7 ms·

Google bows to EU privacy ruling

39 points by AJ72 12y ago

arrrg 12y ago
I don't know why, but this creeps me out. This seems like such a hard balance to get right and also too much of a burden for search engines. Also, there is potential for abuse.
- throwwit 12y ago
  It's already happening in one form or another with 'reputation management' and the DMCA... http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/02/site-plagiarizes-blog-posts-then-files-dmca-takedown-on-originals http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/02/site-plagiarizes-blog...
- danieldk 12y ago
  Sure, it is a hard balance to get right. But privacy is an important right and we should not throw it away because it creates some extra effort for a multi-billion dollar company. I also find it weak that Page plays the 'think of the startups' card. In fact, I think that since the Snowden leaks, there are far more opportunities to create privacy-aware or privacy-protecting services. E.g., I am pretty sure that Duckduckgo, a startup in search, benefitted tremendously from the recent attention to privacy issues.
  - marincounty 12y ago
    Duckduckgo is getting better each quarter. Whenever I type anything into a search engine; I now pause for a micro second, 1/8 of the time I access DDG.
  - Vik1ng 12y ago
    Also open data like OpenStreetMap will really help DuckDuckGo and other services to contest google in that market. Especiylly when that data is connected to Wikipedia & Wikidata then they can show similar snippets as google.
  - yuhong 12y ago
    It doesn't create extra effort just for the companies involved.
  - arrrg 12y ago
    I don’t really see what privacy has to do with it. Really. Privacy, to me, isn’t something that is timed. Either it’s ok to state something publicly or not, time shouldn’t matter in my opinion.
    - seren 12y ago
      Privacy is only very tangentially linked to what you say, this is also related to what you did, or even what happened to you in a passive way. Let's say that 20 years ago your family was murdered under your eyes by an axe-wielding maniac when you were 4 years old. Now as a potential employer, I type your name on Google and the first result is an article from 20 years ago. Maybe I am prejudiced but I wonder if you would be a pretty stable employee, and as a result, I bin your CV. This has nothing to do with being able to "state" something but this is really a privacy issue.
  - cbr 12y ago
    DuckDuckGo certainly has benefited from privacy becoming more salient, but this ruling is probably negative for them. Each of these removal requests needs manual review to keep people from requesting takedowns of other people's stuff. There are ~500M people eligible to request takedowns under the ruling, and if 1% of them ask for one link removed per year that's 14k requests per day. If each request takes 5min then you need 143 people working full time. Which high but doable for Google, but at ~20 employees this would be an enormous burden for DDG. These numbers could be higher if someone puts out a campaign that goes viral and gets lots of people submitting requests, and there's nothing that stops people outside the EU from submitting (invalid) requests. One thing in DDG's favor, however, is that that at first people are probably only going to send these requests to Google. Disclaimer: I work for Google, on open source software.
    - danieldk 12y ago
      There are ~500M people eligible to request takedowns under the ruling, and if 1% of them ask for one link removed per year that's 14k requests per day. If each request takes 5min then you need 143 people working full time. Which high but doable for Google, but at ~20 employees this would be an enormous burden for DDG. You are making a mistake in your math here, since a sizeable portion of that 500M people use Google, but probably only a fraction of a percent uses DDG. In other words, if DDG's usage is currently 1% that of Google (which would surprise me), that's 1.43 people. If you are a search company of 20 people, it seems reasonable to me to have at least a few people working on keeping your index clean.
      - cbr 12y ago
        For my privacy to be protected in this way it doesn't matter what search engine I use, it matters what search engine the people who are trying to look me up use. If I want a fact about me to not come up when people search for my name I would need to remove it from any search engine others might look in. This is a lower barrier than usage, but you're right that at least for now people probably won't bother submitting these to DDG. Unless someone makes a single form for submitting a removal request to all/most search engines? Though I guess then the search engines could pool together and do some kind of centralized processing of these requests?
  - mike_hearn 12y ago
