A list of search results omitted due to the “Right to be forgotten” (opens in new tab)

> This list is a way of archiving the actions of censorship on the Internet. It is up to the reader to decide whether our liberties are being upheld or violated by the recent rulings by the EU.

It cannot present a balanced view of "censorship" to the reader without exhaustively examining examples of the kinds of "censorship" that it's complaining about that are already in use - be it the EU ruling, the IWF watchlist, or the search engines' long documented, voluntary self-censorship of child pornography.

So far, the only examples presented are those where the system is shown to be "inefficient" – if it really wants to be honest and balanced, it needs to find and include all the cases where the "censorship" is functioning as intended.

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.

> 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).

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.

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

That's hardly challenging its intent.

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.

Did you read the articles on the site (tone o fcuriosity, not indignation)?

* The Daniels-Dwyer article serves no obvious public good.

* The post-it thing is a huge wtf. No idea why anyone would even care.

* The train thing is embarrassing; again, reporting on this amounts to gossip mongering for cash and serves no public good.

* The Osborne thing seems like a politically-motivated intrusion into the private life of a politician's brother. Again, trash reporting.

So unless you disagree that these all amount to unhelpful gossip mongering (well, except to the wallet of a lazy reporter/news agency), a little less than half of the unbalanced results demonstrate no harm to the public good.

edit: tone clarification. Also, I agree with your last paragraph.

Do you have a source? My impression from news stories is that the right to be forgotten applies to events no longer pertinent. "Factually incorrect" doesn't seem to be part of the standard.

Actually, "factually incorrect" tends to already be covered by libel laws. You can sue a newspaper that maligns you with false facts.

Whereas, the right to be forgotten would seem to cover things such as nude photos, which in most cases are no longer pertinent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten#Current_l...

I'm open to being wrong about this.

Doesn't this magnify grandparent's point? Each of his examples is doubly important if it's actually factually incorrect.

The Spanish Costeja case shows that's not true [1]. The information ordered to be unlisted was true.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v_Gonz%C3%A1lez

The target is wrong. Your mother (and the other people in the EU) should be targeting the newspapers and other places that actually have the information.

Not the search engine.

A newspaper would probably refuse to remove the story altogether, but they might be willing to add a note saying the charges were dropped.

There's a difference between removing false or misleading information (like in your case) and trying to hide your true history (like most of the EU cases I'm hearing about).

The HN population is usually very skeptical about matters related to censorship. What I see here is a 50-50 proportion of agreement. It's startingly enormous for a law about the internet.

Hmm.. why not? Isn't that a form of censorship?

There's a distinctly 21st century flavor to being able to store all the banal life mistakes indefinitely, to dig them up later if we ever need dirt on a particular person.

Before it was varying levels of unprovable (ie, not photographs or verifiable sources) and bandwidth limited (people could only store so much information; sources weren't interlinked for quick queries).

So it's actually quite likely that when we drafted our laws, this was an implicit right by the nature of technology, and considered a natural part of the bounds of specifically enumerated rights.

We should make sure, as technology removes traditional limits on what we can do, that we adequately adjust our laws to reflect that change.

OMG they're stealing my rights!!!

Except not really. Google, despite what many might like to think, is not an "official" entity, it's a private company. They aren't disseminating information for the public good, whatever that is, but so they can slap an ad on it and make some profits. So what if Jo(e) Bloggs did something embarrassing a decade ago? If one of your friends was constantly bringing up things from years ago, you'd get tired of them doing so pretty quickly. Why should Google get to do it to make some money off of it? And what sort of gossip monger even wants this to be possible?

Not simply for commenting on the de-listing, but if the page is republishing information that's considered a violation of privacy in the EU, it's still a violation of privacy. This would be clearest in the case of e.g. compromising pictures of high-school kids or other such non-public figures. If you started a site reposting those pictures after Google delists the original sites that published them, obviously your site would also be subject to delisting.

This is going to lead to super- and hyper-injunction levels of stupid.

Indexed [1]. Even comes complete with the "Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe" message.

[1] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ahiddenfromgoogle.co...