I think I speak for America and the rest of the world when I say that the EU should stop trying to boss around foreign companies. This was ridiculous the first time when it only applied to EU, but now it's pure insanity.
Well I think there is: it's :"the EU should stop trying to boss around foreign companies". Perhaps you can explain why that is absurd because it's prefaced by an (agreed) absurdity?
All international laws, treaties, and agreements are "bossing around foreign [people|companies]"
We have extradition treaties, peace treaties, copyright treaties, trade agreements, etc etc, all of which present restrictions on what private individuals and corporations can and cannot do.
The notion that countries will seek to gain international adherence to its desired rules is anything but absurd. The only absurdity here is what's actually being proposed - so let's talk about that, instead of some notion that countries should not pursue international cooperation.
There's also a bit of hypocrisy when claiming to "speak for America", considering this is a country that has literally gone to war in order to "boss around foreign [people|companies]" - I'm not even talking about Iraq, look up the sordid history of the United Fruit Company and its relationship to Latin American interventionism.
The government of the United States of (Central-North) America also forces foreign companies to give up information that is not stored in that specific country.
Truth is that every country can demand whatever it wants from companies operating within it. That's part of a concept called national sovereignty. If the company doesn't like it they can stop doing business in that country.
Of course countries should try to cooperate but that's simply not always possible.
I think I speak for the rest of the world when I say that America should stop bossing around foreign companies and forcing them to turn over foreign personal data to American secret spy agencies.
I think this is good, I think people should be able to delete their online presence when they turn 18. The way the internet is now, it's too easy to screw up your own life.
Except a lot of the time recorded history is one-sided and often out of context. People should have a right to a reasonable amount of privacy. Especially children when they do not really understand the mistakes they make while growing up (adults too). Too many witch hunts come out of half-truths and manipulated 'evidence' and facts.
If you see this as expanding libel laws, including the ability to compel publishers to take down or retract libelous statements, then maybe there is some machinery in place. There is an objective criterion, at least - someone was under 18, someone definitely lied, etc.
But like any machinery it can be abused. And expanding it will increase the potential for abuse.
Except a lot of the time recorded history is quite accurate and in context, and people are using privacy or allegations of falsehood as an excuse to engage in censorship.
That's not to imply that all of the info out there is truthful and of legitimate public interest. But the right to be forgotten can and has in fact been abused.
I agree, and definitely do not think its a perfect solution. But I feel that people who are innocent deserve this ability, sort of akin to the statement: " it's better that 1000 guilty men go free than one innocent man be imprisoned"
Your personal data belongs to you, yes. Your past actions do not. If you killed an old lady while DUI, sorry, that information does not belong to you, and you have no right to have it forgotten. Ahem... You should have no right. EU seems to think it is acceptable to rewrite history. As an European, I'm positively ashamed of the image we are sending the world on this matter.
Let the slippery slope begin. Islamic States will mandate that all information about women behaving against the Islamic customs be censored, worldwide. It's idiotic, but not more idiotic than the right to be forgotten.
The data about you should belong to the person or thing collecting the data unless otherwise specified in an agreement of some sort (say, for instance, self-nominated data shall be owned by the user that input the data)
For example: you walk down the street and I see you (because you were there and you exist) and my memory of you being there might be recounted in a blog at some point. That blog might get indexed on Google.
Who owns that data about you? I would argue the person that made the observation owns it - the fact that you acted to walk down a street does not mean you get to control my recollection of that event, or the fact that it happened.
But would you agree with it if we lived in a world where nobody ever forgot anything? Because that's what we're living in now with the internet.
When I read "right to be forgotten" I think of it just as how people forget about the dumb stuff they did as a kid, which we've all done and would prefer to forget. The internet makes this impossible.
Now obviously this could be misused to forget things that really shouldn't be forgot (say, murder or other political things), but that depends on the particular case and they need to be evaluated as such. Just because people have the option doesn't mean it will be abused, and maybe we should concentrate our efforts on making sure it isn't than denying the right completely.
[opinion]
Also please don't judge me too harshly but in my personal opinion I think a lot of people would have been for this a few years ago, but now when it's an option people always find reasons to bitch about something because it makes them seem smarter. "Hah, everyone thinks this is good? Let me prove everyone just how wrong they are." Not pointing at anyone in particular. It's not even tied to this particular issue either, but I feel like I see it a lot. I myself have done this in the past.
