What about other search engines? Social media shares? What happens when a journalist publishes an article based on offline investigation, does the right to be forgotten still apply? Search engines need to fight libelous SEO attacks, but this is a deeply unsettling over-reaction.

Let's drop the Orwellian phrasing and call it what it is: "Right to hide the past". Forget the truth, security through obscurity.

Knowledge is power, and search engines are the map.

edit:

And hopefully it's obvious the issue of search results is separate from consumer data mining/ad profiling.

Embarrassing / reputation-affecting knowledge being available to the public forever is not the same as truth being available. Especially now that we see how engines like Youtube go out of their way to offer extreme and provocative information, we should not leave it to search engines to be unregulated sources of information about individuals. Search engines will not tell your employers that you work diligently everyday but they will show an offensive tweet of yours from 2007 if that's what gets clicks and reactions.

* If someone feels consequences of an offensive 2007 tweet, just delete it. Platforms should be required to make it easy to delete content.

* If someone is scared of saying controversial things, avoid platforms that require real identities. There are plenty of anonymous platforms.

* Uphold social media to the same standards of traditional media, requiring truth and propagation of redactions and corrections. Libel and slander are well-established concepts.

* Demand discretion from friends. In college, my group had a strict "no-camera" rule when it came to embarrassing or unlawful shenanigans. My parent's generation had the same rule.

Hiding search results does not address the problem. If someone posts a photoshop of "Eric driving drunk" on Twitter, I want that post promptly removed... the search results are just a symptom.

That's the nature of the internet. The great equalizer

Removing it at the source removes it from google.

It's like saying the problem isn't that there is a negative story about you in The New York Times from 2007, the problem is that ISPs allow their customers to read that story in The New York Times. Obviously the "problem" is the story -- which you may have no legitimate right to prevent people from reading -- and if you have a legitimate complaint (i.e. libel) then you should have to take it up with The New York Times and not Comcast or Google.

The reason people want to go to Google instead is that they know Google doesn't have a strong enough incentive to stand up for the victim of the censorship. If you go to the source they may refuse to take it down and force you to adjudicate the matter in court where they can argue their side in front of a judge. If you go to Google, economically they have to take it down because nobody is paying them to hire lawyers to spend the hours it takes to make accurate legal determinations and they would go out of business taking on that role without compensation for seven billion people.

so let's say Eric was out drunk with his friends and they walked in a sex shop and picked up some dildos because hah hah this shit is funny we are so drunk and then Eric took some silly photos cuddling the dildo or mimicking putting it in his ass and someone posted it to the internet and now eric would like it gone.

Now Eric's pictures on the internet are actually sort of funny so they have gotten some exposure, and so Eric finds he can't keep his job at the local macho place of employment - I don't know why, maybe he's not good at talking shit to anyone who talks shit to him so everybody picks on him about his stupid funny photos.

So he gets fired or quits because can't handle the harassment, and is sick of going out and hearing hey it's dildo guy. So he moves away. Nobody in his new town know's he's dildo guy, but then he goes out one night with this girl, and somebody exclaims omg it's that dildo guy, hey look at this everybody I got me some google skills, I saw this hilarious picture one time.

Now on the one hand Eric has given the world a lot of (unpaid) entertainment as dildo guy, but on the other hand when he commits suicide because he is emotionally unconstituted to go through life being called out every now and then as dildo guy then he makes people feel bad. So in order to allow Eric to make his stupid drunk dildo hugging photo and not ruin the rest of his life for something embarrassing but totally legal let's just give him the right to remove the stuff from google. That way, when he moves from his old town where there are lots of people remembering the whole dildo picture situation, in his new town people didn't know him when it was fresh and his stupidity is somehow 'forgotten' thus preserving the ability that people have had throughout history of moving from one area because their reputation at that area had become to problematic to continue. Google makes sure the reputation follows.

The problem is the content showing up when searching for someone's name, not that there is an article on a website somewhere.

