Because anti-discrimination laws around criminal records will work about as well as anti-discrimination laws regarding all the other protected classes (race, gender, age, etc.). Companies will very quickly figure out how to work around them, and will find ways to reject candidates for being a member of said protected class without making it apparent that this is the true cause for rejection.

If a company gets 90% through the hiring process, runs a background check, and then immediately says "no", then you sue them.

If this law passes, that will happen about as often as a company telling you to your face, "We're not hiring you because you're {black| a woman| over 40, etc}." What will probably happen is that companies will move the background check step ahead of the interview step. Then, after they've done the background check and had the interview, they can tell you, "Well, sorry, we've decided to go with a different applicant," just as they do today.

The cost of doing interviews to screen candidates is much lower than background checks. Why would a company want to do that step first?

I highly doubt that. An engineer-hour costs roughly $100. A background check probably costs roughly as much as a phone screen, and an order of a magnitude less than an on-site. It'd be pretty easy to do the background check step in between the phone screen and the on-site, and it wouldn't appreciably raise costs to the company.

Also spending money externally appears to the company to cost much more than using internal resources

Subjecting someone to 17 hours of interviews borders on the inhumane.

Plus, interviews are done iteratively; you don't run the whole process for every candidate.

Moreover, background checks are the least likely to actually disqualify candidates, so they are always done last.

A single candidate will do 1-2 screens (this changes over time / role), plus at least 4-5 on-site interviews. That's about 7-8 hours of meetings, minimum. Having interviewed at a number of other SF tech startups, almost all of them had about the same # of interviews.

Once you're past the screen interview, you'll almost always get all 5 interviews in the pool unless you're terrible - it's more efficient to just have the candidate come in once.

Google recommends a 1:1 ratio of prep/feedback time to interview time, so it's ~2 hrs per interview even if you're not involved in the hire / no hire discussion.

The discussion here was specifically that it was likely that background checks would start disqualifying candidates, so maybe it's better to do them up front as that's cheaper than having the interviews done first... I'd say that still makes sense, at least before the pool, if you think there's a reasonable chance they'll get punted.

I have never encountered a situation with 7 interviews.

Bear in mind that many wash out during the phone screen, so no, a fully loaded interview schedule is not that sort of commitment at all.

7 interviews just for the hired candidate (1-2 screeners, 5-6 on-site pool interviews.) Maybe less than 7 hrs if they're cut to 45 mins each.

I think we trust our governments much more than US citizens trust there government. There's a line from Ronald Reagan that goes something like:

"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

The great preponderance of people in Europe simply do not think like this. For a huge range of issues that statement would actually sound reassuring in Europe. Essentially, if you believe in the rule of law and democracy, the government is simply ourselves, getting collectively together to fix something.

Note that this doesn't mean we like any particular politician. We despise many politicians. But the idea of government as a force for good still remains in Europe as far as I can see (UK). Sometimes I think the difference between Europe and the US is that we despise our politicians and quite like the non-political part of our government (civil service, NHS, etc). The US appears to hate the non-political part of it too.

Coincidentally, this is how most Americans seem to feel about their government's foreign policy.

Rule of law being the key part. The U.S. has no rule of law, and our legal system doesn't punish those in power or those with money. For some relevant reading, I recommend Greenwald's book, With Liberty and Justice for Some.

Well, there are some fundamental differences in how we do law in the EU, compared to the US.

We don't do the "jury of peers" thing (and I'm still not sure if this if really true or just stories/TV but, aren't juries specifically selected to have no background in the case matter, or legal matter?). Further, it's not unheard of that the judges and lawyers have technical knowledge for technical cases, or at least read up about it. Moreso than the EU-politicians that made the ruling, anyway, hence deferring to courts to sensibly applying the rulings. There seems to be a "you need to be rich in order to get justice" sentiment that I head Americans openly admit to as the status quo, and what I get from the news. This seems to be a bit less severe in the EU (at least in the Netherlands, that I know of). Certainly, expensive lawyers do increase your chances (unfortunately), but it's not a requirement, and if the law is in fact on your side, an affordable lawyer will do, too. And in addition to that, the "if the law is in fact on your side"-part is also easier to determine beforehand and carries a lot less risk, because of the differences between Common Law (US and most English-speaking countries) and Civil Law (rest of the world, basically) legal systems. Basically it means we codify most of our laws into law-books, using a rather standardised form of "legalese". Because of this, we don't do "precedence" like in Common Law systems. Instead we have "jurisprudence", which is a similar idea, but is used by judges as a guideline in cases where reality is ambiguous with respect to the codified law, so to speak.

