SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story concerning Google's enforcement of search privacy laws across international borders:
What if links to stories about someone's past—stories about defrauding an international business or about medical tourism malpractice—were removed from Google search in your country, not because of your local laws but because someone was able to use the laws of another country. How would you feel about that?
That question may seem simplistic. But it goes to the heart of a very important debate that is taking place now in Europe, initially between some Data Protection Authorities and, next year, in court. At stake: whether Europe's right to be forgotten—which allows people in EU countries to request removal of certain links from name search results—should reach beyond the borders of Europe and into countries which have different laws.
Google believes it should not. 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, not in the way that another country chooses.
Can the requirements of different countries be balanced at all?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday December 12 2016, @07:48AM
I already wrote a long post to say I don't know what to do about this (even though I recognize the problem), but one thing that seems like a rather stupid approach is to pretend that the internet has "borders" that delineate google.com from google.co.uk or google.de or whatever. On the other hand, it seems rather ridiculous to insist that court rulings apply to things outside their borders.
Eventually, we're going to have to deal with all of this somehow. Without an actual world government to oversee such things, we'd need some sort of international treaties defining the policies and creating some standards that can apply across borders -- but if we look like things like the way international copyright law have been implemented, it's pretty clear it would likely just lead to an even greater bureaucratic mess.
So I don't know. But I do know that the internet as currently implemented doesn't observe borders. My fear is that enough such issues come up (and if the legal issues become more sensitive), eventually more countries will try to lock down their regional connections to the internet to try to enforce their own policies, thereby decreasing freedom much more than applying some court rulings across borders.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Monday December 12 2016, @08:44AM
international treaties are certainly needed, because a court order in this area, or whatever is decided necessary to push something farther down in the searches over time needs to happen everywhere, else you can guarantee that there will be at least one country out there that people will use to keep information "fresh" in perpetuity. so the best idea would be whichever jurisdiction the case or story or whatever it occurred in gets to make the call for how long its 'viable'. if the case happened in the UK, then we use the UK's laws; if it happened in the US, the US's laws; if it happened in Somalia... you get the idea.
there certainly is a need for this kind of thing, not to remove the information but to archive it and make it more difficult to find instead of being #1 or #10, but at the same time it shouldn't be so difficult that somebody has to dig through hundreds of pages. the devil is in the details and how to actually implement it.
(Score: 2) by romlok on Monday December 12 2016, @11:50AM
Except, for the most part, the Internet *does* have borders, because it operates over physical infrastructure which traverses known, defined, political jurisdictions. Most governments know well every single point where "the internet" enters and exits their countries, and they almost without exception can and do (or at least attempt to) block all or some of the internet at their borders.
Until we get true point-to-point connections between disparate places on Earth (quantum entanglement? Subspace? Wormholes?), one's connection to the internet will always have to deal with the realities of geopolitics.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday December 13 2016, @03:04PM
Maybe if the plan is impossible to implement it's a sign that it's a bad idea.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"