This is precicly the point. When does a search engine results trasition from indexing to provideing an opinion.
Sounds familiar⌠And totally the right of anyone else to do with their own mediums.
Thatâs where I think weâre having a bit of a disconnect. In this âhypotheticalâ (cough) scenario I own it. All of it. Is it all shiny and glorious and smelling of roses? Nope. But itâs history. And Iâll be damned if I let anyone (including myself) change it.
Now if people are going to spread slander or libel about someone⌠thatâs something else entirely. If the EU made a law that said âGoogle must flag anything proven to be libelous and present that information to anyone searching for said proven libelous contentâ⌠I might be open to that. (Though⌠probably not. That feels like a bridge too far too me.) But weâre talking about erasing truth from history.
And Iâm simply not cool with that. History is awesome. Warts and all.
That is strange, eh? Iâm not sure if I follow the logic of making Google responsible for someone elseâs data.
Feels a bit GPL-Extreme-y to me.
From the Guardian: âThe test case privacy ruling by the European Unionâs court of justice against Google Spain was brought by a Spanish man, Mario Costeja GonzĂĄlez, after he failed to secure the deletion of an auction notice of his repossessed home dating from 1998 on the website of a mass circulation newspaper in Cataloniaâ
Seems that the intent is to erase history in a fashion. No one can read it if it canât be found. And by it not being able to be found, then one doesnât have to own up to it.
Perhaps these are a sensitive bunch of people. I say again, itâs a shallow person who makes conclusions based on so little information. Should one be so concerned what a shallow person thinks?
Wouldnât the appropriate place for that be in the court system facing the one slandering you? The offending person facing a removal of the slander, a retraction, an apology, and maybe punitive damages? And even then, a search engine shouldnât be involved, would it?
You know, you are absolutely right. In my effort to find a common, middle ground with the opposing argument⌠I accidentally threw out obvious logic. 
This is an astoundingly dangerous precedent. This is basically the EU courts stating that a search engine is directly responsible â including potential damages â for all content on the internet.
That is true. They have been shown to manipulate search results when they are unhappy with some one. But was that the issue in this court case?
I didnât realize that this persons data was on Googleâs servers. Isnât it a matter that it was on the newspaperâs servers and it is possible to find it with a google search?
Letâs imagine that thereâs something in your past about which youâre embarrassed; not anything hugely serious such as a crime, but something that youâre not proud of. Obviously, you wouldnât want to legally prevent anyone from knowing about it â youâve made that clear â but equally youâd rather people didnât know about it, if you have the choice.
Step 1: every time I see you in the street, I point at you and shout at the top of my voice âhey! hey everyone standing around! you see @oldgeek over there? He once did (embarrassing thing)! Ha ha ha!â
Thatâs not all that terrible. Itâd get old pretty quickly, and it has the potential to cause you some further embarrassment â imagine youâre walking along the street with a potential client or a potential partner â but itâs not anything massively serious. Also, Iâm not going to see you in the street very much; you donât live near me, and I donât know what you look like.
Step 2: I pay every shopkeeper and barperson and door guard to do the same thing. Everywhere you go, everything you do, is done to a chorus of people shouting about the thing you did. Everyone who knows you now knows about it. Now, youâll overcome that embarrassment; youâll essentially have no choice but to shamefacedly own up to the thing that you did. And thatâs OK; weâve brought a little more clarity to the world, and shown people that they canât forget the mistakes of the past. But there is a difference between not being able to forget them and being forced to repeatedly acknowledge them over and over and over again. People who youâve never heard of have now heard of you â youâre the guy that did that embarrassing thing. And thatâs all they know about you. They donât know anything else youâve done; they donât care about whatever else youâve done with your life. All they know is that youâre the guy who did the embarrassing thing. Even if you wanted to correct them, you canât; you donât know who they are! And youâre typecast as the embarrassing guy.
One day you wander round to my house and say, dude, why did you do this? Fine, I canât hide from my past, but I donât see why I should have my face rubbed in it day after day after day. My life is materially worse off than it was before; I wonât claim that my lifeâs ruined, but I certainly feel victimised. I donât see why this one thing I did should colour everything I do for ever more. Everywhere I go people laugh at me; fine, I made a mistake once, but I canât see how I can erase it; Iâve spent the last few years since then doing nothing but selflessly digging wells in Africa and helping little old ladies across the road, but nobody wants to hear about that! You just keep telling them about the embarrassing thing I did, years and years ago! Why wonât you also tell them about my good deeds? How long do I have to pay?
And I put one finger on my chin, and I roll my eyes up, and say âwell, you donât want to erase history, do you? Are you saying that Iâm responsible for you doing that thing?â
The court of public opinion doesnât have a statute of limitations. And it should.
@sil I do understand the emotion behind what you are saying. I have faced rudeness and ridicule for decades because of my beliefs. Nobody enjoys those things. I certainly donât.
But, I donât understand the logic behind the courtâs decision. Should it not, under this law, be the source of the data concerned that be affected?