Now, I didn't really study law, except for a single course (crash course into IP/tech law, part of my CS curriculum) a decade ago, and stuff I read on Wikipedia. So some of the above might not be 100% accurate, and the conclusions are obviously my opinion. But even then, that's at least some reasons to place some trust in our courts :)

I do think that American courts have a problem with this, and I do wish Americans cared more about it. It's fairly standard to hear people over here talk about whether or not something is legal and say "Oh, but I'm not a lawyer, make sure you consult with one before making any decisions."

That always irritates me. Our laws ostensibly exist for the common people, not lawyers. It reminds me of the stereotypical olden churches where only a few people would get to read or understand the Bible. It feels dirty.

Folks say "you should consult with a lawyer" when the topic is something that's too obscure or marginal to be obvious to a non-lawyer... that doesn't mean the laws are overly complex, just that there are always going to be marginal situations.

I absolutely love how our laws are relatively small, how precedent is from the Supreme Court only, and how most people don’t have any contact with lawyers in their entire life.

We have elements of common law in the US code, and you can definitely have binding precedent that doesn't involve the Supreme Court. As for most folks not having any contact with lawyers... I'm not sure I've met any adult who hasn't.

That's how US Constitution was written (not that it helped a lot - there's still hot debate about what "abridging the freedom of speech" or "to keep and bear arms" means). But most of the other laws are about as readable to the common man as a patch against dense APL code is readable to a seven year old. You may encounter some words you think you recognize. And then there are bylaws and regulations, which most people don't even know exist and some are impossible to get without paying money (yes, really). And then in common law system there's caselaw which is court decision having the power of law. Common man has the chance of a snowball in a nuclear reactor.

You're not going to use a VPN to search "from another country" unless you already know or suspect something but can't find any information on it and suspect the reason is because you are searching from the EU rather than the USA!

The EU has pressured Google to censor its results globally, as I recall. But Google has prevailed on that, at least. So far, anyway.

When China or Russia does it, it's at least "censorship", and probably also "dictatorship".

But Google would probably say "no" to many of them.

That would suck.

and they lost the case in 2014 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Spain_v_AEPD_and_Mario_...), and 'interpreted it' as 'we'll just limit the results from Europe'. This was a landmark case, and they just keep losing them.

Edit: So yes, I see https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/respect-european-law-goog...

So what, Google could nuke all of its business operations in the EU, I suppose.

In general it is always impossible to have this conversation because the idea of "free speech" is very different in America compared to Europe.

Is there something I'm missing about Right to be Forgotten then? Why is this needed if it's already illegal to discriminate against someone over minor crimes or scandals?

Does the law not have much teeth or something?

Case-in-point: Facebook. Most people don't believe that when you ask a company like Facebook or Google to delete your account, they actually delete your data. Sure, you no longer have access to it, definitely, but most people seem to assume that it's not entirely gone.

RTBF ensures that companies whom you provided information to delete this information if asked to politely.

Or I'm a, 18 year old caught in a Romeo & Juliet, with my face plastered across Facebook as a "sex offender", but it's later overturned (or, as I call it, sanity prevailed). Should I have a right to be forgotten?

Or... the list of possibilities continues.

A real con artist can just fake someone's ID, for them it's pretty trivial.

The issue is less than 1% of convictions ever make it to the Internet, and those people currently will be stigmatized forever, unlike the other 99%, unless they have this mechanism. Google's plea was 'we will self police, but we won't tell you how. We will ignore court orders, because we choose to'. The court objected to that approach.

If you are convicted of new crimes, no matter how long ago, then your sentence may be significantly increased as a repeat offender.

