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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: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Monday December 12 2016, @07:56AM
Europe has a fundamental problem with "rights". We apparently believe that we have the "right" to a polite society, where nothing bad is ever said about anyone. While we give lip service to "the right to freedom of opinion and expression" - which really is pretty fundamental - we limit this right with all sorts of bizarre exceptions.
You can express anything you want, but...be nice. No hate speech [legal-project.org]. No questioning the official history of good-vs-evil events [wikipedia.org]. No unapproved pornography [theguardian.com]. And now: no linking to unpleasant information about individuals, even when that information is absolutely true.
As with so many things, this is all done with the best of intentions. However, it is (or should be) obvious that we are building the infrastructure for censorship. Someone decides what must be forgotten, what is hateful, what is unapproved history, what kind of pornography is acceptable. That is a tremendous power, and tremendous power will be abused.
You can see attempts in Germany: with the huge problems they are currently having with migrants, many people are expressing anti-migrant sentiments. The current German government would very much like to suppress this speech [www.ndr.de] - they would love to suppress the AfD, the political party that has come to power precisely because of the migrant crisis.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Monday December 12 2016, @08:40AM
Try thinking of it in a different way. Everyone in the US has a right to privacy. No-one is entitled to sneak up to your home and peek through the windows. You have the right to expect privacy in your home. Sure what you do outside of your home is public, but what occurs inside is deemed private. So, if you have a site where you exchange photos with a member of your family you should be able to do so privately. Nothing gives the company running that site the 'right' to sell your private photos and the information that goes with them to someone else without your permission. Except, of course, in the US - where business is deemed to have priority over everything. The vast majority of the world still believes that the individual has a right to privacy.
So, lets take it a step further. In many European countries if you commit an offence while a juvenile once you have served your punishment and reach the age of 18 the record of that offence is only available to a very small subset of the population. Adults can also have some records removed from public view by law. In the UK it is called the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act.
However, this law - which is seen by most as being a sensible and reasonable thing to do - is being eroded because records of such crimes might be stored in databases held in other countries. They are never expunged and are available for all to view and, as a result, there is no possibility of rehabilitation. Of course, again the US is different. Rehabilitation seems to be the last thing anyone thinks of - it is all about exacting a terrible punishment and incarcerating the individuals concerned because there is money to be made that way!
The right to be forgotten is supposed to come with a review process. If this processed worked, then the review would be able to decide if the details of the offence meet the criteria for it to be covered by the Rehabilitation Act, and if it does then the data should be removed. This, of course, does not happen. So the laws of many countries are being circumvented by the desire of businesses, predominantly in the US, to make a profit by storing masses of data and then selling either the data itself or the results of analysis of that data.
No-one is suggesting that your laws of free speech should be changed, but nor should one country have the right to undo centuries of laws developed by other countries. It is a difficult problem to resolve, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying in my view.
(Score: 2) by BK on Monday December 12 2016, @09:26AM
“Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”
Remind me again who this small subset would be? People who need the information no doubt.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Monday December 12 2016, @09:50AM
So, can I have your passwords, please?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Monday December 12 2016, @05:17PM
dont forget bank logins, credit card numbers, PINs and passwords to access them, etc. oh, lets see some nude pictures too, and videos of you together with your wife. after all, thats all nothing more than information. unless, BK, are you saying you dream yourself our master?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @07:26PM
Sure!
It's password1.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Tuesday December 13 2016, @03:29PM
I wonder if passwords are not so much information so much as they are digital keys to digital locks.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday December 13 2016, @08:04PM
Those two are not mutually exclusive. My door key also is both substance and a physical key to a physical lock.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday December 12 2016, @08:09PM
In the UK it is essentially limited to police forces and the judicial system. They have to be able to take previous convictions into account if appropriate for crime detection (e.g. finger prints) and legal sentencing. At some point you have to accept the rule of law or throw it away completely. If you can't trust your police forces then you have a bigger problem than you first thought.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday December 12 2016, @02:48PM
Does anyone here know what it's like to live in a small town of about 1000? Everyone knows everyone else. Everyone knows who has light fingers, is promiscuous, a bad driver, a wife (or husband) beater, a cheater, a religious zealot, a drunk, a liar, a deadbeat, or whatever. Secrets can be kept, skeletons can be kept hidden in closets, but it's not easy. Once it's out, it's over. You can forget about being forgotten, because it's not happening. Only thing you can do to escape a bad reputation is move far away.
Years ago my aunt was rejected for a teaching job at a nearby town because some cousins with the same last name had gotten a county-wide reputation for partying hard and sleeping around. She wasn't one of them, but it didn't matter. Blood tells, right? Can't have a woman with loose morals like those cousins soiling our children's minds! It was completely unfair, and the head apologized to her for the board's bad behavior. Nevertheless she had to go elsewhere and ended up teaching 2 counties away.
That little story might seem to support the idea that forgetting is good. In those days, people were pretty stuffy and prudish. Seems a better solution is more tolerance and opportunity. The reason a criminal record is such a dire problem for a job seeker is high unemployment. You don't get rejected for a job because a traffic violation or an unpaid medical debt or some other minor blemish on your record makes you unable to do the work, you get rejected because there are too many people chasing too few jobs, and something like that is a great pretext to reject you.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @03:28PM
> Seems a better solution is more tolerance and opportunity.
And if wishes were horses beggars would ride.
People will always find reasons to judge others as unworthy. Its human nature - the same part of human nature that builds institutions also arbitrarily excludes people from those institutions. The best we can hope for is to inject friction into the process where it will do the most good with the least harm and have good mechanisms for exception handling. But no matter how much we try its never going to be a perfect process because people aren't perfect.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday December 13 2016, @04:06AM
It's more than human nature. It's population pressure. When people are scarce and valuable, all kinds of crap is forgiven. What matters is whether they can do the job. When people are plentiful, when there are dozens of qualified applicants for one position, then ever more trivial things matter.