I guarantee Yandex and Baidu will not respect western delusions of security through obscurity.

This has nothing to do with security through obscurity, it has to do with rights of human beings. Anyway Google doesn't either, hence the article.

  All of the "right to be forgotten" arguments seem to devolve to "people shouldn't be able to know any data points that would negatively effect my social standings".

Isn't that a point in the other direction? The existence of convincing fakes will teach people not to believe everything they see on the internet.

If that someone shared it on their own website, hosted out-of-country, on their own hardware... well, I can't do anything about that but i also wouldn't care. It's clearly non-authoritative and won't get SEO traction by itself.

Does Europe not have the concept of a court-appointed lawyer?

> RTBF makes it possible for ordinary citizens who can't afford fancy lawyers to fight big corporations to seek redress.

No it makes it possible for criminals to hide their criminality. To be very blunt, if I were an employer, I don't want to hire a murderer. I don't care if he/she was convicted and served their time. Once you have committed murder, I will not hire you. I will not deal with you in any way. Hiding/obfuscating true information from me is wrong. Criminality is public record. It should be easily accessible.

Not sure you understand how court-appointed attorneys work. First off, you can't use one to sue someone else since you can only get a court-appointed attorney when you're being charged in a criminal suit.

Second, court-appointed attorneys suck. They are underpaid, overworked, and unable to properly do their jobs as is.

Requiring legal action would indeed create a scenario where only the rich bring such cases to trial.

RTBF does not protect murderers, this is a fundamental lack of knowledge of the law and its clearly marked boundaries.

I'm uneasy about some RTBF cases, but where you have a person making prolific publications across a variety of legal jurisdictions and ignoring the legal rulings (which happens in cases of stalking and harrassment, for example) it's impossible for the victim (and they do suffer real harm) to get justice other than asking search engines to de-index the attack pages.

Our legal system tends to attack actual bad actors, not convenient targets. Unless the Internet is involved. The way RTBF and DMCA work, search engines bear 100% of the cost, and people don't ever go after the actual bad actors.

By the way, in the US, if Tabloid X publishes Eric's photo, that's 100% legal thanks to the First Amendment, as long as the photographer agrees. Eric has no part. Attacking search engines on behalf of Eric, in the US, not so cool. Europe doesn't have free speech, so, no problem.

Europe definitely has free speech (all the countries I know of anyway, Europe has a lot of different countries). There is just a different definition of what exactly is free speech and what is something else (some racist things are not considered free speech).

And sure, I'm sure you'd call what you have free speech. But that's not the way the US defines it.

Nope it's not, it's an EU law and EU !== Europe. Europe has 51 countries while the EU only has 28. Just like Mexico is not in the US, a ton of European countries are not in the EU.

RBTF, maybe, but how is the DMCA this way? Certainly not the takedown notice/counternotice provision, which doesn't create new liability, only a special shield from any pre-existing liability.

The problem is that the shield has value to the search engine in excess of the cost to the search engine (but not the cost to the censorship victim) of removing the information. It reduces their risk, even when the risk is low because they would be likely to win, and removes the cost of having to litigate the issue even if they do win, so the search engine takes the deal and then executes ~all the notices even when they're bogus.

Which is a direct cost to the censorship victim compared to handling it the way Section 230 does it, and an indirect cost to the search engine because it has them paying to process the removal of legitimate information and reduces the value of their service to customers -- just not enough of an indirect cost to give them the incentive to refuse, because the brunt of the cost is on the third party being censored.

The search engine could ignore all takedowns and be in exactly the same situation as it would be without the DMCA; the safe harbor provision isn't a mandate on them, it is a benefit to them. They deal with takedowns because the cost of doing so is less than the cost of copyright liability they would have without the DMCA, which means the DMCA is saving them money, not imposing a cost.

You're treating the safe harbor and notice and takedown as indivisible when they obviously aren't. Conditioning the safe harbor on notice and takedown is a huge cost compared to the alternative used in CDA 230.