Here's an alternative: When you turn 18, you get an automatic free name change. I'm sure it'll be a pain in the ass for the person in question, but it's easier than making the Internet forget something.
Besides, if an annoying bureaucratic process is sufficient to deter you from going ahead with a name change, then the privacy interest at stake here can't be that huge.
You're trying to oversolve the problem. Most of the legitimate right to be forgotten requests concern things like "I don't want my status as rape survivor to come up when an employer Googles me". If someone wants to doc they're doing to dox, regardless of any right to be forgotten. But a name change is good enough for 90% of folks.
Absolutely, I can't agree more. I'm not sure why you think it should be limited to people before the age of 18 though or why you think it should be limited to online presence though.
I can think of many corrupt politicians and criminals who would desperately love to be forgotten not to mention people with criminal histories that would love to become politicians. I mean even your average celebrity like Bill Cosby would love to erase bits of his history from the record right about now.
The idea of a "right" to compel other people to destroy information is comically absurd.
Obviously, 99% of the people who might abuse such a "right" are PR groups working for corrupt politicians and corporations; there's no way this is going to be useful for the average person.
This is also a huge pain in the ass technically. It is simply very hard for most sites to enforce arbitrary censorship, and we know how wonderful DMCA takedown requests have been. At least with DMCA requests and more common censorship laws (against proscribed political beliefs, pornography, etc.) there's a fairly limited scope of things that site operators have to worry about.
And this is censorship; that much is clear. You are forbidden from speaking about people who have the wherewithal to leverage this "right". These aren't even anti-slander laws; under the "right to be forgotten", you are forbidden from making even perfectly true statements about someone.
I don't like the right to be forgotten implementation and social implications either, although we do have something slightly related in California that does work. Web sites you login to have to have a privacy policy, profile page, and the ability to change or delete your profile. So I think the Europeans are nuts with their deleting news articles, but I do believe the California system where you can delete anything you yourself put in is fine.
It doesn't apply to politicians, who have chosen to be public figures, and it doesn't apply to corporations because they aren't people.
And nothing is forbidden. The right to be forgotten is opt-out. You can publish anything you like, and unlike DMCA you can let any dispute go all the way up the legal chain.
It has absolutely nothing at all to do with censorship.
Throwing the word 'censorship' around in civil rights issues is as cheap and meaningless as using terrorism and child abuse as an excuse for privacy violations.
As Wikipedia's definition goes: "Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions". So, how is "Right to be forgotten" not censorship ?
As for the balance between protection of individuals vs. transparency, laws already exists in many countries to protect the individuals. Powerless individuals are not the beneficiaries of the "Right to be forgotten" legislation : those who use (and abuse) it already are corporations and powerful individuals...
Is there any version of this "right" that would actually be sensible? I mean many countries do provide some recourse if you prove libelous statements were published. So the machinery exists in some form, and hasn't led to a lot of abuse. Libel, though, requires proving that the statements are false.
Just because you remove it from Google doesn't mean it didn't happen. Removing it from Google also doesn't result in your employer having an open mind about your past history. Making it easier to find something does not mean it won't be found.
If you're a defendant in a case and proven innocent - that's on the record. If you're a victim of something and your name has been released to the public - also on the record. If it's a public record I support all efforts to make that data as easily accessible as possible. Preventing public discovery of an existing record does no one a service.
The fact that that exercise of the "right to be forgotten" won't completely protect you from facts about the past is a red herring. Security is almost never perfect. Security is mostly about making something generally impractical to do. This is similar — a dedicated snoop will probably be able to find the dirt, but it won't be readily apparent to everyone who types your name into the world's most typed-into box.
Totally understand and security by obscurity is definitely possible and effective, though difficult for media and the internet.
That said, if something is legitimately public, why would we not want to make it easily accessible "using the world's most typed-into box"? Why would we prevent someone from developing an effective way to make that data available to the public? What differentiates something with your name on it from all other data? (I'm not talking about private data here that you entered or were promised would be shared in a private context from, say, a profile or payment information standpoint)
This new "right" seems completely random and out of left field. It doesn't really have anything to do with privacy. I don't agree that it is a right because to me, rights make sense across the board. This one only kind of makes sense in a narrow context and when applied broadly doesn't work at all, and infringes on all the others.