    DuckDuckGo is primarily a Bing frontend, no? I seem to recall that they claim to be a real search engine and have their own crawler, but any time someone analyses their results deeply they're almost always identical to Bing. Given that Microsoft has a large EU presence and is presumably also affected by this law, perhaps they will have to start doing the same thing as Google. Which would then automatically feed through to DuckDuckGo. I don't believe there are any competitive startup search engines at the moment. However, this doesn't mean there would never be. Plus this ruling is so vague it's likely to impact all kinds of companies that are not startups: think specialised social networks, etc.
- Fuxy 12y ago
  It's also useless the content isn't removed it is just impossible to find in search engines. If You can make a decentralized search engine that indexes everything no exceptions you would still find it. Or you could make your own. It doesn't make it impossible to find just impossible for the average person.
  - blazespin 12y ago
    Which is really the idea. The law isn't about squelching free speech, it's just trying to keep this information from being so easily available. It's the right balance. I find it so incredibly hard to believe that so many people are falling for this "poor-us" google routine. I just shake my head in bewilderment every time I hear it.
    - ewillbefull 12y ago
      > The law isn't about squelching free speech, it's just trying to keep this information from being so easily available. You're just mincing words here. There are profound speech arguments to be made when someone is coerced or threatened for publishing _facts_. It is the same nanny-state crap that Europe invokes when it criminalizes offending people, and they have an army of people like you to jump on their bandwagon. The ruling is technologically illiterate. It fails to appreciate the growing ability for anyone to access and index public information as time goes on. It fails to appreciate its jurisdiction and effectiveness. It fails to make sound rational justification that separates the role of a newspaper from a news aggregator. Most important of all, it gives the government an enormously broad -- and practically limitless -- ability to remove the expression and dissemination of information based on purely subjective and even temporal characteristics. Europe's freedom of expression laws are a joke with endless carve-outs for "public stability" and "offense" which will only become increasingly useful tools to regulate and censor legitimate public discourse. Too bad for you, these laws won't work and when they fail it will be embarrassing. In the short term, enjoy the further rot of economic growth in the region due to compliance costs of this and other ridiculous judgments.
      - krbbltr 12y ago
- yuhong 12y ago
  Yea, are things like removing results from search engines really the right solution to the problem?
- rmc 12y ago
  There is a potential for abuse with everything.
globalpanic 12y ago
why does the link go to ft.com, rather than google.com (the domain listed after the link)
- jve 12y ago
  When you search Google and copy a link from results page, thats what you get. Links are going through google.com and redirected to the site. This is probably what author did. :/
  - camillomiller 12y ago
    This way you can skip the FT paywall, since it looks like you're coming from search or google news. It exploits the daily allowance of free articles shown to users coming from the search engine.
  - dang 12y ago
    It's a clever trick. Unfortunately, it breaks the referential integrity of the post. I don't think we can allow it as the submission url, for the same reason we don't allow link shorteners. People who are already posting links to Google searches in comments, though, might want to post these instead. For those reading this later, the submitted url was http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCoQqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F2%2Fb827b658-e708-11e3-88be-00144feabdc0.html&ei=mSOIU6bcOITvoASx54LgCA&usg=AFQjCNHUMgpLy_trccfJHij-yjxxqAo52Q&bvm=bv.67720277,d.cGU http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...
    - tomp 12y ago
      Quite a few of your comments about editorial decisions (changing URL, changing title) include a note about what the original was. I really like that, it helps people make sense of the conversation.
    - Tomdarkness 12y ago
      The only problem is now when you click on the submission link you can't view the article because you need a FT subscription. If you clicked the link that sends you via Google you can view the article due to the FT allowing limited free views via search engines.
tuukkah 12y ago
This is the actual form "Search removal request under European Data Protection law": https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_eudpa?product=websearch https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_eudpa?product=we...
andybak 12y ago
Will these take-downs at least make it to www.chillingeffects.org? I do hope so.
porcogordo 12y ago
This is great for google, they have the manpower to do it, creating barriers to entry for the potential future competition.
- rnnr 12y ago
  But.., but.., what about our rights??? /retard
blazespin 12y ago
