h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27388289
EU court backs 'right to be forgotten' in Google case

There are so many things wrong, at first glance, with this, and yet at the same time I can see good reason for, well, the premise, at least, and the more I think about it the more confused and less confused I become. Confused? You will be

Let's look at the case that sparked it off.

"The ruling came after Mario Costeja Gonzalez complained that a search of his name in Google brought up newspaper articles from 16 years ago about a sale of property to recover money he owed."
The important words in that extract are "newspaper article". The story is already out there, in a newspaper, and that story can't go away. Even if everyone who ever bought that day's newspaper have used it to light the fire, wrap up the potato peelings, line the bottom of the rabbit cage, the story has been reported, it's in the public domain (not in the legal, copyright-infringement sense, of course) and that can never be changed, particularly since there's probably a copy of the newspaper in the paper's own archives or at the local library, in a binder.

So if a scanned image of that newspaper page, or a transcription of the story shows up on the internet, what's the problem?.

Well, of course, the internet is a far more public and easily searchable place than the local library; something we frequently forget when posting personal, everyday information to FaceAche, Twitter, even h2g2. It's not like sitting around a canteen table at work and having a conversation with your workmates. Unless you're on a private website that can only be accessed with a password (which we aren't - all our posts can be read by people who aren't registered), everything you say can be read by anyone in the world with a computer, an internet connection and a search engine.

So, how does that change things? The principle at stake in the story is the right to privacy. The moment you post something to a public forum on the internet you've waived your right to privacy by the act of posting. You've said to the world 'I'm content to let you read this about me'. Some people might not realise that's what they're saying, they might not have given it any thought, but that's how it works, and some people, teenagers who have posted pictures of themselves in a less than fully clothed state have had that come back and bite them very hard. That's not the case in this instance, of course. There's a third party - the newspaper - involved.

So, let's say, for the sake of argument, we agree that the internet, being so public and so searchable, should have different rules and that you should have the right to remove something you don't like about yourself. Where should the line be drawn? I don't even know where to start with that. Some things could be clear cut, I suppose, like risqué images you might have posted in a drunken stupor or in the foolhardiness of adolescence, but I can see where this might lead. People will start requesting something about them that's generally innocuous but which they just don't care for, be taken down. Who should be the arbiter of that, and what are the criteria? It's going to be a contentious issue and will inevitably leaad to even more angst on the internet than there already is. And by Jove, there's a lot.

Why should the search engine be the one who have to edit their results? That doesn't remove the original web page. I don't think the search engine should have anything to do with the matter other than bringing the relevant page to the fore in the first place. Once it's done that its part in the proceedings is over and the owners of the web site in question should be the ones to remove it.

Or maybe not, because if the search engine removes the page from its results but the page still exists, which brings us back to where we started - the idea of having a newspaper archive that still includes the original article but that it's much harder to find and you have to *really* go looking for it. And I think that's how it should be.

And then there's the Wayback Machine, the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment, different laws in different parts of the world (it is the world wide web, after all), and should search facilities on individual websites also be subject to the ruling? If you can go to a library and pull out a binder or a microfilm of a newspaper's archive, should you still be able to do that via the library's or the newspaper's own website, bypassing Google altogether?

Oy

Oh, and one more thing.

"Campaign group Index on Censorship condemned the decision, saying it "violates the fundamental principles of freedom of expression. It allows individuals to complain to search engines about information they do not like with no legal oversight," it said. "This is akin to marching into a library and forcing it to pulp books.""

No, it isn't. It's like the idea I described above about the book still being there, just harder to find. There's a very tiresome trend these days for exaggeration and sensationalism individuals and organisations are asked for comments by the press.

It seems that people on both sides are confusing "Google" with "The Internet". They're not the same thing.


That said, my feelings on this align with Google. These take down requests will be abused, just as British libel laws have been abused. It won't be individuals who are a bit embarrassed, it will be major corporations who want to hide things from public knowledge. It will also immediately be used by major media companies who have been wanting to extend their "copyright"* power to search engines.