It's a massive privacy issue - you can change in very personal, significant ways without Google etc updating the person they present you as being - your political beliefs, your gender and sexuality, controversial opinions etc. There are many contexts where these and outdated versions of you shouldn't be the most-available, most-presented information about you.
The "right to be forgotten" is based on the principle that people can be wronged both by true and false statements about them.
Here is the best sense I can make of the dispute here: It is obvious that there are many true things you can say about most people that would be harmful to them. Part of the purpose of the law is to give people a recourse outside of violence against people who wrong them. So the question is, when you say harmful-but-true things about somebody, is there a greater concern that overrides their ability to seek recourse? The US would generally (but certainly not always) say "yes," while the EU tends to say "maybe."
I can see a case for a very limited "right to be forgotten", restricted by:
* Time. You should only be able to request the removal of information that is old -- like, perhaps at least 10 or 15 years. Forgetting takes time, after all.
* Scope. Anything that's a matter of public record should be completely off limits to have "forgotten". If you want it to go away, you have to get it removed from the public records first.
* Target. High-profile individuals (celebrities, elected officials, etc.) live highly public lives by choice. They should be fully exempt.
Right to be forgotten, to me, implies a right to rewrite history. If we extend this to other media - "Right to remove all mentions of my name from indexes in published books" does this make any sense at all? If anything, you already have the right to solicit a retraction and or takedown to fix the problem.
You're not asking for the source material to be removed from the web root content, because that would be crazy and a violation of rights, so you're just asking for the revealing of its existence to be removed?
Similar to requests from users to "change the way that thing looks on the chart", the reason why it looks that way is because the data is there. Either change the data, or live with the picture it presents. Sure, you can blame the graph for its approach to displaying the data, but removal is a clear half-measure. When it's clear a full measure fix is a terrible idea, the half-measure is probably also at least half as terrible, or maybe / .5 as terrible depending on which "law" you use.
1_ the EU trying to convince Google to delete data they are allowed to have outside the EU. That won't work.
2_ the ruling that Google must make certain data unavailable within the boundaries of the EU or pay the consequences. Simply stating "we did, buy then users used the wrong two letters (domain) and accessed it anyway" is a poor excuse, and I think the EU won't take it.
I can imagine Google blocking results based on IP (like they currently do with music videos on YouTube) as a reasonable compromise the EU can enforce. It does not account for proxies, of course, but it's a start.
I understand the need for something like this. The right to delete all Google+, Facebook, and ad tracker network stored data etc. seems reasonable. The right to limit search engine discoverability of 3rd party published information seems to be a step too far. I'm not sure where you draw the line, but there does seem to at least be a line somewhere in there.
There are a lot of big-name crooks who would like to rewrite history. I see this regularly on Wikipedia's conflict of interest notice board. In the last year, four different rich guys with old felony convictions have paid editors trying to make their criminal history go away. In each case, they've failed on Wikipedia.
With a "right to be forgotten", they could litigate over that. Even if they had a weak case, it could become dangerous to refer to the criminal history of anyone with money. There's already been one lawsuit on Wikipedia, alleging defamation for going over someone's past rather than merely echoing what came out of their PR firm. I was one of the people listed in the lawsuit, but the plaintiff backed down after a threat of a countersuit.
Slightly related, but what are thoughts on using internet harassment for extortion purposes or personal attacks. In many ways, the technology and policies we'd use to prevent this harassment could be frightfully similar to technology that allows censorship.
The deliberate misrepresentation and/or willful ignorance about what the "right to be forgotten" means is pathetic. I really expect better from HN, regardless of whether people agree with it or not.
Just some points:
- Politicians, public figures, celebrities and any kind of information that is the public or historic interest does not fall under the right to be forgotten.
- Corporations, governments etcetera do not fall under the right to be forgotten.
- There is no DMCA-like process. This notion is the result of Google's disinformation campaign and the deliberately flawed process Google implemented, like a child throwing a tantrum.
