8 ms·

A list of search results omitted due to the “Right to be forgotten”

158 points by afaqurk 12y ago

maccard 12y ago
This page is almost 1MB downloaded, including 5 fonts, bootstrap, angular, and jquery. It does not need to be this complicated. My facebook homepage, including images, is smaller than this site.
kghose 12y ago
Let's face it, this is simply an attempt to make it harder for Google to operate in the EU. It's probably mainly normal bureaucratic nonsense, encouraged along by some nationalism and probably a bit from european corporations hoping to gain some market share away.
krick 12y ago
So the moral is simple: in the 21th century you have no right to be forgotten. Not sure if it's actually fine.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  The "right to be forgotten" is the "right" to suppress true speech by others, and is in fundamental opposition to the right of free speech. Its a close cousin of the forms of libel laws where truth is not a defense that suppress true and accurate criticism, and the recognition that you can't have that kind of thing and free speech at the same time isn't a 21st century observation. Its also, from a pragmatic standpoint, about equivalent to attempting to command the tides by law.
  - gaius 12y ago
    OMG they're stealing my rights!!! Except not really. Google, despite what many might like to think, is not an "official" entity, it's a private company. They aren't disseminating information for the public good, whatever that is, but so they can slap an ad on it and make some profits. So what if Jo(e) Bloggs did something embarrassing a decade ago? If one of your friends was constantly bringing up things from years ago, you'd get tired of them doing so pretty quickly. Why should Google get to do it to make some money off of it? And what sort of gossip monger even wants this to be possible?
    - nknighthb 12y ago
      You've just made a case for censoring all comedic works based on any real-life events. Was that your intention?
    - hyperpape 12y ago
      So the New York Times isn't a private company then? Just repeating "private company" is meaningless as a justification for well...just about anything. You'll have to find a different point to argue.
      - gaius 12y ago
        The NYT did the work and wrote the story and the editor decided it was worth publishing. The don't just dredge it up, slap an ad on it, and call that adding value. And if a newspaper gets something wrong, it does retract it.
  - DerpDerpDerp 12y ago
    There's a distinctly 21st century flavor to being able to store all the banal life mistakes indefinitely, to dig them up later if we ever need dirt on a particular person. Before it was varying levels of unprovable (ie, not photographs or verifiable sources) and bandwidth limited (people could only store so much information; sources weren't interlinked for quick queries). So it's actually quite likely that when we drafted our laws, this was an implicit right by the nature of technology, and considered a natural part of the bounds of specifically enumerated rights. We should make sure, as technology removes traditional limits on what we can do, that we adequately adjust our laws to reflect that change.
- x1798DE 12y ago
  I have to say, I often find myself at odds with taking a rights-based approach to this sort of thing first. It may not be possible to be forgotten on today's internet, and whether that's a good or a bad thing, it obviates the need to discuss whether you have a right to such a thing. (That said, having links posted on a website about forgotten links is probably way lower impact than having them show up on the first page of a google search for your name. I imagine that most people would be satisfied with this level of obfuscation of their past.)
itamarhaber 12y ago
LOL - so now google.com + hiddenfromgoogle.com == the entire internets!
- Torn 12y ago
  I wonder if google indexes hiddenfromgoogle, or if they'll exempt them
  - oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
    Indexed [1]. Even comes complete with the "Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe" message. [1] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ahiddenfromgoogle.com+Dougie+McDonald https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ahiddenfromgoogle.co...
chton 12y ago
This is going to unleash hell when it gets big enough to be near the top google search results. Not only will anybody googling somebody know what they did, they'll know the person wanted it removed. I wonder how long it will take for google to de-list the site.
- ISL 12y ago
  An interesting problem -- is Google forced by the EU ruling to de-list anything related to the de-listing of a page?
  - chton 12y ago
    This is going to lead to super- and hyper-injunction levels of stupid.
  - _delirium 12y ago
    Not simply for commenting on the de-listing, but if the page is republishing information that's considered a violation of privacy in the EU, it's still a violation of privacy. This would be clearest in the case of e.g. compromising pictures of high-school kids or other such non-public figures. If you started a site reposting those pictures after Google delists the original sites that published them, obviously your site would also be subject to delisting.
unhammer 12y ago
So now it's a "Right to a Streisand effect"
RexRollman 12y ago
Out of curiosity, how is Bing handling this same situation? It applies to them as well, correct?
- logicallee 12y ago
  They actually handle this really well! You can never find anything.
- Someone 12y ago
