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Google's general counsel has signalled the company intends to fight, hard, against broad interpretations of the European Union's right to be forgotten.
Kent Walker, the company's general counsel and senior veep, put his name to a strongly-worded post on Wednesday, US time. Titled "Defending access to lawful information at Europe's highest court", the post argued that forthcoming cases in the European Court of Justice "represent a serious assault on the public's right to access lawful information."
Walker wrote that French courts' request for a European Court of Justice ruling on personal data collection effectively seeks a regime under which "all mentions of criminality or political affiliation should automatically be purged from search results, without any consideration of public interest."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Friday November 17 2017, @12:03PM (4 children)
The thing is this: The information is public, Google just makes it more accessible. The original case (iirc) was about a Spanish businessman who had once gone bankrupt. The articles are still online in the Spanish newspapers, but Google is no longer allowed to index those articles in their search results.
That makes no sense at all. Either the information is legal, or it is not. If it's legal, then there is every reason for search engines to index it.
Look, the Internet has made massive changes in our lives, by making all sorts of information more accessible. As with any groundbreaking new technology: most of the change is positive, but some aspects are negative. In this case, the huge benefits come precisely from the free flow of information. Trying to pick and choose which information flows is like trying to stuff that genie back in the bottle. It's either a futile effort, or else it will ultimately undo all of the benefits inherent in the Internet.
Google, of course, is fighting this for their own business interests. However, it is an important - perhaps the important - fight. Censorship impinges directly on the basic right of freedom of expression, as laid down in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday November 17 2017, @12:35PM (2 children)
As it would be for Google to index and allow access to the electoral rolls.
Do you really like to make your address known to anyone who wants to dox or stalk you?
And the Europeans want a more limited access to information about a private person, even if it comes to a cost to some businesses.
Is it something that impacts on you or your rights, or any other's human being? Or otherwise, what fault do you find in their position?
Keeping info about another person at a low level of accessibility infringes on your or anyone else's right to free speech? How?
Hang on... you don't believe that a "corporate person" is human and, as such, protected by the human rights, do you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 17 2017, @04:23PM
Why is that information on the web? If true, it's doubly retarded, first for having the information out there without even a robot.txt to inform search engines that the result shouldn't be listed, and second for then, attempting to fix the problem by creating a silly mandate on search engines which forces them to censor their search results.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @06:39PM
Keeping info about another person at a low level of accessibility infringes on your or anyone else's right to free speech?
Any and all regulation of content on the internet, or any other communication device, by the state or any other monopoly, is an infringement on free speech, by definition. Nobody has the right to decide what another can post. Society/culture is too authoritarian. The only way to defeat censorship is through a technical means that will leave the tyrants crying in their soup.
(Score: 1) by mmarujo on Tuesday November 21 2017, @09:42AM
This isn't about being able to write about it, it is about indexing. If Google or anyone else wants to write about it they can, if Kent Walker wants to stand on top of a soapbox and shout about it he can.
What the law is about putting a stop into a ginormous information collection machine.