- This has nothing to do with censorship. There is nothing pre-emptive about it. Individuals have to actively make each and every request. Any request for removal can be taken all the way up the legal chain.
Yes, there is a chilling effect risk in the implementation of the right to be forgotten. Possibly to the point where the right itself needs a much clearer definition. Possibly even to the point where the conclusion is that it is impossible to implement without harmful side effects that outweigh the benefits.
Those are valid discussions. But so far I've seen very little of that discussion on HN, just a lot of FUD and outright BS.
> - Politicians, public figures, celebrities and any kind of information that is the public or historic interest does not fall under the right to be forgotten.
I have read those claims some times, can you please direct me to were in the law is said this?
In all the discussion about Silicon Valley and why no place else has been able to have quite so much success in high tech, subtle cultural issues can be underemphasized because they aren't easily quantified. This attitude toward freedom of speech and data in the EU is one reason why startups don't prosper as well there.
For a society to allow and even encourage independent people to create new ways to collaborate with data is risky to existing powers. Most societies place restrictions on who can know or say things and then impose severe consequences on the people about whom those things are said. Sometimes the restrictions and consequences are informal. There may be a strong norm against sharing data or gossiping or spying or publishing. There may be a strong sense of reputation or face or a presumption that bad things said about you make you a bad person and unemployable.
The EU is a place where people have lived with the idea that central authorities can tell individuals what to say or not say for a long time. The large news and data institutions and churches have strong links to the state and individuals are not expected to be able to make choices about information for themselves. Political parties are routinely banned and prosecuted solely for disagreeing with ruling parties; elected officials have been prosecuted and jailed in France and the Netherlands in this decade merely for being leaders of the minority parties in their national and EU legislatures. [0] A certain confidence that anything officially published is endorsed by powerful people lingers weakly as a result. People don't like small companies, startups, individuals controlling data as a result.
China and Japan are the same, though each in its own way, of course, just as each European culture is different.
But America is an outlier. We trust our government and newspapers less. We expect authorities' pronouncements to have less effect on our prospects and reputations. We share data freely and expect that people can gossip about us freely with limited consequences. We even expect a certain amount of lying to go on without being prohibited, though it upsets us more because we've developed stronger norms against it than nations where authorities are expected to have the power routinely to deceive the people like the EU.
And in tech, where information is everything, that cultural approbation for data is deeply though subtly influential. It's one of the many things that make US startups and especially Silicon Valley ones more successful.
Which isn't to day that this EU decision is a bad thing for startups. It's bad for Google, but that's not all startups. It creates an opening for an American company to provide a search engine that fills in Google's EU gaps. EU companies might be able to find ways to exploit it, too.
It does reflect one of the cultural advantages of Silicon Valley, though. Along with the esteem for entrepreneurs, openness to failure, flexible job market, and network effects, freedom of speech is a business advantage in tech.
I can not find a source on Marine Le Pen actually being convicted, but Wilders was not. He was charged, however this only happened after enough citizens pressed charges: initially the public prosecutor declined to do so until they were forced to do so (Dutch law allows victims to fight the prosecutions decision to not press charges). It came to a long trial (he was charged for inciting hate/violence) and the court ruled that he was not guilty, but said it was on the edge of legality.
Basically, it is (legally) okay to say that the Quran incites hate in people, or that middle-eastern immigrants hold backwards customs which clash with Dutch tradition. That is considered part of public discourse. But you are not allowed to then say "And therefore we need to remove them all, by force if necessary" as now you are inciting violence.
Furthermore, Wilders was at the time (unfortunately imho) not the leader of a "minority party" see for example this: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabinet-Rutte_I#mediaviewer/Fil... It shows the distribution of seats in the Dutch Parliment. PVV is Wilders' party, 'rest' is the remaining parties.
> This attitude toward freedom of speech and data in the EU is one reason why startups don't prosper as well there.
This is the sort of assertion (along with quite a few others in your comment) which seems likely to be merely a nice story. To actually believe that it's true, I'd want to see evidence.
In particular, your idea that concerns with privacy are due to people trusting government more in the EU than in the USA seems entirely wrong headed. The concern for privacy in Germany comes from a distrust of centralised data collection because they have experienced it and know how bad it gets, not because they feel more comfortable with data controlled by the government.
