This is literally the exact same argument as "security trumps privacy".

NSA et al. argue that they need to know about everyone's dirty laundry in order to protect civil society from terrorists (or whatever).

You argue that the public needs at-your-fingertips access to everyone's dirty laundry in order to protect civil society from (idk? dictatorship that will inevitably ensue if sleazy reporters don't get their ad revenue?)

How about this alternative: whenever something actually important is de-listed, concerned citizens can mirror en masse. But when some trivial bit of gossipy sleaze reporting that no on cares about is de-listed, we let it die its rightful death.

I see no reason to Streisand-effect private citizens trying to rebuild their life after some reporter decided to make a quick buck profiting off of a single stupid mistake. The fact that you're so gung-ho about contributing to these people's continued misfortune in the name of your political agenda is deeply troubling.

I disagree very strongly with your purported equivalence between Karunamon's argument and that of the NSA.

My primary problem with the NSA is that they (a) use their position of power to install backdoors in hardware/software/infrastructure, (b) do it in secret, (c) claim to be in some way "above the law" w.r.t. secret courts, (d) use public taxpayer money, and (e) motivate their behaviour using bogus anti-terror claims. None of these infractions exist in the "right to be forgotten" scenario.

Fundamentally, in the story of the NSA, it is the NSA that is in a position of power that can and will be abused. In this case, it is the power to scrub the entire internet of information by imposing centralized censorship which, in my mind, is simply too much power to put in one place.

The equivalence is in the rhetorical justification, not the methodology. In both cases, an appeal to security is used to trivialize the importance of privacy.

For the NSA, terrorism > privacy every time. For Karunamon, "censorship" > privacy every time. In both cases, the mechanism is an appeal to security in order to avoid a more nuanced discussion of the issue.

> to scrub the entire internet of information

And this is where the rubber hits the road. "Any possible risk of <bad thing here> means privacy doesn't matter". That's the sort of crap reasoning used by the NSA.

The fact is that the risk of what you're describing is incredibly low, and the good of the law outweighs even a high-magnitude abuse because effectively abusing this law in that manner is highly unlikely to succeed.

This is what I mean. After rejecting the "stop <bad thing here> at all costs!" logic, we can do an actual cost-benefit analysis and take into account the extremely low probability of <bad thing here> actually happening.

The information is still there, but private citizens don't need to pay hundreds/thousands to SEO firms in order to get embarrassing gossip sites off the first page of Google results.

Let's be clear: the dichotomy in this case is between lazy reporter's and SEO firm's right to profit, and an individual citizen's right to privacy. Since I view lazy reporters and SEO as parasites anyways, the choice is clear for me.

Reframing this issue as a "security from dictatorial abuse of power" is playing the same game as the NSA. And worse, it's disingenuous. If the mechanism is abused, Streisand effect always solves back. But there's no reason to go around harming private citizens just because "censorship!"

You've hit the nail on the head. The current "controversy" is manufactured by Google to push back against this ruling.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/04/digital-theatre/

But now an appeal to privacy is used to trivialize the importance of censorship, both of them are important, what is more important to you?

Not at all! I and other comment authors on this thread have mentioned that because of the nature of both the law and the internet, abuse is highly unlikely.

This means that the 100% certain probability that people are currently marginally hurt by search-engine-magnified sleazy journalism far outweighs the almost-negligible probability of high-magnitude abuse of the law.

Other threads on this story have also dealt with other mitigating factors which decrease the probability of abuse, such as the fact that public figures are excluded.

I'm not trivializing censorship; I'm entering a cost-benefit analysis where the importance of an impact is a function of both its probability and the magnitude of the impact, instead of attributing certainty to every outcome and reasoning on impact alone.

Incidentally even the US Supreme Court -- a country where free speech and anti-censorship are (constitutionally) paramount -- does this sort of analysis. Libel, inciting violence, and a slew of other exceptions to free speech have been upheld by that court.

What I'm doing is considering the overall welfare of society, instead of picking and choosing individual issues that always much come first no matter what. In this case, there's a clear and present good done by the law and the chances of bad things happening are minimized by safeguards.

edit: my comments are sometimes living documents. Mostly tweaking of the last 2 paragraphs.