Oh those poor search engines, making billions of dollars having to have the decency to let private individuals not have to have their lives opened up to casual searches on the internet 24/7. What a tragedy! I for one have NO DESIRE for my children to grow up in a world where they do not have control over information about themselves on the internet. I can only pray this sensible law makes it to North America. For those downvoting - are you a shill for Google? Try reading the form itself to appreciate how exceedingly reasonable it is: A recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union found that certain users can ask search engines to remove results for queries that include their name where those results are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed.” In implementing this decision, we will assess each individual request and attempt to balance the privacy rights of the individual with the public’s right to know and distribute information. When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information—for example, information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials.
- x0x0 12y ago
  You'll note this is the privacy that Eric Schmidt already enjoys, or at least believes he should enjoy, whether it's using lawyers to get one his many mistresses' blog yanked from the internet [1], or when he tried to get his political donations pulled from google search: Mr. Schmidt, Google’s outspoken chief who will be replaced by Mr. Page on Monday, has made public gaffes when speaking about privacy. Mr. Levy reveals that he has made gaffes inside the company, too. Mr. Schmidt asked that Google remove from the search engine information about a political donation he had made. Sheryl Sandberg, a Google executive who is now Facebook’s chief operating officer, told him that was unacceptable. [2] And of course, there is always his infamous suggestion that people should change their name when they turn eighteen, in part to avoid google reporting every dumb thing they did as a child. It's hard to say whether he's a sociopath or an entitled asshole, so I suggest compromise: he's an entitled sociopathic asshole. [1] http://gawker.com/5477611/googles-ceo-demanded-his-mistress-take-down-her-blog-source http://gawker.com/5477611/googles-ceo-demanded-his-mistress-... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/business/01author.html?_r=4&ref=technology& http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/business/01author.html?_r=...
cyphunk 12y ago
Larry's request at TED a few months back that we have more faith in corporations shows how much we have already lost to the hands of an increasingly commercial internet. When it is clear that there is no neutral party to trust any more (gov nor corp) balkanisation through enforcement of new laws is a needed and natural effect.
hellbreakslose 12y ago
Google bows... Misleading title by Financial Times that doesn't bow under laws eh? Funny how the media can manipulate the wording and judge someone. It's called LAW! You don't BOW to it, you OBEY. What would FT do in Google case? form an army and go fight against the EU?... Sick of reading articles like that. Its sad that the EU is voting those laws, but its not Google fault of trying to be a legal company...
k-mcgrady 12y ago
I actually have what I think is a valid reason to use this. Years ago I created a friendfeed account. I used their Twitter signup button. Now years later I would like to close my friendfeed account to remove that information from the internet. There's nothing particularly bad about it but it's old, useless and I would rather it was deleted. The problem is I can't login into my account as I authorised through Twitter and I've since deleted my Twitter account. I also can't get in touch with anyone at friendfeed since they've shutdown but left their site up. This ruling gives me a way to hide that friendfeed page from people. Unfortunately it will still be up but it's unlikely anyone will find it 'accidentally' if it isn't on Google.
- camus2 12y ago
  The ruling can be use for good and bad reasons.But I think it's important people can at least reach google in some special case,where a result from 10 year ago can be detrimental.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  I also agree that for reasons such as this (deleting an unwanted account) the ruling is useful. The real problem is demanding Google or other services like theirs to delete data that appears from other services, that Google has nothing to do with, other than indexing them. Of course you'd have to believe that once the data is gone from the parent host, it disappears from Google's cache, too, automatically. But just asking Google to get rid of it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and I think it unnecessarily punishes them, too. Think about the tens of millions of such requests they'd have to respond to every year in the future.
- mike_hearn 12y ago
  If it's really just irrelevant clutter why not ignore it and let Google decide how best to hide it? That's their job, right?
happyscrappy 12y ago
Only Europeans will have their data censored. Good for businesses hosting VPNs.

