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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, Insightful) by khallow on Friday November 17 2017, @04:18PM (4 children)
The thing is someone loses much of their right to privacy when they commit crimes or are a public figure. If you did something heinous and high profile in the past to the point that stories about that still appear high up in search results under your name? Sucks to be you. That's the way it should be.
And these facts can be quite relevant long after the incident. For example, committing the crime of embezzlement remains quite relevant to anyone who hiring said person for a position of considerable financial trust (like accountant), particularly, if the behavior is repeated.
In addition, the level at which this right is being implemented is both irrational and destructive of freedom. It shouldn't be Google's job to filter out lawful websites. If someone wants their information removed from a website, go to the website to get it removed. If the content of that web page is lawful, then sucks to be you. Instead, Google and other search engines operating in Europe are now mandated to implement a substantial amount of machinery of censorship of lawful web pages into its search results. In other words, it is now legal to suppress lawful speech at the search engine level. This will aid future tyranny in Europe.
Further, despite all this talk of the "internet never forgets", it does. It just takes longer.
So what? The right to be forgotten has been observed by the party it applies to, your government.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Friday November 17 2017, @05:54PM (3 children)
When government demands that information must not be searchable, but not unpublishable how is there really any right to be forgotten?
If the right to be forgotten can't be brought up in a court of law to suppress history, how is there any such right?
The logical conclusion is that newspapers must cull their archives, articles must be somehow retroactively unpublished and bells must be un-rung.
And thousands, or millions of people's brains must be manipulated for the benefit on an individual.
Of course none of this applies to government, who are allowed to keep archives and search them forever.
It only applies to public accessible search engines, it really only applies to "members of the public", not to the police or government.
At least for now, that's all it applies to.
How far from officially redacted libraries and archives are we? How far from punishment for merely "knowing"? How long until merely reminding people of past offenses is itself a crime? How long until mere knowledge will be illegal?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday November 19 2017, @07:53AM (2 children)
No, they aren't. Criminal records are to be deleted after some time.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 19 2017, @11:54PM (1 child)
That's the claim. The reality always proves otherwise. Just ask the gun owners living around the area the Beltway "Snipers" worked in, and how those "temporary" background check records were used to identify them as owning .223 rifles many years later.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday November 20 2017, @06:18AM
That's the law.
We are talking about Europe.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.