1x16: Forgotten to be Right

Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it’s a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.

Al Franken,

Well, if we ever meet in person we can grab a burger and swap weird stories. :smile:

After listening to me, you would probably end up like one of Ted Striker’s traveling companions! :smiley:

When I heard the Balsamiq review, I immediately thought of Pencil.
In my company, we need to build not only wireframes for mobile apps, but also logical flow charts (relationships between all the screens and logics that connect them). So far, the design team was using Adobe InDesign, but it’s a pain in the ass, any modification takes 2 days because it’s usually about the logics and designers don’t understand what has to be done, etc.

So I’ve been looking for a program to design logical flow charts, but I couldn’t find anything apart from Pencil, which seems to do the trick.

I tried Balsamiq web demo, but it looks like you cannot do logical flows using this app, so it’s basically no use for me :frowning:

Aside from that, I really, really enjoyed Stuart’s magnificent Spanish accent when he pronounced the name of mister Consteja Gonzalez, or should I say “Coste-ha Gonjales”. That’s for sure my favorite second of the whole show!

Yeah, yeah, I’m no good at Spanish. :slight_smile:

But you rock at British English, and that’s the most important (I love your accent! — even though sometimes it’s a bit cryptic for my ears)

Great show, until the Hitler comment was made.

“You know, I shouldn’t have to explain this, but sharing one attribute with Nazis doesn’t make you one!”
— Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

Bad idea to use Godwin’s law to win an argument.

That said, here is a TED talk on why I think the statutes of limitation protect our freedom, especially our possible freedom in the future. As well as our children’s future.

To be clear, I was saying it tongue in cheek.

So that explains the speech impediment :smile:

If it’s not ok to remove the web page(s) then it’s not ok to ask google to do it, the European court are idiots if the guy really has a right to be forgotten then take down the page,

Why no Bad Voltage remix of the Lugradio GPL v3 song?!? Disappointed.

Most of the discussion of this topic is just plain wrong. The reason is that this ruling is related to the European Data Protection legislation, and centers around the question is a Google search an publication, or a listing. So when a computer system contains Personally Identifiable Information (PII) then the principals of the Data Protection apply. The recording of a newspaper article that has the mans name, address, and details of the event is clearly PII data.

So then a system that curates and presents that data must ensure that “Personal data shall be adequate, relevant and not excessive” and this is the principal that the courts found that Google had overstepped.

The more important point is that the court found that Google was a “Data Controller” even though it was merely indexing other content on the internet. Previously the newspaper site would have been regarded as the Data Controller.

In the UK Credit Reference agencies have used the defense that they are not Data Controllers because they merely index data they receive, the banks and others are the Data Controllers, so if you want to get inaccurate information removed from this you have to go to the institution that entered the data.

Absolutely; agreed entirely with @xplora1a.

There is an awful lot of equivocation in this discussion between “it’s not OK to do this” and “it’s unlawful to do this”. This surprises me a little; one of the more common arguments that speech should not be suppressed in the United States is “the first amendment says you can’t do that!”, i.e., “the law says this, thus this”. Here, the law is reasonably clear but objectors are appealing to some sort of higher morality: “the EU court shouldn’t do that!”, “but the law says that they should”, “well the law’s wrong”. I find this a bit surprising.

Thanks Stuart @sil and I would add to that that the Data Protection legislation while it has it faults, is pretty good as a legal framework. It is based on principals not on any specific technology. And it tries to balance a complex area of rights and responsibilities.

As an update, here’s Google’s Right to be Forgotten Form:
https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_eudpa?product=websearch&hl=en

Note: "*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.

If you have a removal request, please fill out the form below. Please note that this form is an initial effort. We look forward to working closely with data protection authorities and others over the coming months as we refine our approach.*"

–jeremy

Fair play, Google; found to be not in compliance with the EU’s firm data protection laws, they’re clearly making some effort to rectify that rather than just pretending that it didn’t happen. Good work.

So… in order to be in semi-compliance with EU laws… Google has to pay for additional employees to help people erase any part of their past that someone feels embarrassed about at any given moment. Even though it won’t actually be effective… because there are other website indexes and histories out there.

In other words… a pointless, but expensive, non-fix for a law that says companies should be forced to facilitate individuals who want to be fickle little chicken-shits.

Radpants.

I think this is the stumbling stone for many. If the newspaper has the ‘offending’ information, then under this law it would seem that the newspaper would be required to remove it, not the indexing service that could find it.

Silly hoomans. Government always makes me think of Einsteins definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and expecting different results.

For crying out loud. Listen to the arguments made. The point is not that this bloke wants to erase his misdeeds from history, nor even that he should be allowed to.

Imagine that, for example, twitter wrote “left the Linux Action Show under a cloud” and linked to all the (wrong) insulting Reddit threads about you, next to every tweet you posted. And when you say, hey, stop doing that: that’s not all I am, and it’s not even important to me; why do you keep bringing it up? they say, why are you trying to erase the past? Own your mistakes.

It’s not about erasing history. It’s about giving undue prominence to one thing in this dude’s past – in anyone’s past. It’s the same thing as not being allowed to bring up prior convictions when putting someone on trial. Google have a huge amount of power to shape the public discourse on a topic: other collectors of data do too, but google collect data with the urgency and the volume of a nation state. The EU (correctly) strongly regulates the amount of influence and power that one can gain by collecting data on a vast scale; Google have learned here that if you operate at nation-state levels of data collection then you hsve to play by the same rules as the democratically elected. Smaller players do not: indeed, the laws specifically prohibit wiping an event from the public record entirely. It’s about big players not being able to shape the world without controls. If being opposed to that makes all of Europe whiny, then I accept the label. Enjoy your unrestricted free market, Uncle Sam.