39 points by AJ72 12y ago

arrrg 12y ago

I don't know why, but this creeps me out. This seems like such a hard balance to get right and also too much of a burden for search engines. Also, there is potential for abuse.

throwwit 12y ago
It's already happening in one form or another with 'reputation management' and the DMCA... http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/02/site-plagiarizes-blog-posts-then-files-dmca-takedown-on-originals http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/02/site-plagiarizes-blog...
danieldk 12y ago
Sure, it is a hard balance to get right. But privacy is an important right and we should not throw it away because it creates some extra effort for a multi-billion dollar company. I also find it weak that Page plays the 'think of the startups' card. In fact, I think that since the Snowden leaks, there are far more opportunities to create privacy-aware or privacy-protecting services. E.g., I am pretty sure that Duckduckgo, a startup in search, benefitted tremendously from the recent attention to privacy issues.
- marincounty 12y ago
  Duckduckgo is getting better each quarter. Whenever I type anything into a search engine; I now pause for a micro second, 1/8 of the time I access DDG.
- Vik1ng 12y ago
  Also open data like OpenStreetMap will really help DuckDuckGo and other services to contest google in that market. Especiylly when that data is connected to Wikipedia & Wikidata then they can show similar snippets as google.
- yuhong 12y ago
  It doesn't create extra effort just for the companies involved.
- arrrg 12y ago
  I don’t really see what privacy has to do with it. Really. Privacy, to me, isn’t something that is timed. Either it’s ok to state something publicly or not, time shouldn’t matter in my opinion.
  - seren 12y ago
    Privacy is only very tangentially linked to what you say, this is also related to what you did, or even what happened to you in a passive way. Let's say that 20 years ago your family was murdered under your eyes by an axe-wielding maniac when you were 4 years old. Now as a potential employer, I type your name on Google and the first result is an article from 20 years ago. Maybe I am prejudiced but I wonder if you would be a pretty stable employee, and as a result, I bin your CV. This has nothing to do with being able to "state" something but this is really a privacy issue.
- cbr 12y ago
  DuckDuckGo certainly has benefited from privacy becoming more salient, but this ruling is probably negative for them. Each of these removal requests needs manual review to keep people from requesting takedowns of other people's stuff. There are ~500M people eligible to request takedowns under the ruling, and if 1% of them ask for one link removed per year that's 14k requests per day. If each request takes 5min then you need 143 people working full time. Which high but doable for Google, but at ~20 employees this would be an enormous burden for DDG. These numbers could be higher if someone puts out a campaign that goes viral and gets lots of people submitting requests, and there's nothing that stops people outside the EU from submitting (invalid) requests. One thing in DDG's favor, however, is that that at first people are probably only going to send these requests to Google. Disclaimer: I work for Google, on open source software.
  - danieldk 12y ago
    There are ~500M people eligible to request takedowns under the ruling, and if 1% of them ask for one link removed per year that's 14k requests per day. If each request takes 5min then you need 143 people working full time. Which high but doable for Google, but at ~20 employees this would be an enormous burden for DDG. You are making a mistake in your math here, since a sizeable portion of that 500M people use Google, but probably only a fraction of a percent uses DDG. In other words, if DDG's usage is currently 1% that of Google (which would surprise me), that's 1.43 people. If you are a search company of 20 people, it seems reasonable to me to have at least a few people working on keeping your index clean.
    - cbr 12y ago
      For my privacy to be protected in this way it doesn't matter what search engine I use, it matters what search engine the people who are trying to look me up use. If I want a fact about me to not come up when people search for my name I would need to remove it from any search engine others might look in. This is a lower barrier than usage, but you're right that at least for now people probably won't bother submitting these to DDG. Unless someone makes a single form for submitting a removal request to all/most search engines? Though I guess then the search engines could pool together and do some kind of centralized processing of these requests?
- mike_hearn 12y ago
  DuckDuckGo is primarily a Bing frontend, no? I seem to recall that they claim to be a real search engine and have their own crawler, but any time someone analyses their results deeply they're almost always identical to Bing. Given that Microsoft has a large EU presence and is presumably also affected by this law, perhaps they will have to start doing the same thing as Google. Which would then automatically feed through to DuckDuckGo. I don't believe there are any competitive startup search engines at the moment. However, this doesn't mean there would never be. Plus this ruling is so vague it's likely to impact all kinds of companies that are not startups: think specialised social networks, etc.
Fuxy 12y ago
It's also useless the content isn't removed it is just impossible to find in search engines. If You can make a decentralized search engine that indexes everything no exceptions you would still find it. Or you could make your own. It doesn't make it impossible to find just impossible for the average person.
- blazespin 12y ago
  Which is really the idea. The law isn't about squelching free speech, it's just trying to keep this information from being so easily available. It's the right balance. I find it so incredibly hard to believe that so many people are falling for this "poor-us" google routine. I just shake my head in bewilderment every time I hear it.
  - ewillbefull 12y ago
    > The law isn't about squelching free speech, it's just trying to keep this information from being so easily available. You're just mincing words here. There are profound speech arguments to be made when someone is coerced or threatened for publishing _facts_. It is the same nanny-state crap that Europe invokes when it criminalizes offending people, and they have an army of people like you to jump on their bandwagon. The ruling is technologically illiterate. It fails to appreciate the growing ability for anyone to access and index public information as time goes on. It fails to appreciate its jurisdiction and effectiveness. It fails to make sound rational justification that separates the role of a newspaper from a news aggregator. Most important of all, it gives the government an enormously broad -- and practically limitless -- ability to remove the expression and dissemination of information based on purely subjective and even temporal characteristics. Europe's freedom of expression laws are a joke with endless carve-outs for "public stability" and "offense" which will only become increasingly useful tools to regulate and censor legitimate public discourse. Too bad for you, these laws won't work and when they fail it will be embarrassing. In the short term, enjoy the further rot of economic growth in the region due to compliance costs of this and other ridiculous judgments.
    - krbbltr 12y ago
yuhong 12y ago
Yea, are things like removing results from search engines really the right solution to the problem?
rmc 12y ago
There is a potential for abuse with everything.

