SCREW YOU, EU: BBC rolls out Right To Remember as Google deletes links The BBC will publish a summary of articles removed from Google search rankings under the infamous "right to be forgotten" rules. At a public meeting, the Beeb's editorial policy chief, David Jordan, said the public also had a "right to remember". A ruling by the European Court of Justice in May ordered Google to remove links …
If you would be so kind as to supply your name and address here so I can post scurrilous, and of course completely unsubstantiated, rumours about your squirrel fetishes then I would be much obliged. Of course, nobody looking you up on Google would worry about these squirrel love-in rumours but, you know, no smoke without fire.
That would have nothing to do with Google, DavCrav. That would be an unsubstantiated rumour and there are existing laws about that. He could sue you and get the article taken down.
This is for accurate articles that are no longer relevant or no longer of public interest, but are public record and cannot be removed (accredited press etc,).
"That would have nothing to do with Google, DavCrav. That would be an unsubstantiated rumour and there are existing laws about that. He could sue you and get the article taken down."
Good luck with that. If he's in a different jurisdiction, if the server is in a different jurisdiction, etc. Ask the music industry how difficult it is. Shall we see? If I said big_D is a squirrel botherer, maybe El Reg would take it down, especially if you complained, but another website, in a different part of the world, might just tell you to sod off, you big squirrel lover you.
"This is for accurate articles that are no longer relevant or no longer of public interest, but are public record and cannot be removed (accredited press etc,)."
It's actually for irrelevant, outdated, *or inaccurate* information.
And all these people moaning about freedom of speech should presumably be complaining about the new tougher sentences for abuse over the Internet. After all, freedom of speech.
However, on this occasion, they're doing the right thing. Google seem to be vulnerable/defending themselves from disgruntled competitors but it seems to me that the right to be forgotten is nonsensical. The example cited by the BBC themselves is a case in point.
As the crims themselves say (apparently) if you can't stand the time don't do the crime.
If you do something that attracts public attention you didn't do it in private. No doubt there are counter examples (e.g., Max Mosley might have interesting tastes but he was indulging in private and he was stitched up) but English Law at least, is based on remedies not rights.
You miss the point that Google is being deliberately bloody-minded by smugly claiming to "do the right thing" whilst sticking to the letter of the law, rather than its spirit.
If someone has not committed an offence and *was* doing something in private (the Mosely case you cite is a perfect example) then that information should *NOT* be made available through searches, something which is entirely different from the cases of the IRA members who were caught, tried and convicted according to the law.
Google are just messing around and playing silly buggers to try to undermine the law whislt pretending to obey it.
I am confused here - the information was at one point publicly available - available to anyone on the planet
Is the next step for the EU to implement a global mind wipe to remove any knowledge of the existence of the information from the human race?
If there was a reference to the information in a book should we start burning the books?
It's getting there. There was the case of a girl being abducted (not exactly against her will, to be fair, but she was under age and hence not officially able to provide consent) by her teacher. For about a week, her name was all across the news. Not very long after, it was considered contempt of court to mention her name, despite it being readily available on various new websites.
@jonathonb
There's an interesting side-effect here. She is named because she was named in the broadcasts prior to the event, while she was a 'missing person' and considered at risk. Once it became clear that she had eloped with the teacher, she, as a minor, became protected by the court and it was no longer permissible to name her.
He has been subject to public record by a court; thus he is and should continue to be named. This is part of his record, even when his term is complete. He will have completed his sentence, paid his debt to society, but the fact of his action remains; he will not have miraculously undone his actions. So why should this be hidden by/from a search engine?
The young lady is unfortunately associated with a search for him from the pre-arrest times. Allowing a judge to require that all previous records to her be expunged would be foolish; if nothing else, it would provide the precedence that the judiciary can modify history. But that ignores the simple practical fact of locating every internet and written reference and removing them - an obvious impossibility.
So if one has the material existing, it is equally foolish to try and prevent its indexing, lest we return to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
> You miss the point that Google is being deliberately bloody-minded by smugly claiming to "do the right thing" whilst sticking to the letter of the law, rather than its spirit.
Maybe it is my failing, but I don't understand the phrase "sticking to the letter of the law, rather than its spirit". Laws are written in letters. If the law makers make laws, where the letter and the spirit are not one and the same, whose mistake is that? If I wrote a piece of software, would it be reasonable for me to complain that the compiler was following the letter of my code and not the spirit? If I gave an order to an employee, whose fault would it be if they did as I asked rather than what I meant to ask?
> I don't understand the phrase "sticking to the letter of the law, rather than its spirit".
I suggest you try reading some of the stories on El Reg of the way that laws which have been passed, ostensibily for the purposes of "anti-terrorism" such as RIPA have been used (or abused) by Councils to spy on people, let alone people who have been jailed, again under anti-terrorism legislation, for simply refusing to hand over their passwords.