66 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadUmmm no you don't.
There is literally nothing that could follow this beginning and not be absurd, including (but not limited to) what actually follows it in your post.
We have extradition treaties, peace treaties, copyright treaties, trade agreements, etc etc, all of which present restrictions on what private individuals and corporations can and cannot do.
The notion that countries will seek to gain international adherence to its desired rules is anything but absurd. The only absurdity here is what's actually being proposed - so let's talk about that, instead of some notion that countries should not pursue international cooperation.
There's also a bit of hypocrisy when claiming to "speak for America", considering this is a country that has literally gone to war in order to "boss around foreign [people|companies]" - I'm not even talking about Iraq, look up the sordid history of the United Fruit Company and its relationship to Latin American interventionism.
Strongly disagree. Sovereignty exists so that my rules don't apply to you.
Or do we need to address all inequities in the world before we're allowed to have an opinion on a global "right to be forgotten"?
True - it is America's job !
If that's the American way, I would like to opt out.
Truth is that every country can demand whatever it wants from companies operating within it. That's part of a concept called national sovereignty. If the company doesn't like it they can stop doing business in that country.
Of course countries should try to cooperate but that's simply not always possible.
But like any machinery it can be abused. And expanding it will increase the potential for abuse.
That's not to imply that all of the info out there is truthful and of legitimate public interest. But the right to be forgotten can and has in fact been abused.
Who do you think it belongs to?
Let the slippery slope begin. Islamic States will mandate that all information about women behaving against the Islamic customs be censored, worldwide. It's idiotic, but not more idiotic than the right to be forgotten.
For example: you walk down the street and I see you (because you were there and you exist) and my memory of you being there might be recounted in a blog at some point. That blog might get indexed on Google.
Who owns that data about you? I would argue the person that made the observation owns it - the fact that you acted to walk down a street does not mean you get to control my recollection of that event, or the fact that it happened.
When I read "right to be forgotten" I think of it just as how people forget about the dumb stuff they did as a kid, which we've all done and would prefer to forget. The internet makes this impossible.
Now obviously this could be misused to forget things that really shouldn't be forgot (say, murder or other political things), but that depends on the particular case and they need to be evaluated as such. Just because people have the option doesn't mean it will be abused, and maybe we should concentrate our efforts on making sure it isn't than denying the right completely.
[opinion]
Also please don't judge me too harshly but in my personal opinion I think a lot of people would have been for this a few years ago, but now when it's an option people always find reasons to bitch about something because it makes them seem smarter. "Hah, everyone thinks this is good? Let me prove everyone just how wrong they are." Not pointing at anyone in particular. It's not even tied to this particular issue either, but I feel like I see it a lot. I myself have done this in the past.
[/opinion]
Besides, if an annoying bureaucratic process is sufficient to deter you from going ahead with a name change, then the privacy interest at stake here can't be that huge.
I can think of many corrupt politicians and criminals who would desperately love to be forgotten not to mention people with criminal histories that would love to become politicians. I mean even your average celebrity like Bill Cosby would love to erase bits of his history from the record right about now.
Obviously, 99% of the people who might abuse such a "right" are PR groups working for corrupt politicians and corporations; there's no way this is going to be useful for the average person.
This is also a huge pain in the ass technically. It is simply very hard for most sites to enforce arbitrary censorship, and we know how wonderful DMCA takedown requests have been. At least with DMCA requests and more common censorship laws (against proscribed political beliefs, pornography, etc.) there's a fairly limited scope of things that site operators have to worry about.
And this is censorship; that much is clear. You are forbidden from speaking about people who have the wherewithal to leverage this "right". These aren't even anti-slander laws; under the "right to be forgotten", you are forbidden from making even perfectly true statements about someone.
It doesn't apply to politicians, who have chosen to be public figures, and it doesn't apply to corporations because they aren't people.
And nothing is forbidden. The right to be forgotten is opt-out. You can publish anything you like, and unlike DMCA you can let any dispute go all the way up the legal chain.
It has absolutely nothing at all to do with censorship.
> doesn't apply to corporations because they aren't people.
could be a problem post Citizens United couldn't it?
"I'm not a politician! I'm just a humble police commissioner."