globalpanic 12y ago

why does the link go to ft.com, rather than google.com (the domain listed after the link)

jve 12y ago
When you search Google and copy a link from results page, thats what you get. Links are going through google.com and redirected to the site. This is probably what author did. :/
- camillomiller 12y ago
  This way you can skip the FT paywall, since it looks like you're coming from search or google news. It exploits the daily allowance of free articles shown to users coming from the search engine.
- dang 12y ago
  It's a clever trick. Unfortunately, it breaks the referential integrity of the post. I don't think we can allow it as the submission url, for the same reason we don't allow link shorteners. People who are already posting links to Google searches in comments, though, might want to post these instead. For those reading this later, the submitted url was http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCoQqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F2%2Fb827b658-e708-11e3-88be-00144feabdc0.html&ei=mSOIU6bcOITvoASx54LgCA&usg=AFQjCNHUMgpLy_trccfJHij-yjxxqAo52Q&bvm=bv.67720277,d.cGU http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...
  - tomp 12y ago
    Quite a few of your comments about editorial decisions (changing URL, changing title) include a note about what the original was. I really like that, it helps people make sense of the conversation.
  - Tomdarkness 12y ago
    The only problem is now when you click on the submission link you can't view the article because you need a FT subscription. If you clicked the link that sends you via Google you can view the article due to the FT allowing limited free views via search engines.

tuukkah 12y ago

This is the actual form "Search removal request under European Data Protection law": https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_eudpa?product=websearch https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_eudpa?product=we...

andybak 12y ago

Will these take-downs at least make it to www.chillingeffects.org? I do hope so.

porcogordo 12y ago

This is great for google, they have the manpower to do it, creating barriers to entry for the potential future competition.