  I cannot find it on Microsoft.com or bing.com, but apparently, their position is: "We’re currently working on a special process for residents of the European Union to request blocks of specific privacy-related search results on Bing in response to searches on their names. Given the many questions that have been raised about how the recent ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union should be implemented, developing an appropriate system is taking us some time. We’ll be providing additional information about making requests soon." (http://microsoft-news.com/microsoft-is-still-working-on-right-to-be-forgotten-process-for-bing-users-in-the-uk/ http://microsoft-news.com/microsoft-is-still-working-on-righ...)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
hosay123 12y ago
Perhaps the list would be more representative if it included at least a few victims of sexual exploitation, or teenagers who previously had trouble getting naked images of themselves removed from servers hosted outside the EU. Ideally it would also include a link to every child porn web site on the IWF's blacklist, as used by at least the UK. The problem with simply listing known cases where the "censorship" mechanism has some inefficiencies is that it hides the many cases where it can have a very real benefit to peoples' lives. The current implementation of the EU ruling leaves a lot to be desired, but let's not challenge its intent - restoring an element of privacy and security that search engines have been strip mining for their own benefit for over a decade.
- EpicEng 12y ago
  I agree that most reporting on this are completely ignoring the upside. My mother was wrongfully accused of a crime nearly ten years ago. It took eight years of fighting the charges (going bankrupt in the process) before they were finally dropped. However, you can still find the charges as soon as you type her name into Google, and that's all it takes. She was a lawyer; now she can't get anything but the most menial work. I wish she could exercise her "right to be forgotten".
  - ars 12y ago
    The target is wrong. Your mother (and the other people in the EU) should be targeting the newspapers and other places that actually have the information. Not the search engine. A newspaper would probably refuse to remove the story altogether, but they might be willing to add a note saying the charges were dropped. There's a difference between removing false or misleading information (like in your case) and trying to hide your true history (like most of the EU cases I'm hearing about).
    - tspike 12y ago
      Unfortunately, if I'm trying to get an idea of the trustworthiness of a person, I'm probably just going to skim the search results and reject them as soon as I see something related to a crime. It's an imperfect filter, but dismissing someone who has done nothing wrong is less costly than trusting someone you shouldn't.
buzzkills 12y ago
The Stan O'Neil one is incorrect. Google spokes persons was on BBC Radio the other day and stated that it was one of the commenters on the article that requested the removal. Here I found a source: http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/07/04/google-takedown-requests/ http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/07/04/google-takedown-requ...
- joosters 12y ago
  I heard this too - this site needs to be careful that it isn't pushing false information. Could it viewed as defamatory, I wonder?
- DanBC 12y ago
  Thanks for mentioning this. You can find the article for almost any combination of relevant search terms, so long as you do not include the name of one particular commenter.
userbinator 12y ago
This reminds me that sometimes search results will have "results were removed from this page due to DMCA complaint, click here to view it" and then you can go through and see the whole list of URLs that were removed... and they're often the torrent/warez sites with the real pirated content, so it's almost like they added a "pirate mode" filter. (I don't pirate anything these days, so I don't need it, but still a little amusing that Google is basically taking the "removed from search results" rather literally.)
- leni536 12y ago
  Actually the DMCA complaint list is quite useful and I used it many times. However since duckduckgo is quite good and does not give a damn about these DMCA complaint lists I don't need to use google's DMCA lists anymore.
fragsworth 12y ago
So if this list is published, won't this have kind of a Streisand effect for people who request to be removed from Google search results?
known 12y ago
Netcraft Risk Rating is 10/10 http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://hiddenfromgoogle.com http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://hiddenfro...
- personZ 12y ago
  Because it's a brand new domain running on AWS.
known 12y ago
Google's search removal request URL 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...
x1798DE 12y ago
I imagine this won't be a popular opinion, but I don't see why it is necessary for this site to populate the list using javascript when server-side scripting would suffice. Maybe they're trying to fool search bots so their site won't get delisted? I'm fairly sure Google at least has a bot built on Chrome (or rather Chrome was built around their search bot) that executes JS just fine. Unfortunately, all it does is make a site that doesn't degrade well with scripting turned off.
givan 12y ago
Most of the things I see in the comments from the supporters of the law are selfish arguments, what if Joe couldn't delete his ugly story from the past, everyone wants this tool, maybe they want to remove something in the future about themselves, it might come in handy, they want it so badly that they are willing to sacrifice freedom of speech, maybe Joe should be more careful instead of trying to bury what he did to get away because Joe might become someone important and we should know things that otherwise will get buried.