No. The court were emphatic that the issue was not with the source of the data; they firmly stated that the chap in question canât expunge that data from the historical record, and the actual publisher of the data does not have to remove it. Their issue was, in line with EU data protection laws, that it not be given undue prominence. Now, they have essentially defined âgoogle provide it as a high-ranking search result for the chapâs nameâ as being undue prominence, which might seem a bit off, but frankly I think that thatâs a fair assessment of the level of influence that Google have over the public discourse. Google canât hide behind the âitâs not our data, we just index and link to itâ any more than newspapers can hide behind âwe didnât say this happened, we just reported that someone else said thatâ defence.
Youâre comparing Apples and Whale Blubber there.
Google is providing an indexing and data searching service (in this case). Content that is already published online (publicly) with no restrictions on indexing (cough robot.txt) is being indexed and made searchable.
Newspapers are taking information (public record or not), verifying it as they can (which, all to often, is not really at all) and writing an original piece of content around that information. This may be nothing more than a shell of an article with some quotes in it from an unverified source⌠but, in that way, it is still technically original.
Letâs come back to this quote for a second:
I donât see Google as hiding behind that fact. This fact simply states what Google does.
It seems to me what youâre saying is (and, please, correct me if Iâm wrong) that it would be preferable for Google to not simply by an indexing/searching service. They should also manually curate the content, disallow some content from being indexed (based on such criteria as âthis content gave me a frowny faceâ or âsomeone said something true about me but I donât like truthâ), and manually change the search result rankings for content.
Which seems like itâs just begging to be abused (say, by politicians and corporations) until Google is no longer a useful tool in any way, shape or form.
Again we get back to the logic of the courtâs decision.
John is looking for x information. He asks Bob who would have such information, for Bob, while not knowing the exact information, almost always knows who has what. Bob tells John that Mike has the information. Mike gives John the information. Bob should be punished for directing John where to ask? Mike should not have to be asked not to give out such information?
This is strengthening what the slogan of the EU (and for every government for that matter) should be. That is? âCompletely unencumbered by the thought process.â For this decision seems to be an emotional driven decision and not a logic one.
Now you got me wondering if Whale Blubber could be used to make a nice, light flaky crust for Apple pie! Mmmmmm I love pie.
One thing I havenât yet seen discussed (unless my skim reading of the above has been poor) is the fact that often parts of reported news get greater prominence than other parts, and the Google effect exacerbates this. And thus the court of public opinion becomes the primary court.
For example: A TV star gets accused of rape. Front page news. Lots of clicks. Same TV star is completely acquitted. Fourth page news. Less clicks. In 5 years time, a Google search for that person is far more likely to bring up the rape story than the acquittal story.
A newspaper story doesnât have to be libellous to be biased, and I could imagine that having that story expunged from Google might be useful.
At least in the EU. From what I understand, this affects Google only in the EU (Google.de, etc.) and not google.com. So, what is to prevent anyone in the EU to use google.com?
Actually, if this is the case, I could see further embarrassment for someone who wanted their info removed from googleâs index and it was found on google.com. I would think even more attention would be brought to it. I could even imagine someone, somehow, getting what these take downs are and posting them.
But that is not what they are doing. They curate the results all be it algorithimically, but it is not just a straight index.
So they are then a Data Controller under the remit of the Data Protection legislation and so have to make sure that the data is accurate relevent, and proportinate.
Accurate based on what standard?
Relevant to whom?
Proportionate to what?
Google displays results based on searches of data that they have indexed. Those results are weighted based on what Google understands to be your desired weighting criteria (as potentially flawed as that may be). If they, however, did not provide any weighting⌠in what order should the results be displayed?
Chronological order of indexing? Alphabetical? Random order?
Regardless of how they choose to order the displayed results they are immediately veering into the territory of curating data. As such it is impossible to display data in a non-curated way (although we may all agree that the levels of curation may differ).
Honestly the entire argument for âthe right to be forgottenâ and "Google needs to remove indexed data I donât like"and âGoogle needs to adjust how it displays data in order to make me happyâ⌠that whole thing just needs to be better thought out. Right now it is lacking on the implementation specifics and consistency necessary to even make it happen in a way that is at all worth while.
Which⌠I donât consider it to be, in any way, worth while.
Youâre saying âfar more likelyâ, which means youâre guessing. In actuality, the opposite seems to be true. Take the story of Bill Roache, an actor from long-running UK soap Coronation Street.
In May 2013, he was arrested and then charged with raping a 15 year old girl in 1967. In February 2014, he was found not guilty of all charges. In the intervening months, the press had a field day, essentially convicting Roache in the court of public opinion, if not the court of law.
However, the interesting thing is that if you Google for William Roache, the top stories are âfound not guiltyâ, âto resume roleâ, âaccuser âregretsâ speaking outâ ⌠these are all stories reflecting the most recent status of what happened, not the most lurid or most sensational.
Maybe there are other examples that demonstrate what youâre talking about, but I just picked one at random, and it doesnât necessarily hold water.
Not sure whether this is evidence for my argument or against it, but integrity demands I present it.
Why has Google cast me into oblivion?
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