I for one have NO DESIRE for my children to grow up in a world where they do not have control over information about themselves on the internet. I can only pray this sensible law makes it to North America.
For those downvoting - are you a shill for Google? Try reading the form itself to appreciate how exceedingly reasonable it is:
A recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union found that certain users can ask search engines to remove results for queries that include their name where those results are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed.” In implementing this decision, we will assess each individual request and attempt to balance the privacy rights of the individual with the public’s right to know and distribute information. When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information—for example, information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials.
Mr. Schmidt, Google’s outspoken chief who will be replaced by Mr. Page on
Monday, has made public gaffes when speaking about privacy. Mr. Levy reveals
that he has made gaffes inside the company, too. Mr. Schmidt asked that
Google remove from the search engine information about a political donation
he had made. Sheryl Sandberg, a Google executive who is now Facebook’s chief
operating officer, told him that was unacceptable. [2]
It's hard to say whether he's a sociopath or an entitled asshole, so I suggest compromise: he's an entitled sociopathic asshole.
[1] http://gawker.com/5477611/googles-ceo-demanded-his-mistress-...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/business/01author.html?_r=...
They are complaining that you are just removing it from google. The info is still there!
And not only that, it's only removed from google.co.{eu*} google.com will still have it.
Which makes it as stupid of a law as the one about cookies: Make it look like you are helping privacy while actually doing nothing of any value.
Anyone from the EU who wants the full scoop about someone will just use the US google site, making this a completely pointless exercise.
Which, as far as I can tell, is the point of the ruling.
The idea is to not have one particular thing that the world found interesting or newsworthy at some point in the past cast a shadow over an individual's life, so to speak. Yes, if you're really interested in someone's dirt, all the info is still there for you to dig up. Again, that's the idea.
Your point about google.com being unfiltered is, if true, somewhat valid. But the inability to enforce a good thing globally does not excuse not making an effort locally.
By the way, most countries in the EU do not use a `.co` domain for commercial entities.
Do you have a reference that confirms this? I have not seen it mentioned in any of the articles about this issue.
Where is this information from? Sounds a bit strange, but I guess it could be true. It's not the first time big companies say "f u" to these rulings.
We, the users, are missing out on the completeness of our search results. You already have no control over information about you. It has always been like that, people have been gossiping since the dawn of language. If something was published, then it should be in the index.
If you don't like it, take it up with the publisher. This is just like those ridiculous rulings on copyright infringement by linking to a copyrighted work.
And yes, everyone who downvotes you is a shill for Google at 0.2$/downvote. There's just no other explanation.
We already make exceptions for certain things (illegal content). Obviously a line has to be drawn somewhere - it's just a matter of where we draw it.
>> "We, the users, are missing out on the completeness of our search results."
With this law AFAIK content cannot be removed if that would be against the public good. So, for example, a politician can't have an article that makes the look bad but is true removed. Technically, although no longer 'complete', the quality of your search results should not be hit. The only results being removed are ones which are incorrect and damaging to someone.
>> "If you don't like it, take it up with the publisher."
AFAIK with this law the publisher has to remove it too. Google is involved because they cache pages which can include deleted content.
Search engines just index the web. If you have an issue with some stuff on the web, then go after the person hosting it, not the person telling you where it is.
This is akin to shooting the messenger.
The biggest gripe for me about this thing is that removing a link from google doesn't remove it from the website itself.
But people think they're safe once the can't find it via Google because Google is all they know. Especially in the age of removing URLs from the browsers input field and all.
Just because the person who brought the suit targeted Google first (which is not strange, given that Google collects and re-publishes that information in a way that makes it immeasurably more accessible and "public" than the original publication) doesn't make the everybody else exempt.
The only valid debate her is if Google significantly adds to the damage, or if Google's search engine is just a neutral utility. I would say the answer to that is pretty f-ing obvious. That ship has sailed a long time ago.
Today, Google's search results and interface are so thoroughly manipulated (not just for profit but also for political/ideological reasons) that it counts as a curated publication.
The fact that Google uses algorithms instead of humans for most of that curation doesn't absolve them from responsibility for the result.
But the same is probably true for the average person looking for it. A small Employer might look trough a few results to see if can find something about a applicant, but he is not going to do some big reasearch.
I also find it weak that Page plays the 'think of the startups' card. In fact, I think that since the Snowden leaks, there are far more opportunities to create privacy-aware or privacy-protecting services. E.g., I am pretty sure that Duckduckgo, a startup in search, benefitted tremendously from the recent attention to privacy issues.
These numbers could be higher if someone puts out a campaign that goes viral and gets lots of people submitting requests, and there's nothing that stops people outside the EU from submitting (invalid) requests.
One thing in DDG's favor, however, is that that at first people are probably only going to send these requests to Google.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, on open source software.
Given that Microsoft has a large EU presence and is presumably also affected by this law, perhaps they will have to start doing the same thing as Google. Which would then automatically feed through to DuckDuckGo.
I don't believe there are any competitive startup search engines at the moment. However, this doesn't mean there would never be. Plus this ruling is so vague it's likely to impact all kinds of companies that are not startups: think specialised social networks, etc.
If You can make a decentralized search engine that indexes everything no exceptions you would still find it.
Or you could make your own. It doesn't make it impossible to find just impossible for the average person.
I find it so incredibly hard to believe that so many people are falling for this "poor-us" google routine. I just shake my head in bewilderment every time I hear it.
Years ago I created a friendfeed account. I used their Twitter signup button. Now years later I would like to close my friendfeed account to remove that information from the internet. There's nothing particularly bad about it but it's old, useless and I would rather it was deleted. The problem is I can't login into my account as I authorised through Twitter and I've since deleted my Twitter account. I also can't get in touch with anyone at friendfeed since they've shutdown but left their site up.
This ruling gives me a way to hide that friendfeed page from people. Unfortunately it will still be up but it's unlikely anyone will find it 'accidentally' if it isn't on Google.
But just asking Google to get rid of it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and I think it unnecessarily punishes them, too. Think about the tens of millions of such requests they'd have to respond to every year in the future.
This is probably what author did. :/
For those reading this later, the submitted url was http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...
It's called LAW! You don't BOW to it, you OBEY.
What would FT do in Google case? form an army and go fight against the EU?... Sick of reading articles like that.
Its sad that the EU is voting those laws, but its not Google fault of trying to be a legal company...