They obviously are both part of the DMCA, so you can't say that the DMCA imposes costs based on the notice and takedown condition for the safe harbor, because ignoring that condition leaves the host in the same position they would be in without the DMCA.

You can say that the notice and takedown requirement reduces the cost savings of the safe harbor compared to the hypothetical policy of an unconditional safe harbor, or one with alternative sets of conditions, but that's a very different claim than the DMCA imposing costs.

The safe harbor and the anti-circumvention rules are both part of the DMCA too, but it's silly to argue that the anti-circumvention rules don't impose net costs because if you average them together with the safe harbor it comes out somewhere near neutral. They don't cease to be divisible just because they were enacted at the same time. Otherwise you could justify anything by just finding something which is as good as the target thing is bad and lumping them together on the same side of the scale.

And if you've never gotten a DMCA takedown from Perfect 10, you probably don't understand the true terror of the DMCA process.

Just because hate speech isn't protected doesn't mean we don't have free speech.

No-where[1] has the US's extremist version of freedom of speech. Europe has a different form of free speech, and in this example Eric's right to be forgotton probably doesn't trump Someone's right to publish true information.

I guess there'd be some judicial attempt to balance these two rights: Does Eric pose a continuing risk to the public from drunk driving? Is Eric a public figure who's claimed to never have driven drunk? Was this a one off event that happened many years ago, never repeated? This would be something courts are able to decide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_10_of_the_European_Con...

BTW, search engines don't "publish" information in the US sense of the word. The way Russia forces Yandex to self-censor is that Yandex is liable for everything they show to users. That's 'publishing' in the US sense. Newspapers have publishers, and the publisher is the person you sue if you think the newspaper has libeled you.

Meanwhile, Europe (mostly) doesn't consider RTBF to be censorship because it only involves censoring search engines and not newspapers. Except that people are filing RTBF against newspaper site search, too.

...and I read that tweet in 2007, and quoted it in a blog post on my obscure, low traffic blog. Google will still find it.

> * Uphold social media to the same standards of traditional media, requiring truth and propagation of redactions and corrections. Libel and slander are well-established concepts.

What about the case where the damaging content is true? A key thing here is that what is acceptable changes over time. Something that can be a life ruining social faux pas today may have been pretty normal 20 years ago, and many people today won't accept the "oh, that was normal back then" explanation.

We used to be able to avoid these problems because it took effort to dig up records from 20 years ago, and from low circulation sources like local newspapers.

So, for example, if you did stupid things in your home town that ended up in your high school newspaper, and then 20 years later were applying for a job in a city in another state...the employer would probably not find that high school newspaper, even if you were applying for a fairly sensitive job in an industry like finance.

That's because to find things like that they would have to actually send someone to visit your high school library and comb through their archives of the high school newspaper. That's just too expensive to do routinely for job applicants, except for the most sensitive positions.

Nowadays, all that stuff ends up online from the start, and it is cheap and easy to find.

> * Demand discretion from friends. In college, my group had a strict "no-camera" rule when it came to embarrassing or unlawful shenanigans. My parent's generation had the same rule.

All it takes is one person in the group to slip up, or for you to overlook one third party who is not part of your agreement and who can see you. So really, the rule has to be don't undertake embarrassing or unlawful shenanigans. (And as I noted above, standards for what is embarrassing or unlawful can change over time, so it really needs to be don't do anything that could conceivably become embarrassing or unlawful in the next 50 or so years).

Essentially we used to balance privacy vs. public access kind of automatically, due to the limitations we had in information storage, indexing, and retrieval. We've removed most of those limitations, so the balance has been lost.

“Just delete it”.

Except have you ever personally been in the situation that you needed something removed? I have and:

1) You might not even have the password to every random account you created in the past, nor the e-mail addresses that you used when you created those profiles, nor maybe even remember what e-mail address you used for each of them.