> In this case, it is the power to scrub the entire internet of information by imposing centralized censorship

That is a bafflingly bad reading of what has actually happened.

Nothing has been scrubbed from the Internet. Some articles are harder to find if you include a person's name - but you can still find those articles with that search term if you use google.com with ncr.

The only one that matters there is (d). Without that stolen loot they are doing productive work at a real job.

"You argue that the public needs at-your-fingertips access to everyone's dirty laundry in order to protect civil society from (idk? dictatorship that will inevitably ensue if sleazy reporters don't get their ad revenue?)"

Actually he argued much more narrowly that the public needs access to the dirty laundry of public figures. And I'm inclined to agree. This narrow argument is very different from the broad argument you're casting it as - I didn't see anywhere that OP said "everyone's dirty laundry".

That's not how I understood the granparent's comment (operative word is some).

In any case, the EU policy specifically excludes public figures. So to the extent that you're correct, s/he's reacting to an fictional interpretation of the law.

Which would be somewhat ironic, given that the premise of grandparent's argument is that an informed citizenry is crucial to the security of civil society.

The baffling thing about this argument is that the EU apparently doesn't think that this information is so terrible that it can't be published--just that we have to suppress links to it. And since the ruling only concerns older material, it's built into its logic that these articles are things which the public once deserved to know but now must forget. So your talk of sleazy reporters has no place here.

There is an excellent post below by user gaius addressing this issue.

You seem to believe that search engines are not force multipliers for for-profit gossip mongering; this is demonstrably false.

> We're talking about public figures in some cases

The decision explicitly lists that as a legitimate exemption: search engines may reject removal requests for information concerning someone who has a "public role". If Google took down information pertaining to a public figure, it is probably their error. Now you can argue that this decision will in practice lead to many such errors, but that's a slightly different attack on the decision (arguing that it's impractical to implement accurately vs. arguing that it's in principle wrong, even when implemented accurately, are at least conceptually different criticisms).

If Google is the one making the call about whether or not someone is a public figure, where exactly do you expect them to draw the line? Do you honestly expect them to draw a line in the public interest?

Personally, I'd expect them to do everything they can to minimize the cost of compliance (where that cost primarily includes the cost of processing requests and the risk of being hauled into court again). In principle, they also care about search quality, but, as long as they deal with the most blatant cases, I think the impact on perceived (not actual) search quality will be small and the impact on relative search quality might even be positive (in other words that the best-case scenario for Bing is matching the precision of Google's blocks and they might do worse).

In practice, I think that means wild overblocking of results that should be public because the cost of refusing a request is larger and more immediate. And so far as I can tell that's what we're seeing so far.

The fundamental problem without a "right to be forgotten" is that missteps and deliberate mischief are not covered equally by journalists. the news making process is not a perfectly efficient system (ie. not all cases get covered equally) - some cases simply get covered because they are funny, just filled a remaining gap in the newspaper, were especially bizarre, were very embarrassing, etc. other missteps (of similar gravity) do not get covered. this law allows such people to counter their misfortune, while the cases which are actually important to the public still remain to be seen for everybody. If you look at hiddenfromgoogle.com, it links to quite a few of such cases. They are to a large extent mundane and exaggerated stories (which are typical for dailymail and the guardian). They carry no/very little importance for the general public - however can be very incriminating for the individual itself.

Yes.

When I'm searching for a academic's name I am more likely to be interested in that person's work than some theft they committed years ago.

I guess this shows the flaws in Google's algorithm and the destructiveness of shitty SEO. Irrelevant information is pushed to the top of Google's first page and useful information is dropped. (People who need to know someone's criminal record status can use existing mechanisms to get that, so long as they're complying with the various laws about rehabilitation of offenders. Google should not be your method of getting reliable conviction or arrest information about a person.)

> Let's definitely challenge its intent. We're talking about public figures in some cases

That's hardly challenging its intent.

The point being that, much like the cookie law, this law is simultaneously misaimed, ineffective, and backwards.

Why would the site need to be mirrored? If it's run by an American, hosted in the US, and doesn't do business in the EU then (not a lawyer) it's US law not EU law that applies. And (again, not a lawyer) under US law posting facts like this is completely legal.