Academics Call For Greater Transparency About Google's Right To Be Forgotten 57
Mark Wilson writes: Just yesterday Google revealed that it rejects most Right To Be Forgotten requests it receives. In publishing yet another transparency report, the search giant will have hoped to have put to bed any questions that users and critics may have had. While the report may have satisfied some, it did not go anywhere near far enough for one group of academics. A total of 80 university professors, law experts and technology professionals have written an open letter to Google demanding greater transparency. The letter calls upon the company to reveal more about how Right To Be Forgotten requests are handled so that the public is aware of the control that is being exerted over "readily accessible information."
There is a bypass. (Score:4, Informative)
Just go to http://google.com/ncr [google.com] to bypass it.
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So as you say, "Stop Welfare Babies", are you talking about corperations that take huge subsidies from the government and not paying taxes? or are you talking about the person down the street that was laid off of their job for having a kid and now has to use food stamps to buy dipers and food? Because if its the later, you can go kill yourself!
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Just go to http://google.com/ncr [google.com] to bypass it.
How, exactly, does a "no country redirect" (i.e., "ncr") help in this situation? That's just intended for you to be taken to the "regular" (US English) Google.com homepage in case it's incorrectly detecting your location or you otherwise don't want to be redirected to a country-specific site. I'm pretty sure there's nothing else special about it.
Good Grief... (Score:2)
"Right To Be Forgotten"?
How about your personal responsibility not to put crap on the Intertubes that you don't want people to see?
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You've still got it. It's just Google that lost its right to remember; and I'm not really sure whether I have a problem with government and personal privacy trumping corporate rights on this one. If the government was censoring the actual content, I'd have more of an issue.
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"How about your personal responsibility not to put crap on the Intertubes that you don't want people to see?"
It's not that easy, simply existing people can take photos and upload them to the internet, talk about you, and everything else. If you exist in any public way other people can divulge information about you and you can't control their behaviour.
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Firstly, it's not actually the "right to be forgotten", that's something else that the EU is still working on. This is just data protection laws that have existed since the mid 90s and some even earlier.
The problem is generally not stuff people put online themselves. If you go to a credit agency for information about someone it will be reasonably current and comply with all relevant laws. If you go to Google you might get a 15 year old story about charges made, which fails to mention that they were later dr
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I thought checking dates on items and following up on them was perfectly normal internet literacy, and I'd like to note that my understanding is that a credit report will mention even a 20-years-past bankruptcy--any bankruptcy, ever, and it doesn't go away. (And anybody offering to take it off for money is a con artist.)
You might possibly want to have chosen a better example there.
That said, part of why somebody having been charged is worth knowing is because charges are dropped for reasons other than inno
Re:Good Grief... (Score:4, Insightful)
In the EU credit reports can't mention bankruptcies over a certain age, by law. Some crimes can't be mentioned after a certain period of time either.
Internet literacy or not, some companies and managers will reject anyone with an excessively negative internet presence because they fear how it could make them look.
Let me ask you something. Is there anything that could be forgiven and forgotten in your eyes? Any kind of mistake. Of you want people to be young and not wrapped in cotton wool, you have to allow them to make mistakes and to fail, and to move on from that without it blighting the rest of their lives.
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My heart bleeds.
You of course completely ignore the opportunity for abuse this provides. If something is to be forgiven, or if a person wants to take a chance that should be their decision, not the states.
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How would it be their decision? It would be Google's. Google would get to decide what is behaviour that can be forgiven.
All laws protecting people can be abused. See false rape claims for an example. That doesn't mean we should make those things legal. The good far outweighs the bad.
Are you really saying that any mistake made by anyone ever should be recorded and reported to anyone who asks for the rest of time? If so, you will find a lot of people changing their names, subverting your desire for eternal pu
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How would it be their decision? It would be Google's. Google would get to decide what is behaviour that can be forgiven.
Google only conveys the information. THe end users do what they want with it.
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In the EU credit reports can't mention bankruptcies over a certain age, by law. Some crimes can't be mentioned after a certain period of time either.