I have read that in the 1950s and into the 1960s, a person who earned a PhD had it made. Universities would come to the new doctor with job offers that included good pay, a light teaching schedule, and perks such as a nice big lab. In the 1970s, that began changing. Today, some professors have to supplement their poverty level income with food stamps. Schools have flooded the market with graduates of PhD programs. Schools win in two different ways on that. The oversupply drives down the pay they have to offer to attract professors, and they make a pile of money off the tuition all these doctors had to pay to get the PhD.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13 2016, @07:35AM
> What matters is whether they can do the job.
Pretty much all of American history is proof of the opposite. If you are black that is.
That reductive libertarian fantasy version of the world just does not exist outside of laboratory conditions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @03:27PM
That's not what the law is used for and you know it. If it was limited to things you did before 18 well then maybe, but it's used to suppress fraud and corruption claims so those people can go defraud and cheat more people. I seem to remember it being advertised as a way to remove false information about you and its certainly been abused. Society only needs to grow up a little bit and not count the stupid things you did 20 years ago against you. No laws needed, just some basic logic and compassion. Or you could make it illegal to hold those events against someone. Even with that there's still no need to delete records. Does this law require all libraries and newspaper companies to go through all past editions of their papers and cut out any microfilm or whatever records of the story that is being suppressed? No? Then it shouldn't be happening on the internet. This isn't even removing the content from the net, it's removing the search results to the content.
The law is bullshit, mostly used to hide corruption. There are better ways of dealing with old crimes that don't include methods to hide corruption.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @03:43PM
That's not what the law is used for and you know it. If it was limited to things you did before 18 well then maybe, but it's used to suppress fraud and corruption claims so those people can go defraud and cheat more people.
Do you have evidence that such use of the law is the typical case and not the exception?
Because the law in the EU explicitly forbids that kind of use since its clearly in the public interest for evidence of fraud and corruption to be in the public eye.
In the US we already have a law that wipes the record of bankruptcies older than 7 years. Does google deserve an exception just because they are google?
. Society only needs to grow up a little bit and not count the stupid things you did 20 years ago against you.
"Only" You trivialize what is essentially impossible.
And remember - this is not about wiping the info from websites. Its about wiping the info from search engines. None of the right-to-be-forgotten laws require that public records be censored. Only that major search engines do what they have been doing for things like stolen credit card numbers and links to pirated material. If the search engines are going to block stuff for their big corps then us little guys ought to get the same protections too.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday December 13 2016, @07:52AM
Agreed, which is precisely why I wrote the following:
You are criticising the implementation of the law rather than the law itself.
Again, I answered your concern. The law is quite specific on what can be expunged from one's record and what cannot. Fraud and serious criminality are not covered by this law as I clearly stated here :
And then you wander off into this marvellous example of illogical thinking...
We have made such a law - this is it. You want to replace our existing law with one of your choosing that meets your own view of the world.
Please read all of my comments before you go making future statements.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Tuesday December 13 2016, @03:27PM
". No-one is entitled to sneak up to your home and peek through the windows. "
Ok, so the parallel with regards to computer networking is a LAN. This right to privacy currently exists. Comparing your "house" to your ISP's WAN is a mistake. As soon as you upload the data to a server which you agreed to use under specific conditions, that data is:
1) No longer in your home.
2) No longer yours.
" Nothing gives the company running that site the 'right' to sell your private photos and the information that goes with them to someone else without your permission. Except, of course, in the US - where business is deemed to have priority over everything. The vast majority of the world still believes that the individual has a right to privacy."
People click "I Agree" on the EULAs.
Government's job here would not be to protect people from making bad decisions and legislate common sense. Government's job here would be to inform people about the impact of their choices, and many are seeing the impact already: VPN use is on the rise. Many people no longer use "firstname.lastname@AOL.com" in their public-facing online accounts, etc.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday December 13 2016, @06:28PM
While I can agree with some of what you have written, I cannot agree with it all.
It is possible to have photographs held on sites so that only a limited number of people can view them - i.e.those given specific authorisation to do so. But the companies themselves use the data and the analysis of that data for any purpose that they see fit. That is where there should be a restriction. The company should not be able to use that data without the user's explicit consent. If the company wishes to argue that such a move would make the site unprofitable then the user should be recompensed - if the data is worth money then the user should be paid for providing the data.
The site can make its profit from advertisements etc, none of which need specific user data - although the company will often claim it is for 'targetted ads' i.e. the company can make more money by providing such advertisements'. Basically, this is only an admission that they have used personal data for a use other than that which the site advertises as being its function.
In Europe, it is illegal to use personal data in ways that the user has not specifically authorised - and any company that stores such data is subject to inspection to ensure that they are complying with all the necessary rules and regulations for holding such data. The EULA would not stand inspection in a European court because it does not specify the precise ways in which data can be used. Coverall statements such as 'data analysis' or 'may be provided to a 3rd party' do not comply with local legislation; they are simply too broad brush. How will the data be analysed, who will see the results of the analysis, how does the user obtain the analysis, which 3rd parties are involved (by name), what will they receive (in detail), and how specifically will the data be used?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @04:42PM
> However, it is (or should be) obvious that we are building the infrastructure for censorship.
Too late. Once we started requiring google to obey the DMCA the infrastructure for censorship was already fully developed.
The only question now left is whether the right to censor is only for the rich and powerful or is it democratized.