2) Turns out that there are a lot of sites out there that copy and preserve a lot of random data from other sites. They do so without regards to the ToS of the site you originally posted to. They do not care about copyright. They do not respond to personal requests for removal of data. They do not respond to DMCA notices. They are outside of the jurisdiction of the country you live in and as are their hosting providers. And even if they are cooperative, there are so many of them that reaching out to all of them and following up on the removal will require much much more time and energy than what you have available.

So then the best you can do is delete what you can and submit the rest for removal from Google.

“Well you shouldn’t have posted it in the first place if you didn’t want it to be public”, right? No, it’s not that simple!

The things you post today can be taken out of context and misinterpreted by someone in the future in ways you would never have imagined today.

We keep posting comments, pictures, videos, creating profiles, liking and sharing posts and information, but most of us rarely delete any of it. As the amount of data increases, so does the room for cherry picking data about you to build up an image of you that while true in the sense that all of it are things you posted, wildly misrepresents what kind of person you are, and on top of this misrepresentation and even more inaccurate image can be painted.

If you had any idea what it feels like to have that happen to you, I think you would want to be able to have some of that information at the very least removed from search results.

Once it’s gone from search, it’s gone from the public eye. And if you are lucky you are able to erase the bits of information that ties the data to you so that even if the data resurfaces in the future it is no longer connected to you, or at least not as directly.

Furthermore, when you are working on having information removed you should first make a list of all of the information, then have it removed from Google ASAP so that 1) it gets harder to find as soon as possible and 2) so that the information is not retained in the publicly available caches of search engines after it’s been deleted from the source sites.

Beyond that, for the information that you could not get deleted but which you were able to have removed from search results, some of it will eventually disappear all together on its own because of bitrot (hardware failures, data management errors, sites going out of business, etc) and some of it will probably stick around forever.

But like I said you want as much of it removed as possible and you want the rest of it to be hard to find and you want as much of it as possible to lose connection to you. And achieving that requires the cooperation of the search engines in removing results.

But Google does cooperate with DMCA. The difference there is that that content deemed in violation of copyright is actually illegal for anyone to distribute; legal responsibility extends all the way to the website owner.

Unless content falling under "right to be forgotten" is ruled privileged and not legal for public distribution, any artificial roadblocks to their discovery will merely present a business opportunity for their circumvention.

Information you, yourself, post publicly to the internet is public. Just the same as if you got up in Times Square and shouted it using a megaphone.

Information that is factually accurate that is posted publically on the internet isn't under your domain to censure. This falls heavily in the camp of "freedom of my speech not freedom of your speech" that seems so common here.

Information that is posted by others that isn't factual is already covered by libel and slander laws so doesn't fall under here.

The internet should be, and for the sake of truth has to be, immutable. The "right to be forgotten" is the right to break any concept of online reputation.

If you want to control your narrative, maybe don't post thoughtlessly and publicly.

I am not posting thoughtlessly. What I am saying is that there is just a million ways that anything can be interpreted in the future that you have no way of foreseeing.

This is not a tech problem (at all). This is a social problem that had existed since forever, but now uncovered by technology's availability. And if the agreed solution to the "world's gone mad" is to grant one legal ability to alter other's memories, then the world's truly gone mad.

However, that doesn't mean that annotating content or making it more clear that a different (Firstname Lastname) did something might be a better response. For example, I have never created an account on facebook, linkedin, twitter, etc. I refuse to give any one company a defacto monopoly over social discourse and interaction; those tools belong on OPEN, FREE (libre+beer), well defined minimum interoperable standard platforms. Currently that's email; it really sucks, but the standard is well defined, anyone /can/ implement it without barriers, and everyone is forced to federate to at least some degree.

It isn't and it has never been.

Given that different countries have different laws and yet all claim to universal application of their laws can you imagine how many people would be killed because of this?

Atheists taken off planes form Arab Emirates flights because they posted about god. Homosexual activists getting assassinated by Russia. Europeans being arrested in the US because of the difference in age of consent.