Internet literacy or not, some companies and managers will reject anyone with an excessively negative internet presence because they fear how it could make them look.
Let me ask you something. Is there anything that could be forgiven and forgotten in your eyes? Any kind of mistake. Of you want people to be young and not wrapped in cotton wool, you have to allow them to make mistakes and to fail, and to move on from that without it blighting the rest of their lives.
Forgiven, yes, but forgotten should never happen--I'm not terribly interested in finding myself in the same situation as those aforementioned abuse victims, for example, and I also feel that there are very valid reasons to want to be concerned about an employee who has an excessively negative internet presence because their fear about how it makes them look is not without cause, or have you missed the various people who managed to generate bad publicity and boycotts for their employers because of their unwi
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Americans are obsessed with the " no interference " part of freedom, but in the EU we also value the " fair chance to prosper " part. If you went bankrupt 20 years ago that shouldn't blight your life now if you have reformed, otherwise we might as well just brand people with a hot iron and be honest about never forgiving and forgetting mistakes.
What you've actually accomplished here is nothing of the sort. Instead, you're failing to move forward as humans by permitting people to pretend things you shouldn't hold against them never happened instead of maturing and realizing that those things don't matter.
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That would be lovely, but is unrealistic. You might as well argue that anti discrimination laws are the wrong approach and we should just did society instead. As well as being s useful tool such laws protect people now, not in 50 years when society has changed.
Anyway, do you really think you can make a moral appeal to a bank to ignore old bankruptcies? Good luck with that.
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Anyway, do you really think you can make a moral appeal to a bank to ignore old bankruptcies?
So pass a law that limits what the banks are allowed to use as criteria. You're so proud of your protection laws over there...
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How about your personal responsibility not to put crap on the Intertubes that you don't want people to see?
How about the right to be a teenager without having to worry about how your actions will come up to haunt you 15 years later?
EUROPE (NOT GOOGLE) IS EVIL (Score:1, Flamebait)
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I hope some Americans will write a fucking letter to Europe as a reminder for our "right to remember", because WE stupid Europeans forgot it.
If you keep going down this road, we'll be on your doorsteps with war machines again. Our economy could use the help, though, so by all means continue. I'm too old and fat to be worth drafting anyway.
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I hope some Americans will write a fucking letter to Europe as a reminder for our "right to remember", because WE stupid Europeans forgot it.
If you keep going down this road, we'll be on your doorsteps with war machines again. Our economy could use the help, though, so by all means continue. I'm too old and fat to be worth drafting anyway.
PLEASE COME! First write the letter i proposed, but then (since we are stupid enough to ignore you) JUST COME...
More transparency! (Score:3)
We want to know the names and information of the people making requests to be forgotten, Google!
80 ... professors, law experts and blah blah (Score:1)
What *right* do they have to *demand* shit from any entity?
Unless the EU mandated that Google produce such reports, and they've been stonewalling, Google needs to say, "Fuck. You." until those self-righteous pricks learn some manners.
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Ah; but Google is a public company. That means that if these people are also shareholders, they DO have the right to demand answers. But only as shareholders.
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I am a signatory.
We're not demanding anything, we're politely asking Google to give release more data for study so that policymakers everywhere can decide whether this is working as intended, or not. The EU is about to enshrine this into law in a right to erasure, we want to know more.
The downside of owning the internet (Score:2)
A single corporation sort of owns the internet. The one search engine we almost all use; that's about as much of the internet as one entity can own. The internet is a public possession, so therefore, their business becomes our business.
I wonder for how long that's going to be tenable, both for us and them.
They're not the government, they don't owe us an explanation for every little thing; they should be able to do whatever they want, within the law, and make a profit. Hell, make a huge profit if you can; I
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Even now, I don't like the fact that i have to care exactly how they implement right to be forgotten.
Since the "right" is imposed by regulation, the best way to address that problem would be for the EU to define the standards and the process to be followed, and to provide regulatory oversight to ensure the legally required standards are being met, rather than punting the problem to Google to figure out.
Or get rid of the silly "right". That'd be even better, actually.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google but this post contains only my personal opinions.)
