Comes across a little bit petty, but I kind of liked it. You ask for links to our articles to be removed from Google, we drag them up and link to them from a fresh story and put it on our home page:
Google removes 12 BBC News links in 'right to be forgotten'
Streisand effect strikes again
Hexus thoughts on the whole mess of a law? It just seems a bit odd and poorly thought through, like most laws related to the internet at the moment.
Personally, I find it bizarre that the EU is trying to consign history to the dustbin (in a more literal sense than the phrase typically implies).
If I go to an archive, and there's a list of documents, it will contain every document that's there. I can scroll through the list, find the one I want, and go to pluck it out from the stores.
The idea of going through that list of finding [redacted] written everywhere, and knowing that the information is there, but that it's effectively hidden and thus impossible to access? How does that make sense?
If information is inaccurate, then it's probably libelous and can be removed at source. But if information is outdated, well, it's history. What a guy did 15 years ago might not be massively relevant to what they're doing today, but it still happened. It's still history! Why should it be expunged?
I don't know that it makes sense, I'm just delighted you managed to use 'expunged' in a forum post. Awesome word.Originally Posted by jim
No trees were harmed in the creation of this message. However, many electrons were displaced and terribly inconvenienced.
I feel the EU is doing a bit of a respekt-mah-authoritah type posturing exercise against the worryingly powerful Google. Once you get legislators doing the kneejerk something-must-be-done bit, you can pretty much guarantee shoddy inappropriate pieces of legislation.
How long before there is a website dedicated to, 'Googles Forgotten Searches'. Rendering the entire point of the excersise moot.
Whilst I think the EUs idea is stupid, I can understand where this is coming from.
People do stupid things, we like to rehabilitate people, criminal records can get expired.
Say someone does something really, really stupid as a kid, that person it appears for ever, will be associated with it by a quick search. We've never in our culture had that before.
Before such rehabilitation was completed and then the past hidden from the great unwashed public, it's much easier to do that than to educate them to be tolerant after all.
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Except that Google are the ones making each decision on whether they remove the search result or not, making it even more odd!
I assume (hope) that this is what they were trying to achieve. You do wonder in this digital age how many digitised newspaper searches exist where you could do this from print media? And it's not like private companies aren't scraping Twitter for example and storing everything said publicly by a person. Nice idea, poor implementation.
Would be an interesting proposition rewording the legislation to actually be workable - short of a full-on censorship stylee take-the-article-down court order. I suspect you would need some kind of EU wide metadata removal facility, but making that any less unworkable than the annoying cookie popups the EU foisted on us seems unlikely.
The problem isnt that the information is available, its that other people use it wrongly.
If youre declared bankrupt or have a previous conviction you eventually get to stop declaring it, except under some circumstances.
If youre found not guilty, or not charged over something, you should get to walk away and not have to worry about it.
The problem, for at least that Spanish guy, is that people look you up on google and find Bad Things™ from your past and hold it against you. Although, I suspect hes just an incompetent twit.
Removing links from google is still retarded, people should be judged on relevant things, be it past financial mistakes to making an "offensive" comment on a forum.
Someone already did, I just forget what the site was.
Its easily done, you just compare the google search from the EU to one from the US, and you have a list of removed links.
That has never been the case, since literally the invention of newspapers they've been archived and available to the general public. With the increasing move to online only news sources (huffington post etc) its only right that that continues. The use of google just makes the searching easier. The ad absurdo position on the EU argument is what if a prospective employer pays for a service that has armies of people scouring paper newspaper archives for the same information? Should the paper archives be redacted for 60 years and then somehow returned to the original copy when it becomes 'historical record' rather than a right to be forgotten? Or, if you prefer the daily mail type stories. What if in 5 years time, someone employs a peadophile with a spent sentence because an article from the 1999 bbc news website was obscured?
But, people didnt go and search them, they werent interested or bothered by it.
Just as a simple example, go back 30 years. Assuming a private individual, not a company or some sort of paid investigator, consider the following.
How many people then spent time being nosey and searching for friends in newspapers and other media?
And today? How often to people type their own name, friends, past partners etc into a search engine, even just for fun?
Yes, the mechanisms have changed, but so have people, because its now easier and you dont need to ask anyone for help to be inquisitive.
Theres a difference there, youre deliberately naming something that has the person on a register for life, one they themselves are required to register.
If they are working with children, it should be flagged up on background checks they cant hide or deny and DONT need the use of news articles to uncover. Even for casual contact or self-employed work, how many people would even consider searching for information on someone? What if its not their real name they give? How many news articles include information from the future, like the new false alias of an unreformed criminal?
Don't forget, in general terms rather than sex offenders specifically, the basis of the UK legal system is "reform", the expectation that crimes are punished and once the punishment has been administered, the person is deemed to fit to return to society and resume life.
The EU ruling came about because of someone who wasnt a criminal, but was obviously finding past information negatively affected his life. Would you trust someone that seemed to be lacking business acumen? I guess plenty of spanish people did, either that or he was actually incompetent and blames google for his own ineptitude.
Should people be able to request links be removed? no, not unless the information is actually incorrect.
IMO, that's a good thing. What we need to learn, as a society, is a new way of judging people.
In years gone by, you couldn't easily know that someone had a minor conviction at 18. Nor could you know that at 15 they expressed a daft opinion on a web forum.
The answer is to change attitudes, not to selectively erase people's pasts.
In theory yes. Yet the trendy left bring up David Cameron's student life over and over and over and over and over and over. Long time ago yet...
Isn't it just Google that is being targeted by this? Ie if I, heaven forbid, used an alternative to Googler er... Bing? AskJeeves? Altavista? the results would still appear in the listing?
But back to the OP, yes, that made me smile when I saw the list of BBC links that Google had been asked to remove
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