The web is ephemeral and should be anonymous.

Immutable data structures have their place in programming, and immutable communication has it's place in society, but neither are appropriate for all use-cases.

If I made an offensive tweet in 2007, I'd stand by it, and assert that it's my tweet but I'm also a different person. Personal integrity would demand no less. Hiding behind a "privacy" law to conceal something you shouted from the rooftops in 2007 is a disingenuous position to take.

It happens frequently, not only with rape, but with any false accusation of a major crime... Typically there are a lot of articles about it but if you are proven innocent no main source reports it.

Now, would you want that information to remain online and to appear instantly anytime some HR look for your name after reading it in your cv?

This model is used by other nations because regulating publications prevents both short and long-term harm while still preserving access to the truth.

My parents abused me, however, they were never convicted of a crime in a court of law because nobody ever reported them. The statue of limitations has almost certainly passed by now so they are unable to be convicted. Are you suggesting it should be illegal for me to say that my parents abused me?

Same with Bill Cosby's accusers, the statue of limitations has passed on all of those. Should those women really not be legally allowed to have their voices heard?

I can't see this leading anywhere except an authoritarian regeme where court proceedings are conducted in secret - after all, the suspect is being publicly accused on crime in court.

We know employers can and have discriminated against individuals where convictions have been overturned.

However, I don't think the false conviction should be hidden - what if they were guilty and there's a crimes down the road? That information could be useful for the public.

Nobody owes anyone an apology.

Faces, I can see that but journalists must be very explicit... "This is the suspect who allegedly did xyz".

From my point of view, Google eliminated itself long ago: it's already intentionally very biased, distorting the reality by design, different to every of its users: adjusting the "algorithm" to return to the seeker what the seeker would click the most and also what the Google's marketing would like to present, even to the point of intentionally ignoring the very words you entered in the search(!).

Just try to find somebody with whom you seriously disagree on some topic then ask him/her kindly to "google" the same terms related to that topic and to let you see what he/she sees. Compare.

That said, it would be nice if there was an easy way to turn off this search personalization on a search-by-search basis in a similar manner to how one can look for results from a certain time period

Not counting that even that "magnification of the confirmation" is additionally modified for some topics by the "editorial" policies of Google.

it is, it's called anonymous window

When I open an incognito tab and search for “latex”, the entire first page of results is still all about LaTeX for me and I would bet my left hand that this is not universally true.

In other words, you are still seeing personalized results.

So yes it is the right to hide the past to the extent that it should not be super easy to get all available dirt on anyone at any time anybody gets nosy or irritated. But if you are willing to put in weeks of work to find out that someone once smoked pot or burned an american flag or whatever you can still put in those weeks of work.

No we should not, the law seems well intentioned, some kid may not have to worry about an embarrassing photo from university days following him/her around into their adult life, etc. But I think it would be an overall net negative for abuse in hiding truly relevant information.

You say that, but according to some reports, only 5% of requests to Google to remove personal information from search results comes from high-profile figures (politicians and the like), the rest is just ordinary people [1]. I know that there is a huge selection bias going on here, but I'm not sure you can discount the data point just based off of that.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/14/google-ac...

Because ease of access makes all the difference, and it is disingenuous to argue otherwise.

This law won't protect Trump from having his bankruptcies reported but it will protect someone who made a stupid mistake when they were younger having it haunt them for the rest of their careers or lives because it would otherwise have been the top hit when you google'd their name. It will still be there for anyone willing to put in the effort to find it of course. Just like it was in the old days.

Google will happily ruin that person's life forever for a few cents in ad clicks. Think about that.

I don't agree that this will protect anyone, or that they need to be protected in the first place. This is just hiding the problem that someone would judge you for whatever the content is.

In my opinion the real solution here is to be more understanding to stupid things people have done in the past. Nobody is perfect, so why are you letting whatever that story on Google is affect your judgement of the person, assuming they learned from whatever it was.