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.. the best way to address that problem would be for the EU to define the standards and the process to be followed...
This, absolutely this. In order to force someone to turn over information, I have to have a valid subpoena issued by a court with jurisdiction. The fact that they just punted this to "you figure it out" means Google is given arbitrary discretion on how they can fulfil this, and the recourse to disagreeing is to take them to court and sue them again.
If you're going to give someone a right enforced by the government, then you should provide the necessary process to issue a "strike-records decree"...
BTW, Goog
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Google is a for-profit business. It's not up to the EU to facilitate their compliance with the laws that have existed for decades. If they want to provide a service that lets people research other people, they need to factor the cost of doing it legally into that.
This is the correct way to do it. Have Google decide each case, and if people disagree they can elevate it to the courts. That puts the initial costs on Google, which is what the law intended. Google uses personal data in a commercial capacity in t
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It is obviously not the right way, at least not to people who know how the Internet works. That's what this whole discussion is about.
The right way to deal with objectionable content is to take down the content from the server on which it is stored. Not from search engines. (There are fully distributed search engines, wonder how this nonsensical EU rule works with them.)
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It's not up to the EU to facilitate their compliance with the laws that have existed for decades.
But it is up to the EU to define what the laws mean. And they haven't done that. If you're going to regulate, regulate. If not, not.
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The one search engine we almost all use
The last dozen or so times that I have used any of googles search products was specifically with Google Scholar ( https://scholar.google.com/ [google.com] )
Googles regular search has turned to shit. Even bing is better.
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"Googles regular search has turned to shit. Even bing is better." I have the opposite experience.
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The do not own the data, they just have a idea where it is and there power is not in providing access to it but in the exact opposite, hiding it. The dominant search engines power is not in providing access but in denying it by burying it on page, well any page beyond page 10 of search results. I sometimes do take a quick look at page 1 of the results and then skip to page 10 and beyond, sometimes those results are more interesting.
The letter isn't an endorsement of this mess... (Score:3, Informative)
Hope google gives this the attention it deserves (Score:2)
I.E. None. Just one more example of a slow motion shakedown in action.
Google's Right To Be Forgotten? (Score:1)
Google doesn't have a right to be forgotten, any more than Microsoft, or IBM, or AT&T, or Standard Oil did before them.
How about my right to remember? (Score:2)
How about we quit making up rights?
Fuck them. (Score:1)
The Rip-Off report is a scam website that let's people anonymously post anything about anyone, without any validation. Hideous things about ethics, morality, criminal activity. You name it. Theoretically, "about businesses", but they're allowed to do it about specific individuals. You can pick one out of the white pages. Or your neighbor. And write vile shit about them and offer their full name and general information. And youc an be anonymous in doing it. And that will not only last forever (they have gone
Impossible situation (Score:3)
This "right to be forgotten" is impossible!
First, the government required private companies to take action, without any recompense. Few if any companies will invest time and effort in something that only costs them money. Note: it's not only Google (though they are always mentioned) - this applies to all search engines.
Second, the entire concept is flawed: It only requires search engines to remove the links; it does not require the source material to be deleted. Take, for example, the original case that caused all of this: a Spanish businessman who filed for bankruptcy two decades ago. His claim - likely correct - is that this ancient bankruptcy still causes him problems today. Fair enough - is the Spanish government willing to expunge their records? And require all Spanish newspapers to delete their articles? No?
If the academics want transparency, they should be willing to finance that transparency: pay Google to help run the requests the way they want them managed. And Bing. And DuckDuckGo. And IXquick. And all of the others. Alternatively, they could invest their energies in getting this abominable legal situation corrected: Either there is no "right to be forgotten" or else it should apply to the source data. The current situation is beyond stupid...
Right to be forgotten == right to change history (Score:2)
Whenever I get omitted search results, I use a proxy to go to Google.com and read what has been deleted. It's surprisingly informative.
Still waiting for someone to write a Firefox extension to do that automatically.
Why is this Google's Responsibility? (Score:2)
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Because the EU doesn't want to bear the costs of processing these requests.