> it doesn't apply to corporations
"I'm not a corporation! I'm just a humble executive."
>And nothing is forbidden. The right to be forgotten is opt-out.
What is this supposed to mean? This is clearly not the case. Websites cannot opt-out of following these requests.
>unlike DMCA you can let any dispute go all the way up the legal chain.
Oh great, so I get some semblance of due process before being censored?
>It has absolutely nothing at all to do with censorship.
Explain to me how preventing me from saying true things about certain people is not censorship.
As for the balance between protection of individuals vs. transparency, laws already exists in many countries to protect the individuals. Powerless individuals are not the beneficiaries of the "Right to be forgotten" legislation : those who use (and abuse) it already are corporations and powerful individuals...
http://www.pictureshowman.com/articles_genhist_censorship.cf...
In New Zealand, the law that "enforces" this is called the "censorship" law.
http://www.censor.org.nz/classification-law/censorship-law-i...
If you are charged with something and found innocent you should have the right to not be forever associated with it in search results for your name.
If you are the victim of something you should be able to move on without every potential employer and partner building an image skewed by that moment.
If you're a defendant in a case and proven innocent - that's on the record. If you're a victim of something and your name has been released to the public - also on the record. If it's a public record I support all efforts to make that data as easily accessible as possible. Preventing public discovery of an existing record does no one a service.
That said, if something is legitimately public, why would we not want to make it easily accessible "using the world's most typed-into box"? Why would we prevent someone from developing an effective way to make that data available to the public? What differentiates something with your name on it from all other data? (I'm not talking about private data here that you entered or were promised would be shared in a private context from, say, a profile or payment information standpoint)
This new "right" seems completely random and out of left field. It doesn't really have anything to do with privacy. I don't agree that it is a right because to me, rights make sense across the board. This one only kind of makes sense in a narrow context and when applied broadly doesn't work at all, and infringes on all the others.
Here is the best sense I can make of the dispute here: It is obvious that there are many true things you can say about most people that would be harmful to them. Part of the purpose of the law is to give people a recourse outside of violence against people who wrong them. So the question is, when you say harmful-but-true things about somebody, is there a greater concern that overrides their ability to seek recourse? The US would generally (but certainly not always) say "yes," while the EU tends to say "maybe."
* Time. You should only be able to request the removal of information that is old -- like, perhaps at least 10 or 15 years. Forgetting takes time, after all.
* Scope. Anything that's a matter of public record should be completely off limits to have "forgotten". If you want it to go away, you have to get it removed from the public records first.
* Target. High-profile individuals (celebrities, elected officials, etc.) live highly public lives by choice. They should be fully exempt.
You're not asking for the source material to be removed from the web root content, because that would be crazy and a violation of rights, so you're just asking for the revealing of its existence to be removed?
Similar to requests from users to "change the way that thing looks on the chart", the reason why it looks that way is because the data is there. Either change the data, or live with the picture it presents. Sure, you can blame the graph for its approach to displaying the data, but removal is a clear half-measure. When it's clear a full measure fix is a terrible idea, the half-measure is probably also at least half as terrible, or maybe / .5 as terrible depending on which "law" you use.
I'm pretty sure this question could be used as a reasonably reliable predictor of nationality.
1_ the EU trying to convince Google to delete data they are allowed to have outside the EU. That won't work.
2_ the ruling that Google must make certain data unavailable within the boundaries of the EU or pay the consequences. Simply stating "we did, buy then users used the wrong two letters (domain) and accessed it anyway" is a poor excuse, and I think the EU won't take it.
I can imagine Google blocking results based on IP (like they currently do with music videos on YouTube) as a reasonable compromise the EU can enforce. It does not account for proxies, of course, but it's a start.
With a "right to be forgotten", they could litigate over that. Even if they had a weak case, it could become dangerous to refer to the criminal history of anyone with money. There's already been one lawsuit on Wikipedia, alleging defamation for going over someone's past rather than merely echoing what came out of their PR firm. I was one of the people listed in the lawsuit, but the plaintiff backed down after a threat of a countersuit.
Interesting related article: http://www.troyhunt.com/2014/11/ransom-is-new-black-increasi...