You can't deny that the advent of social media has brought about a MUCH bigger problem of people getting fired, judged, or their lives ruined by stupid mistakes, posts online of a single comment they made, etc. These things aren't _new_ occurrences. People have always made stupid remarks; people have always done stupid things. The difference now is that it's trivially easy for me to go find some idiotic thing you did as a teenage that you've outgrown, and point to it as a way to ruin your life if I want to. All it would cost me is a little money to Google or Facebook. Back in the day, an attempt to truly ruin someone's life like this would require _digging_. If the person deserves it to happen to them (which is almost never), then people will go through the effort. But for the casual assholes who think it funny to SWAT someone or to call up embarrassing photos because that person called them a bad word, this barrier to entry would prevent them from doing something about it.

I only heard about this anecdotally. Do you have any data on such a huge increase in firings etc.? That would be quite interesting.

Furthermore, context matters, but context is the first thing that gets lost online.

Something that was said or done in one context can be perfectly fine in that context while at the same time that thing can be completely unacceptable in another context.

We need not and we should not strive to keep a record of everything. It is important that we are able to forget.

The world at large is not capable of ensuring due process. Real lives of innocent people are ruined. People are driven to suicide. All because the public formed a narrative about someone based on incomplete or otherwise inaccurate information.

I wish for compassion and forgiveness.

One tweet taken out of context we’ve seen many examples of is enough to ignite an epic shitstorm. No. You’re just proposing further destruction of public discourse and civility.

If you think the real solution is to change the way the world thinks about, and judges, everyone else then you're being remarkably naive.

This isn't a response, it's an insult. Two well educated, equally experienced people can come two two seperate conclusions, without one being "naive". Try and argue always assuming that the person your taking to is equally intelligent as you.

Regardless, treating the symptom (Search engines displaying old news stories) of the problem (people judging others irrationally), without treating the problem itself will only cause equally bad, if not worse, issues to pop up elsewhere. The vast majority of times a state censors information, it ends up being harmful far past what was initially intended (the red scare/McCarthyism, DMCA, FOSTA, SOPA/PIPA, etc).

But every inconvenience presents a business opportunity that will inevitably be seized upon so long as the information being sought after is still considered part of the public record. The public record consists of all information that the public has a right to know. A more honest solution would actually declare certain information privileged and make it illegal for websites to publicize it.

The question of whether one uses Google or other sources is irrelevant here. Sure, journalists could go to find public records and not be able to be published because of the law (because their article wouldn't be listed etc).

That's why people try to get things delisted from Google, because they can't get the original publisher to remove them.

That's the entire point of this. Right to be forgotten laws don't allow you to censor the intercept (a publication), but do allow you to force aggregators to remove the publication.

If you can prevent a journalists' article from ever being found, you have effectively censored it. Especially, this would impact a journal outside the "top 100" - Someone could conceivably search the 50 or 100 top publications but after that you need an aggregator. So essentially this would censor journalism.

And to my original point, it's not just about Google in particular since the alternative to Google is pretty much some other aggregator.

Oh this I 100% agree with. Information isn't information if it can't be found. (And noting that I'm employed by Google) I don't at all find the argument that "we can't prevent you from publishing something, but we can prevent it from being accessed" not compelling. Does it apply to newspaper anthologies or hard copy aggregation?

"It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"

I'm imagining a subscription-based aggregator - something like LexisNexis, say - that isn't subject to the same right-to-be-forgotten laws that search engines are.

It at least seems possible that we'll end up with a situation analogous to the credit scoring industry - with data accessible to corporations, but not accessible to individuals.

Unfortunately we live in a world where if something is not listed in Google's SERP, we doubt it exists.

... would Google be allowed to link to stories that mention those bankruptcies?

It's not like this "right to be forgotten" will apply only to Google. If Google folds, all search engines will surely respect it.

Agreed. That said, should we give Trump the right for his bankruptcies to be deleted from Google?