158 points by afaqurk 12y ago

This page is almost 1MB downloaded, including 5 fonts, bootstrap, angular, and jquery. It does not need to be this complicated. My facebook homepage, including images, is smaller than this site.

kghose 12y ago

Let's face it, this is simply an attempt to make it harder for Google to operate in the EU. It's probably mainly normal bureaucratic nonsense, encouraged along by some nationalism and probably a bit from european corporations hoping to gain some market share away.

krick 12y ago

So the moral is simple: in the 21th century you have no right to be forgotten. Not sure if it's actually fine.

dragonwriter 12y ago
The "right to be forgotten" is the "right" to suppress true speech by others, and is in fundamental opposition to the right of free speech. Its a close cousin of the forms of libel laws where truth is not a defense that suppress true and accurate criticism, and the recognition that you can't have that kind of thing and free speech at the same time isn't a 21st century observation. Its also, from a pragmatic standpoint, about equivalent to attempting to command the tides by law.
- gaius 12y ago
  OMG they're stealing my rights!!! Except not really. Google, despite what many might like to think, is not an "official" entity, it's a private company. They aren't disseminating information for the public good, whatever that is, but so they can slap an ad on it and make some profits. So what if Jo(e) Bloggs did something embarrassing a decade ago? If one of your friends was constantly bringing up things from years ago, you'd get tired of them doing so pretty quickly. Why should Google get to do it to make some money off of it? And what sort of gossip monger even wants this to be possible?
  - nknighthb 12y ago
    You've just made a case for censoring all comedic works based on any real-life events. Was that your intention?
  - hyperpape 12y ago
    So the New York Times isn't a private company then? Just repeating "private company" is meaningless as a justification for well...just about anything. You'll have to find a different point to argue.
    - gaius 12y ago
      The NYT did the work and wrote the story and the editor decided it was worth publishing. The don't just dredge it up, slap an ad on it, and call that adding value. And if a newspaper gets something wrong, it does retract it.
- DerpDerpDerp 12y ago
  There's a distinctly 21st century flavor to being able to store all the banal life mistakes indefinitely, to dig them up later if we ever need dirt on a particular person. Before it was varying levels of unprovable (ie, not photographs or verifiable sources) and bandwidth limited (people could only store so much information; sources weren't interlinked for quick queries). So it's actually quite likely that when we drafted our laws, this was an implicit right by the nature of technology, and considered a natural part of the bounds of specifically enumerated rights. We should make sure, as technology removes traditional limits on what we can do, that we adequately adjust our laws to reflect that change.
x1798DE 12y ago
I have to say, I often find myself at odds with taking a rights-based approach to this sort of thing first. It may not be possible to be forgotten on today's internet, and whether that's a good or a bad thing, it obviates the need to discuss whether you have a right to such a thing. (That said, having links posted on a website about forgotten links is probably way lower impact than having them show up on the first page of a google search for your name. I imagine that most people would be satisfied with this level of obfuscation of their past.)

itamarhaber 12y ago

LOL - so now google.com + hiddenfromgoogle.com == the entire internets!

Torn 12y ago
I wonder if google indexes hiddenfromgoogle, or if they'll exempt them
- oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
  Indexed [1]. Even comes complete with the "Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe" message. [1] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ahiddenfromgoogle.com+Dougie+McDonald https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ahiddenfromgoogle.co...

chton 12y ago

This is going to unleash hell when it gets big enough to be near the top google search results. Not only will anybody googling somebody know what they did, they'll know the person wanted it removed. I wonder how long it will take for google to de-list the site.

ISL 12y ago
An interesting problem -- is Google forced by the EU ruling to de-list anything related to the de-listing of a page?
- chton 12y ago
  This is going to lead to super- and hyper-injunction levels of stupid.
- _delirium 12y ago
  Not simply for commenting on the de-listing, but if the page is republishing information that's considered a violation of privacy in the EU, it's still a violation of privacy. This would be clearest in the case of e.g. compromising pictures of high-school kids or other such non-public figures. If you started a site reposting those pictures after Google delists the original sites that published them, obviously your site would also be subject to delisting.

unhammer 12y ago

So now it's a "Right to a Streisand effect"

RexRollman 12y ago

Out of curiosity, how is Bing handling this same situation? It applies to them as well, correct?