rnnr 12y ago
But.., but.., what about our rights??? /retard

blazespin 12y ago

Oh those poor search engines, making billions of dollars having to have the decency to let private individuals not have to have their lives opened up to casual searches on the internet 24/7. What a tragedy! I for one have NO DESIRE for my children to grow up in a world where they do not have control over information about themselves on the internet. I can only pray this sensible law makes it to North America. For those downvoting - are you a shill for Google? Try reading the form itself to appreciate how exceedingly reasonable it is: A recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union found that certain users can ask search engines to remove results for queries that include their name where those results are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed.” In implementing this decision, we will assess each individual request and attempt to balance the privacy rights of the individual with the public’s right to know and distribute information. When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information—for example, information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials.

x0x0 12y ago
You'll note this is the privacy that Eric Schmidt already enjoys, or at least believes he should enjoy, whether it's using lawyers to get one his many mistresses' blog yanked from the internet [1], or when he tried to get his political donations pulled from google search: Mr. Schmidt, Google’s outspoken chief who will be replaced by Mr. Page on Monday, has made public gaffes when speaking about privacy. Mr. Levy reveals that he has made gaffes inside the company, too. Mr. Schmidt asked that Google remove from the search engine information about a political donation he had made. Sheryl Sandberg, a Google executive who is now Facebook’s chief operating officer, told him that was unacceptable. [2] And of course, there is always his infamous suggestion that people should change their name when they turn eighteen, in part to avoid google reporting every dumb thing they did as a child. It's hard to say whether he's a sociopath or an entitled asshole, so I suggest compromise: he's an entitled sociopathic asshole. [1] http://gawker.com/5477611/googles-ceo-demanded-his-mistress-take-down-her-blog-source http://gawker.com/5477611/googles-ceo-demanded-his-mistress-... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/business/01author.html?_r=4&ref=technology& http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/business/01author.html?_r=...

cyphunk 12y ago

Larry's request at TED a few months back that we have more faith in corporations shows how much we have already lost to the hands of an increasingly commercial internet. When it is clear that there is no neutral party to trust any more (gov nor corp) balkanisation through enforcement of new laws is a needed and natural effect.

hellbreakslose 12y ago

Google bows... Misleading title by Financial Times that doesn't bow under laws eh? Funny how the media can manipulate the wording and judge someone. It's called LAW! You don't BOW to it, you OBEY. What would FT do in Google case? form an army and go fight against the EU?... Sick of reading articles like that. Its sad that the EU is voting those laws, but its not Google fault of trying to be a legal company...

k-mcgrady 12y ago

I actually have what I think is a valid reason to use this. Years ago I created a friendfeed account. I used their Twitter signup button. Now years later I would like to close my friendfeed account to remove that information from the internet. There's nothing particularly bad about it but it's old, useless and I would rather it was deleted. The problem is I can't login into my account as I authorised through Twitter and I've since deleted my Twitter account. I also can't get in touch with anyone at friendfeed since they've shutdown but left their site up. This ruling gives me a way to hide that friendfeed page from people. Unfortunately it will still be up but it's unlikely anyone will find it 'accidentally' if it isn't on Google.

camus2 12y ago
The ruling can be use for good and bad reasons.But I think it's important people can at least reach google in some special case,where a result from 10 year ago can be detrimental.
higherpurpose 12y ago
I also agree that for reasons such as this (deleting an unwanted account) the ruling is useful. The real problem is demanding Google or other services like theirs to delete data that appears from other services, that Google has nothing to do with, other than indexing them. Of course you'd have to believe that once the data is gone from the parent host, it disappears from Google's cache, too, automatically. But just asking Google to get rid of it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and I think it unnecessarily punishes them, too. Think about the tens of millions of such requests they'd have to respond to every year in the future.
mike_hearn 12y ago
If it's really just irrelevant clutter why not ignore it and let Google decide how best to hide it? That's their job, right?

happyscrappy 12y ago

Only Europeans will have their data censored. Good for businesses hosting VPNs.