I don't know whether those laws were written with, shall we say, deliberate incompetence, or whether their drafters *really* didn't think about how they could be used, but open-ended legislation that give TPTB carte blanche to do what they like is not good for our liberties.
Now do you start to understand?
"but I don't understand the phrase "sticking to the letter of the law, rather than its spirit""
"If I wrote a piece of software,"
Can work both ways. If you write some software that you sell but decide to allow students to use it free. Then one of your biggest customers signs every one of their employees up to a never ending online course for $10. They are now students and all using your software for free.
They are sticking to the letter of the law (your license agreement) just not the spirit of it.
> Google is being deliberately bloody-minded by smugly claiming to "do the right thing" whilst sticking to the letter of the law, rather than its spirit.
Google has been charged with the task of censoring the net, and if it gets it wrong it can be sued. It is naturally going to stick to the letter of the law, not some nebulous "spirit".
Whose freedom of speech was infringed? The article remained on the BBC's website, and it is still retrievable in searches on Google.
Even convicted IRA terrorists are entitled to privacy, after they have served their time.
(Apart altogether from the right of any other person who happens to share a name with someone else who was convicted of a crime, and who would rather not see those links show up in response to a search for their name!)
> Whose freedom of speech was infringed?
The author's/BBC's. If it's not on a search engine, it does not exist. Pretending that you have freedom of speech because you're allowed to write stuff and store it where no one will ever see it, is disingenuous: the whole point of the law is to prevent (in this case) BBC from getting information out. The EU law is a direct and deliberate attack on freedom of speech, an explicit statement that your right to be forgotten trumps my freedom of speech.
"If it's not on a search engine, it does not exist."
Hardly a 100% accurate statement. It may be true of information on small sites and blogs etc, but if I want to find a story on the BBC news site or on El Reg I don't Google it I go to that website and use their own search feature.
@Vociferous: "I'd happily bet £10 that a significant portion, probably at least one third, of the traffic to any article on BBC comes via search engines."
I'd happily bet £100 that a lot less that 5% of the requests for that particular article were as a result of a search for the name of the particular name involved in that "right-to-be-forgotten" request, and that less that 0.1% of the traffic to the BBC website would be effected by "right-to-be-forgotten" requests - a degree of change that would easily occur any time Google tweaks its search algorithms, but it won't alert the BBC to those changes.
Of course, the BBC knows exactly how many requests were made for the particular in question, how many of them came from Google requests, and even what particular names were used in those requests (unless it has chosen to forget that information!). But that information won't be part of their argument, because it wouldn't support their case.
@Vociferous: "The author's/BBC's. If it's not on a search engine, it does not exist"
The article is still in the search engine.
Maybe you don't understand the way search engines work - there are lots of search terms that will return a link to a specific web-page or article. All of those search terms will continue to return links to that article, except the single search term that is the subject of a right to be forgotten request.
That single search term is a persons name. Is it really so unreasonable that a person should be entitled to some degree of control over how their name is used?
"conflicting with the Freedom of Speech."
Freedom of speech is restricted by law for good reason; society would be in deep trouble otherwise. Look at the USA for a bad example.
Law has to set some limits, and on the whole the balance struck in law has always been good. Internet search engines have changed that balance for the worse, so it was decided that law had to be altered to redress that. That's a good thing.
What I don't understand is why the BBC thinks that they are immune to the EU law. If they take on the roll of a search engine in place of Google, especially in a way intended to specifically highlight the content, then the legislators will cast their beady eye in the BBC's direction too. The right to privacy, even for discharged criminals, is a very big topic in Europe at the moment and the BBC's action is not going to do anything to reverse that. If anything it will achieve the opposite. They will also likely attract right-to-be-forgotten requests from the very same people who asked Google too. Are they going to ignore those? Are they going to risk a court case? Google hasn't risked that yet.
> What I don't understand is why the BBC thinks that they are immune to the EU law.
You seriously don't think that content creators like the BBC should be allowed to make lists of their own articles?
You may be on to something. There's no reason why the right to be forgotten should only be limited to search engines and content aggregators. Why shouldn't it apply to everyone, everywhere? Why shouldn't I be allowed to demand that a New York Times article I didn't like be redacted because I'd posted an intentionally dumb comment under my own name to it?
Right?
That is, as you suggest, a logical interpretation of this incredibly dumb and destructive law.
@Vociferous,
"You seriously don't think that content creators like the BBC should be allowed to make lists of their own articles?"
If those articles are demonstrably inappropriate for continued distribution, then yes they should remove or correct them.
Before the Internet people did bad things, they'd get caught, there'd be a load of publicity and perhaps a court case, they'd serve their time and years later it would all have been mostly forgotten and some normality would return to everybody's lives. A worse scenario - somone would be wrongly accused of something, and part of the redress was that it would never come to public conciousness again. In both scenarios the official record would remain.