It seems the internet as we know it is taking some pretty major blows lately.



*Briefly, on copyright, I do support copyrights. I was trained as a photographer and I definitely believe creators should profit from their work, but copyright as a concept has been turned into a grotesque of its original purpose by large media companies like Disney who have extended copyright durations long and far beyond their original usefulness for the content creators. Now it's a tool for abuse by major media companies to wring every cent out of consumers.

There's also a very tiresome trend for me to omit words at random when writing anything, anywhere these days

I hadn't even begun to consider how corporations might use this, but I'm sure they will, oh yes, because as we now know, corporations are people too.

Feels uncomfortably like a further move towards 1984 and the Ministry of Truth.

Ideally, in the context of individuals, it could lead to no one ever doing anything they are likely to regret later, so there is nothing defamatory to leave to posterity. (who am I kidding?)

But in the realm of politics or, more worryingly still, big money - scary. Surely we are manipulated enough as it is...

I wonder how many people searched for his name on reading the article?

it's only added to the confusion, and as TC said: the guy isn't just a little bit on the internet now, he is genuinely internationally famous. There will be a wiki article about him any second now.

Gosho summed it up for me, and (I think it was) BG: it will be used mostly by corporations.

I think that's exactly what will happen, yes.

But the same could be said for any piece of legislation, couldn't it? It will be more use to wealthy corporations than the average citizen because they have much better access to the means of wielding the power of law.

Ah, yes, the Streisand effect. If we hadn't heard of him before, we sure have now - exactly the opposite of what he seems to looking for Oh the irony. But I suppose if you feel strongly enough about changing something you have to step into the spotlight, and in a case like this, that inevitably means media exposure. I don't know anything about the bloke or his situation, but it sounds to me like he's a) being a bit precious and b) making a rod for his own back.

Like I said though, this won't effect something like the Wayback Machine and any other internet archives. The ruling only stops search engines from including content in their results; it doesn't remove the content itself. There are people who will still be able to hack their way to any content they really want to find. And it's often the case that even when an organisation or individual deletes something from their website, there's a chance someone already took a screenshot that's already whizzing around Twitter. UKIP's a recent example of that.

I still don't see why this was directed at search engines and not at the pages that feature the information. I'll have to read a few more stories and see if anyone has a good explanation of this.

I suspect he might have gone for the low-hanging fruit. The content exists, on the www *and*, importantly, in the real world, because it's an old newspaper article. I imagine he'd have had a much harder time demanding the newspaper removes it from their website (or wherever it is that this article resides), and even if they did, the hard copy would still exist... somewhere. It's been published in a paper - that can't be erased from history; it's thing (dear Bob, I've got to stop using smartarse internet jargon ).

Unless someone like Franco comes to power in Spain again and revises history.

And I've got to check my posts my thoroughly before posting

It's *a* thing.

Oh

I still think the one thing that would improve h2g2 most would be a time limited edit for posts.

But then again, what would h2g2 be without that instantaneous one so often feels after hitting [Post Message]?

A lot less stressful

And so it begins.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27423527

Again, I still don't know how I feel about this. People in the public eye are now going to start demanding any kind of bad publicity about them is removed from search results, just to make themselves look better if, for instance, they're running for office. That's manipulating the news, and, ultimately, the facts. It's wrong. People who have been convicted of a crime will ask for reports of their crime be removed from results. While the information itself might still be there, that's de facto revisionism.

As for negative reviews, I could go either way on that. Customer reviews, and the websites that facilitate them, like Yelp, are, in my opinion, one of the evils of the internet. Apart from the fact that it gives opinionated idiots the chance to influence other people by exaggerating their experiences, apart from the way it adds to the prejudice in society, I know people who have lost their jobs because someone wrote a review on Yelp that painted them in a bad light, the company read it and fired them. That's summary justice and it's justice without a right of appeal because the person who leaves the review is rarely consulted, if they even can be, and for all the company knows they might be outright lying.

That's just plain wrong

I've just written about this (in Ask, I think)

it's tricky, that's for sure