Just some points:
- Politicians, public figures, celebrities and any kind of information that is the public or historic interest does not fall under the right to be forgotten.
- Corporations, governments etcetera do not fall under the right to be forgotten.
- There is no DMCA-like process. This notion is the result of Google's disinformation campaign and the deliberately flawed process Google implemented, like a child throwing a tantrum.
- This has nothing to do with censorship. There is nothing pre-emptive about it. Individuals have to actively make each and every request. Any request for removal can be taken all the way up the legal chain.
Yes, there is a chilling effect risk in the implementation of the right to be forgotten. Possibly to the point where the right itself needs a much clearer definition. Possibly even to the point where the conclusion is that it is impossible to implement without harmful side effects that outweigh the benefits.
Those are valid discussions. But so far I've seen very little of that discussion on HN, just a lot of FUD and outright BS.
I have read those claims some times, can you please direct me to were in the law is said this?
For a society to allow and even encourage independent people to create new ways to collaborate with data is risky to existing powers. Most societies place restrictions on who can know or say things and then impose severe consequences on the people about whom those things are said. Sometimes the restrictions and consequences are informal. There may be a strong norm against sharing data or gossiping or spying or publishing. There may be a strong sense of reputation or face or a presumption that bad things said about you make you a bad person and unemployable.
The EU is a place where people have lived with the idea that central authorities can tell individuals what to say or not say for a long time. The large news and data institutions and churches have strong links to the state and individuals are not expected to be able to make choices about information for themselves. Political parties are routinely banned and prosecuted solely for disagreeing with ruling parties; elected officials have been prosecuted and jailed in France and the Netherlands in this decade merely for being leaders of the minority parties in their national and EU legislatures. [0] A certain confidence that anything officially published is endorsed by powerful people lingers weakly as a result. People don't like small companies, startups, individuals controlling data as a result.
China and Japan are the same, though each in its own way, of course, just as each European culture is different.
But America is an outlier. We trust our government and newspapers less. We expect authorities' pronouncements to have less effect on our prospects and reputations. We share data freely and expect that people can gossip about us freely with limited consequences. We even expect a certain amount of lying to go on without being prohibited, though it upsets us more because we've developed stronger norms against it than nations where authorities are expected to have the power routinely to deceive the people like the EU.
And in tech, where information is everything, that cultural approbation for data is deeply though subtly influential. It's one of the many things that make US startups and especially Silicon Valley ones more successful.
Which isn't to day that this EU decision is a bad thing for startups. It's bad for Google, but that's not all startups. It creates an opening for an American company to provide a search engine that fills in Google's EU gaps. EU companies might be able to find ways to exploit it, too.
It does reflect one of the cultural advantages of Silicon Valley, though. Along with the esteem for entrepreneurs, openness to failure, flexible job market, and network effects, freedom of speech is a business advantage in tech.
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Geert_Wilders
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/02/marine-le-pen-i...
I can not find a source on Marine Le Pen actually being convicted, but Wilders was not. He was charged, however this only happened after enough citizens pressed charges: initially the public prosecutor declined to do so until they were forced to do so (Dutch law allows victims to fight the prosecutions decision to not press charges). It came to a long trial (he was charged for inciting hate/violence) and the court ruled that he was not guilty, but said it was on the edge of legality.
Basically, it is (legally) okay to say that the Quran incites hate in people, or that middle-eastern immigrants hold backwards customs which clash with Dutch tradition. That is considered part of public discourse. But you are not allowed to then say "And therefore we need to remove them all, by force if necessary" as now you are inciting violence.
Furthermore, Wilders was at the time (unfortunately imho) not the leader of a "minority party" see for example this: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabinet-Rutte_I#mediaviewer/Fil... It shows the distribution of seats in the Dutch Parliment. PVV is Wilders' party, 'rest' is the remaining parties.
This is the sort of assertion (along with quite a few others in your comment) which seems likely to be merely a nice story. To actually believe that it's true, I'd want to see evidence.
In particular, your idea that concerns with privacy are due to people trusting government more in the EU than in the USA seems entirely wrong headed. The concern for privacy in Germany comes from a distrust of centralised data collection because they have experienced it and know how bad it gets, not because they feel more comfortable with data controlled by the government.