Follow in our footsteps
That's right you USians, follow in the footsteps of us Bri...err..Europeans as always ;)
The US should be more like Europe – and introduce the controversial "right to be forgotten" ruling – says a top American consumer-defending organisation. In a letter to Google CEO Larry Page and exec chairman Eric Schmidt, Consumer Watchdog asked the search supremos to extend the EU's privacy ruling, dubbed the "right to be …
Retention and publication restrictions already cover the organizations named.
- Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax are governed by a number of laws and civil court decisions, including a legal requirement to drop information after a period of time.
- The IRS, as I understand it, ignores information over about three years old unless they find evidence of fraud, in which case the effective period is indefinite.
- For the NSA, the legal retention is 5 years or less for nearly everything and generally 0 for US person information, although that obviously conflicts to a degree with retention of communication information between a US person and a foreigner. The FISA and USSID 18 rules are quite specific in this area.
- The CIA is expected to pass to the FBI or maybe, now, DHS, any material pertinent to US persons or activities; for the latter agencies I would expect the rules for criminal investigations and proceedings to apply.
"but does not mention early teething problems that saw fair and accurate news reports de-listed due to things said in the comments sections."
But only the journalists were notified that their stories were being delisted from the search. It was almost like Google was trying to stir up resentment....
Has anyone ever actually nailed down that 'only journalists got told'/Google-secret-PR thing, coz when I look, I see things like this instead:
http://searchengineland.com/google-notifying-publishers-right-forgotten-removals-195634
i.e. if you tell it who to tell, it tells you, unconditionally, automatically.
Nobody's articles are being delisted under "right to be forgotten" rules. The only thing that Google changes in the results returned in response to a search for a users name. The articles will still turn up in response to thousands of other search terms.
Google changes the results that are returned for different search terms all the time, and it makes no effort to alert the owners of pages that are affected by such changes - in fact it steadfastly denies that it is has any responsibility to businesses that may suffer significant financial loss when a tweak by google changes the response to specific search terms. It is only alerting people about changes due to "right to be forgotten" changes because it is making those changes under duress, and it wants to stir up support for it's opposition to this ruling.
I do not know whether Google (Yahoo!, Bing) would be misclassified in the US as "publishers", but suspect it would make little difference, as restriction of the right to publish true information here is quite difficult to get and therefore quite exceptional. Notable instances are classified government documents and copyrighted material, and occasionally court proceedings and documents are suppressed for a time. The idea of deleting or delisting "outdated or no longer relevant" information is alien, as is the curious notion that unpopular ideas like white supremacy or holocaust denial could be regulated or suppressed. The idea that official and public actions of a government body, like that taken against Mario Costeja Gonzalez in Spain, could be ordered "forgotten" is, in the context of the first amendment, preposterous.
If anything, we err in the other direction, as in assigning "sexual predator" labels that are legally required to remain public for long periods or permanently for the life of the assignee.