So, employers don’t get access to criminal records, and generally, newspapers can’t republish information about people in a way that would harm their life today. Even criminals whose cases were public when they went into jail have a right to a normal life after they’ve finished their sentence – sometimes this is included with a change of name, but ideally, it’d be better if we, as society, would just forgive, or forget.

> solved more elegantly by creating anti-discrimination laws around criminal records

Such laws have a terrible record. What happens in reality is not that company says "screw it, we'll take a risk of hiring a criminal since we can't run a background check" but "we'll use next available statistical heuristic for being a criminal and if you have it we won't let you nowhere around 90% - we'd fail you much earlier and we'd build the process in a way that you can prove nothing". And if you're familiar with statistical heuristics they'd use - and note they're not trained statistician so they wouldn't go into such details as "bad sign for the whole population but good sign for this particular tiny subgroup", especially if they hire for a position where they have a large pool of candidates - you can imagine how discriminatory it would be in practice.

I feel it is basically a cultural issue. Many Europeans (including me) believe that the "right to be forgotten" is real, i.e. we want that right. Company with american cultural roots feels differently, so there's a clash. The main problem is that Google doesn't want to submit to our European culture; which is fine, they can fight in court.

We had that in Russia since 2016, and your guess how it works is exactly correct (e.g. see Skrynnik vs Yandex case).

What I don't understand though, is how this is supposed to help. If you want a fact to disappear, shouldn't you work that out with the publisher? Until you do that, it isn't really forgotten... just kind of badly remembered. I mean, people can still access that story as long as it's on the internet.

- the fact you were member of X and you done some comments gets a good Page Rank

- X becomes very unpopular, people that believed in X ideology are seen as idiots,racists,violent

- you got older and smarter and you realized your mistake

- you made some other good things during your life, like maybe won chess tournaments, volunteered,donated to charities,raise children

And the problem will be that your mistake will be on the top results on web search wile your good stuff will probably not be online or if it is will be on 3rd or 4rd web search page(the even where you won the chess competition has a bad page rank)

Many issues you can say are a society problem, like a murder, you can argue that the society is at fault for creating them, allowing guns, drogs, bad education.

So for this problem I think there should be some technical solution for affecting the page rank of some pages on Google or other searches in some conditions, and now we need to find some fair conditions when this should happen, maybe google could fix the algorithm to not give such a big page rank to this kind of stories in general.

Every conviction must be declared for a small number of years if asked. After that period it must only be declared if you're applying for a sensitive job (e.g. school teacher) and it resulted in a custodial sentence.

Former cons should be able to get a job, otherwise they'll just end up in jail again. If it's white collar crime then they could be just temporarily barred from that profession as part of the sentence.

There are some jobs where that matters.

What I want is for companies to NOT, outright reject someone because of a google search. After the person is 90% THROUGH an interview process, and the company has spent significant amounts of resources interviewing someone, THEN they can reject them.

The problem isn't rejection for a potentually valid reason. The problem is the immediate instant judgment without giving someone a chance.

That you can't get that question answered through Google is actually good. Just think about it: anybody can add content to Google, and making you look bad is as simple as making a page with a bunch of stuff about you that isn't actually true. And in the age of Google-without-checks that's how it works: a quick Google search has taken the place of a much more thorough background check for important positions and instead it is being applied to pizza delivery people as well.

The reocities project got a lot of mail over the years and a couple of the cases that stood out for me were people that had been targeted by individuals that had gone out of their way to make their lives much harder to the point of some of them thinking of ending their lives. And then there were all the childhood follies that people would rather have the internet forgets.

The 'right to be forgotten' is as much about being in control of the narrative about ourselves as anything else, and that there is some level of recourse here is good: the judge carefully weighed the evidence and decided in favor of the party that brought the suit, it could have gone the other way too.

It is also quite funny to me that on the one hand people argue that those who break the law and pay the price should then be forever haunted by this but at the same time hold corporations to a different standard by allowing them to break the law on an ongoing basis because it suits their purpose.

Seems to me that's an opportunity for regulatory capture: politically-connected companies end up permitted to check on potential employees, while upstarts and outcasts don't — giving an unfair advantage (assuming the hiring criminals is a disadvantage) to the well-connected firms.

I trust the European courts more than I trust American advertisers.