongly incriminated (by tabloid media, or legitimate courts) have plenty of recourse out there, and the law already takes care of that. While it might be somewhat easier to just go after Google and ask them to take down any links, the process has no legal merit: if there are libelous statement about someone, they aren’t made by Google, so any requests should be directed to the authors (or distributors) of such statements. It is like suing the owner of the news stand for selling the tabloid that published inaccurate accusations against someone.
Totally agree with you. It’s BS.
This has nothing to do with Google’s collection of data for business purposes; that’s a completely different issue.
We are talking here about the essential function of any search engine–whether Google or anybody else–of providing an index of data publicly available on the Internet. The ruling says that anybody who feels that any document anywhere on the Web violates their privacy can ask all the search engines to omit that document from their search results. The allegedly infringing document will still be there, and still be accessible by anyone who discovers its URL, but there will be no reasonable way to find it.
There will be no problem if we are talking about a single libelous allegation made against “Percival Piggott-Smythe” twenty years ago. Any link to that can readily be located and removed. But what if we are talking about truthful but outdated information on “John Smith” or “Juan Garcia?” Figuring out which links reference the right person could be extremely time consuming.
Perhaps the applicant will be required to point out exactly which links are to be suppressed, but new links come up all the time. What about searches for something other than just the person’s name? “Fraud New York 2008” will bring up as many links to information about Bernie Madoff as a search on his name. “Dog Shooting Podunk 2013” will provide as many allegations about the wrongly-accused shooter as a name search, and is actually more likely to occur. What about a search for legitimate data on a convicted co-defendant that yields a link to a document that mentions the applicant? Pulling the link to protect the applicant may suppress lawful searches for the other guy.
Is Google expected to do the research to determine whether the data is in fact inaccurate or out-of-date, or will they be forced to take the applicant’s allegations at face value? Will the Data Protection Agency make any effort to look behind the application or take its statements as conclusively correct?
In the real world, people do pretty routinely lie. I might state that I was wrongly accused when I really wasn’t, or that the link refers to something that happened in 1983 rather than the actual event in 2013. What is to stop me from having my history of fraudulent engagements deleted the week before I propose to yet another rich woman? What about the bribery allegations at a former employer just before I apply to a new one? What about alleged “personal privacy violations” that actually involve allegations of government or corporate wrongdoing?
How much data is to be blocked? I would guess that most objectionable data appears in documents that contain other information that is not suppressible, but how is the search engine to delete links to one without the other? Suppose somebody was wrongly accused of theft in a letter to the editor published in the Sept. 12, 2001, New York Times. Obviously, there is no way for a search engine to redact information from linked sites, so are the search engines required to block all links to that issue, including coverage of the terrorist attacks the previous day? Otherwise, I can still use Google to find the objectionable information.
My guess is that most search engines’ “solution” when they are deluged with applications will be to delete almost any link on request. The alternative is to refuse, which will simply lead to an administrative proceeding before some country’s (or more likely many countries’) Data Protection Agency. That will be costly to Google with no clear economic upside even if it wins.
The Internet users who might find the data useful will have no notice of the proceeding and will have no way to assert their position that the social utility of the information is sufficient to counterbalance the subject’s privacy interests. The search engine will have notice, but no particular reason to make the argument apart from an abstract interest in the freedom of information. Since the Data Protection Agency has the specific mission of protecting privacy rather than defending freedom of information, it will also come down on the side of suppression in any close case… and probably most not-so-close cases.
If a link is suppressed by a country’s Data Protection Agency, is the search engine required to delete that link just for searchers in that country, or searchers anywhere in the world? Even if it is just limited to that country, must all other EU members honor the ruling by reciprocity? Is is possible (gasp!) that the Agencies in some country might be bribed, blackmailed, or politically influenced to suppress information that nobody in that country will ever find useful, but that enables a political or criminal career somewhere else?
This is one of the biggest cans of worms I have ever seen.
I made an effort to read through the whole thing and I couldn’t find anything to disagree with. You re absolutely correct — this is a very murky area and a problematic direction for regulators of the internet.
And I’m pretty sure it will be corrected pretty soon. As it is now, it simply cannot work correctly.
You should really read the ruling to placate your worries..
As a complainant, you still have to go through a state’s Information Commission or a court, and a judge still has to decide whether your case has merits. The justices spend some time discussing how this balance between privacy and expression should be struck.
The ECJ acknowledged that there’s a conflict, and that asserting a right to your private life infringes upon someone else’s freedom of expression.
A citizen can only ask a “data processor” to take action if the information is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to those purposes and in the light of the time that has elapsed” – and that adds up to something seriously prejudicial to the citizen.
It’s BS. The search engines cannot be held liable for the content they find on the web. Plain and simple. You can’t ask them to “take down the links”. Can’t be done.
It is simply untrue that a citizen cannot ask to have information suppressed unless it meets the EU criteria. Whatever the legal merits of the claim, he can ALWAYS ask. The problem is that the merits of whether privacy or free speech should be upheld will be made by an agency whose dedicated purpose is to safeguard privacy after a “hearing” at which the applicant can submit his arguments without cross-examination or independent investigation, and the other party gets no notice or ability to participate.
This is great! Now that we no longer know if all the knowledge we need is on G00gle, maybe people will actually try out some other search engines that don’t have a legal presence in this court’s jurisdiction … Duckduckgo, anyone? This is the WORLD WIDE web, and it will route around this kind of nonsense.