Right to be forgotten? That’s not Google’s call – data MEP Albrecht

Eh...

The point is that Albrecht, and the EU ruling, are as silly as debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. None of the URL's Google "deletes" from searches is deleted for people doing their searches outside of the EU. In other words, only stupid people think there is a "right to be forgotten" on the Internet.

Re: WT Everlasting F???

And they still say TTIP is a good thing? With regulations like that???

Re: “Google’s right to have nice search results”.

But hard for them to do that when the EU keeps telling them to forget results.

Re: “Google’s right to have nice search results”.

> I'd prefer that Google produce meaninful, accurate and COMPLETE search results.

Therein lies the problem. Accurate, meaningful and complete are often mutually exclusive because politicians (and users actually) treat google as a database.

The problem is that google is actually an index. If someone mis-reports something, do you include it (for completeness of the index) or do you delete it (for accuracy) or do you delete it (I wasn't looking for that anyway) or do you keep it (I was looking for it).

As an example, I know of a school which had a case of child-abuse quite a few years ago. It was dealt with and the offender went to jail for a long time. The problem was that years later, anyone who googled the name of the school was presented, right at the top, with an old newspaper article on child-abuse at the school, which made it appear as if the issue was on-going . In this case, accurate, relevant and complete depend on your motive for searching. Not even google can work that out. You might be looking for the school address or office telephone number or term dates, or you might be researching child-abuse historical data. You might have the Chrome abomination which pushes all data to google and encourages you not to use URLs so that it can serve more search results. Regardless, if you searched on the name of the school, back came this newspaper article and it was a serious on-going issue for the school. In the end, the school changed its name. Not everyone can reasonably do that.

In this case, the right to be forgotten seems reasonable to me. Not all organisations are global. The fact that anyone in the US would get back the newspaper article is not a problem for all non-US organisations.

The problems come with the ability to manipulate search results being put in place. That puts way too much power in the hands of the rich and powerful who can afford to make filtering happen.

I'm not sure there is a good solution for this. The best I can come up with is something like the "chilling-effects" notices but instead of scrubbing the data completely, there is just a link with access to the full results. That moves things out of the way for casual searching of google.co.uk, google.de etc, but keeps the data available and visible for those who want to dig a bit deeper.

This seems to strike a decent balance. I really don't want to see more powers and laws. There are hard cases, but they make for abusable law. The last thing I want is to give politicians more power over the data we see. It does seem reasonable, however to age news-type articles in the index.

Careful what you wish for. If he offers, that's our taxes paying.

Of course the law is nonsense in the absence of a taxpayer-funded agency to arbitrate. Which is kind-of what I suspect he's saying, on the basis of a least-nonsensical reading of the article.