With the Internet that doesn't happen, and that is a huge change in the balance of society. One supposes that the EU is seeking to restore the balance.
"Why shouldn't I be allowed to demand that a New York Times article I didn't like be redacted because I'd posted an intentionally dumb comment under my own name to it?"
The fuss surrounding the BBC's article would seem to be related to a comment that someone put below Robert Peston's blog post. If so then it opens up all sorts of questions.
For instance, if the BBC does not let a commentator delete a comment they later regret then are the BBC taking on the responsibility as publisher of the comment?
How about this one. If the BBC does let commentators delete comments but in this case the commentator could not do so (forgotten password, etc, etc) then who is responsible for the publication? Without a proper means for the BBC to establish whether a delete request comes from the original commentator, one might argue that the BBC is responsible for the continued publication of the comment. "Proper" probably means more than just a simple password recovery mechanism; it would have to be more resilient than that if the BBC were to be seeking to off-load the publication responsibility to the commentator.
The answer to your question is yes, you should be able to have your comment redacted from the New York Times website. If they don't let you do that then the New York Times should be bearing the responsbility for the comment, not you. Obviously that places a whole different emphasis on how people comment online, but I think that that is something that the website owners have to consider.
Is there a Better Way?
Here's another point: has the BBC thought of simply wiping out all comments for the blog post? If the comments are the problem then getting rid of them would presumably allow the blog post to be "restored" to search results.
This probably comes down to whether or not Google are being dumb about it in trying to make their point. I suspect that many requests to be forgotten might be better satisfied if there were some means for "the record" to be put right.
Google desparately do not want to be responsible for the web content they index and push as search results. But this whole episode shows that Google's denial of responsibility for content has no credibility. Afterall, we type words into Google's website, and words appear on the next page to be shown which is still in Google's website. Those words appear on Google's web page because of what Google has chosen to do, not through any action of the content provider. If someone has a perfectly good reason to dislike those words then Google cannot deny responsibility for having put those words up on their webpage; afterall, the URL contains "google.com".
Google and the other search engines could become the place where a request to alter the record is initiated and managed. Having been shown that a web page is now irrelevant, wrong, not in the public interest, etc. they could say to the content provider that their page will not be listed in search results unless changes are made.
Obviously that then requires the content provider and the search engines to have a formal relationship instead of the informal one that exists now (Google's indexing robot comes steaming into your website without so much as a please or thank you). But it would be a means by which pages could remain discoverable rather than the sledgehammer approach that Google have now brought upon themselves.
Google's indexing robot comes steaming into your website without so much as a please or thank you
Google makes requests to your published interface, and it's up to you whether or not to respond.
Additionally, it has already requested the robots.txt file, which is the more usual way to tel spiders to bog off if you don't want them indexing your site...
Vic.
I believe you are right but originally all the EU wanted to go after was Google and they added the other search engines to be "fair". I seem to have forgot that a bureaucracy just keeps growing and creating less freedoms/income for everyone while creating more power for themselves.
So we can look forward to the Beeb doing re-runs of Jimmy Savile radio and TV programmes as the public also has a "right to remember"?
Or is it just the now familiar, dumbed down BBC rolling over for its own and Google's interests?
Someone here recently mentioned the Beeb's top 10 on its news page being there because they're the most popular. I guess that person doesn't actually read them very carefully as, for ages, several of the "Top Ten" are always a random selection from ages ago. It's news, Jim, but not as we know it.
And I remember the day when the Radio 4 "PM" presenter first referred to the programme as the news "show". Sums up their take on news these days.
And then there's Rory Apple-with-little-bit-of-Facebook Cellan Jones, the "technology" correspondent.
It's a very different BBC from the days when it was good. Still surviving on an ill-deserved, increasingly historical reputation.
I guess that re-runs of the case that he has now been exposed will be fully indexed for a long time to come along with the fact that prior to his exposure he was very popular. Well popular among those who did not know the whole story, which appears to have been a large number of people.
At the time his right to have some things forgotten does appear to have trumped all other aspects of his life.
In retrospect I am not sure that was such a wonderful right for him to have. I suspect that his 'right to have some things forgotten' may now have been withdrawn.
Re: the Beeb doing re-runs of Jimmy Savile radio and TV programmes as the public also has a "right to remember"?
Also the BBC should be doing re-runs of Gary Glitter's Top of the Pops appearances!
Remember there is no court order preventing the media from playing Gary Glitter or showing his music, it is a self imposed censorship.
I raise Gary Glitter only because his music formed the backdrop to part of my adolescence ...
This seems rather fishy to me. The BBC exhibits blatant pro-EU bias while receiving millions from it in 'unspecified grants', and the EU demands subservient allegiance in return for its handouts. So why is the BBC apparently cocking a snook at the EU's latest puerile, ill-thought-out ramblings? Something does not add up. I wonder if the bosses know about this?
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