logicallee 12y ago
They actually handle this really well! You can never find anything.
Someone 12y ago
I cannot find it on Microsoft.com or bing.com, but apparently, their position is: "We’re currently working on a special process for residents of the European Union to request blocks of specific privacy-related search results on Bing in response to searches on their names. Given the many questions that have been raised about how the recent ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union should be implemented, developing an appropriate system is taking us some time. We’ll be providing additional information about making requests soon." (http://microsoft-news.com/microsoft-is-still-working-on-right-to-be-forgotten-process-for-bing-users-in-the-uk/ http://microsoft-news.com/microsoft-is-still-working-on-righ...)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

hosay123 12y ago

Perhaps the list would be more representative if it included at least a few victims of sexual exploitation, or teenagers who previously had trouble getting naked images of themselves removed from servers hosted outside the EU. Ideally it would also include a link to every child porn web site on the IWF's blacklist, as used by at least the UK. The problem with simply listing known cases where the "censorship" mechanism has some inefficiencies is that it hides the many cases where it can have a very real benefit to peoples' lives. The current implementation of the EU ruling leaves a lot to be desired, but let's not challenge its intent - restoring an element of privacy and security that search engines have been strip mining for their own benefit for over a decade.

EpicEng 12y ago
I agree that most reporting on this are completely ignoring the upside. My mother was wrongfully accused of a crime nearly ten years ago. It took eight years of fighting the charges (going bankrupt in the process) before they were finally dropped. However, you can still find the charges as soon as you type her name into Google, and that's all it takes. She was a lawyer; now she can't get anything but the most menial work. I wish she could exercise her "right to be forgotten".
- ars 12y ago
  The target is wrong. Your mother (and the other people in the EU) should be targeting the newspapers and other places that actually have the information. Not the search engine. A newspaper would probably refuse to remove the story altogether, but they might be willing to add a note saying the charges were dropped. There's a difference between removing false or misleading information (like in your case) and trying to hide your true history (like most of the EU cases I'm hearing about).
  - tspike 12y ago
    Unfortunately, if I'm trying to get an idea of the trustworthiness of a person, I'm probably just going to skim the search results and reject them as soon as I see something related to a crime. It's an imperfect filter, but dismissing someone who has done nothing wrong is less costly than trusting someone you shouldn't.

buzzkills 12y ago

The Stan O'Neil one is incorrect. Google spokes persons was on BBC Radio the other day and stated that it was one of the commenters on the article that requested the removal. Here I found a source: http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/07/04/google-takedown-requests/ http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/07/04/google-takedown-requ...

joosters 12y ago
I heard this too - this site needs to be careful that it isn't pushing false information. Could it viewed as defamatory, I wonder?
DanBC 12y ago
Thanks for mentioning this. You can find the article for almost any combination of relevant search terms, so long as you do not include the name of one particular commenter.

userbinator 12y ago

This reminds me that sometimes search results will have "results were removed from this page due to DMCA complaint, click here to view it" and then you can go through and see the whole list of URLs that were removed... and they're often the torrent/warez sites with the real pirated content, so it's almost like they added a "pirate mode" filter. (I don't pirate anything these days, so I don't need it, but still a little amusing that Google is basically taking the "removed from search results" rather literally.)

leni536 12y ago
Actually the DMCA complaint list is quite useful and I used it many times. However since duckduckgo is quite good and does not give a damn about these DMCA complaint lists I don't need to use google's DMCA lists anymore.

fragsworth 12y ago

So if this list is published, won't this have kind of a Streisand effect for people who request to be removed from Google search results?

known 12y ago

Netcraft Risk Rating is 10/10 http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://hiddenfromgoogle.com http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://hiddenfro...

personZ 12y ago
Because it's a brand new domain running on AWS.

known 12y ago

Google's search removal request URL 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...

x1798DE 12y ago

I imagine this won't be a popular opinion, but I don't see why it is necessary for this site to populate the list using javascript when server-side scripting would suffice. Maybe they're trying to fool search bots so their site won't get delisted? I'm fairly sure Google at least has a bot built on Chrome (or rather Chrome was built around their search bot) that executes JS just fine. Unfortunately, all it does is make a site that doesn't degrade well with scripting turned off.

givan 12y ago

Most of the things I see in the comments from the supporters of the law are selfish arguments, what if Joe couldn't delete his ugly story from the past, everyone wants this tool, maybe they want to remove something in the future about themselves, it might come in handy, they want it so badly that they are willing to sacrifice freedom of speech, maybe Joe should be more careful instead of trying to bury what he did to get away because Joe might become someone important and we should know things that otherwise will get buried.