Can someone explain why the EU is pushing for right to be forgotten so hard? This type of legislation can only end badly.

Because European courts are no more tech-savvy, nor capable of reasoning about the consequences of their judgements, than American ones.

What are the specific parts of their reasoning about the consequences that you find fault with?

I'm actually quite impressed that they're not falling for the non-existent technological obstacles that have been put in place here to side-step the law, for a change the EU court actually seems to be on the ball.

Because "The right to be forgotten" is just doublespeak for censorship. Politicians are using it to hide an unsavory past. Businesses will use it to cover up past wrongdoings. I'm not just exaggerating, this is already happening now with the current implementation.

Of course it isn't. That right applies to any citizen, not just to politicians, and besides, the newspaper morgues are not so forgetful. Also, for 'public figures' the standards are different and they probably will be only very partially successful in this. The Streisand effect will nicely counteract any attempt to be 'forgotten' for those who are extra deserving of being remembered.

Streisand effect can only exist when the speech is free. When EU can ban any mention of a politician being embroiled in a juicy scandal 10 years ago, how would you disseminate this information? Only at great risk to yourself. This is not what should be happening in a free country, but apparently EU doesn't really need all the troubles of being free countries, their politicians are completely fine to deny their citizens the right of free speech. It's safer for them this way.

The EU can not ban any such mention, you are completely misrepresenting the intent and the actual use of these laws.

Free speech American Style is American, the EU is different, whether better or worse is not for me to decide but it is the law of the land and as such it should be respected by corporations operating there.

The EU is concerned with privacy here, you are concerned with censorship, those are not the same concepts and they are not addressed by the same mechanisms.

The fact that in some EU countries (ex) politicians hold large stakes in media conglomerates and can manipulate public opinion is a much bigger source for worry than that some politician embroiled in a juicy scandal would be able to wipe his trail completely. Especially newspapers will take a serious stance against that and it will simply not work.

and besides, the newspaper morgues are not so forgetful

So how can such a double standard possibly be justified? How can google be forced to delete things from the servers, but newspaper archives can't be forced to burn their material?

Newspaper archives do not vacuum up random facts about random citizens, they don't build mile-long profiles, they store articles about events that were considered news-worthy by some newsdesk. Automated collation of data and journalism are not even remotely similar processes.

What I find interesting is how everybody is focusing on Google here, when the real focus should be not on how this system could be abused but why it exists and who it could benefit. And that gives a completely different picture. But it's late here (3 am) and I'm off to bed.

I wonder how EU regulators are going to react when, for example, Russian regulators demand that Google remove all links to "inaccurate" (i.e. not Russian propaganda) stories about MH17, worldwide.

It's a fairly natural privacy issue. The EU DPD has some fairly clear rules about automated gathering of information about people, the rules under which you are required to honor requests for reports about that data, to update it if so required and to be deleted at the first request.

Google is side-stepping the reach of the EU by keeping the data on servers outside of the EU but this goes against the spirit of those laws, it is about the citizens not about where the data resides.

Thailand can just as easily say that laws banning criticism of the king are about the king, not where the data resides.

They could indeed. And if Google had a Thai presence (I don't know if they do) and plan on keeping it then they should probably comply. Pesky problem, nation states that claim they trump corporations.

Here's a partial list of removal requests Google has gotten from governments. Are you saying Google should remove all of this worldwide?

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/government...

Or maybe you think it should only honor requests from these countries, where it has an office?

http://www.google.com/about/company/facts/locations/

Those requests have nothing to do with the right to be forgotten under the DPD. Really, censorship and privacy are two totally different issues and the mixture here is not conducive to progress.

This is nonsense. Google isn't making policy decisions about censorship and privacy, nor should they be. Instead, they're assessing when it is and isn't legally risky / expensive to return search result X to a user in country Y. At that level, privacy requirements and censorship requirements are functionally identical.

Just because the EU's legal restrictions are grounded in privacy doesn't mean another jurisdiction's won't be grounded in censorship. Which is one thing if those restrictions apply to search results intended for that jurisdiction and quite another if those restrictions are applied worldwide.

You are still reasoning from Google's viewpoint. There are other viewpoints. Such as citizens of the EU, who have decided to empower the EU with laying down laws dictating what companies can do with their data. If google wishes to continue to operate in Europe then it will have to comply with the law of the land.

Whether that is functionally identical with censorship or not is another debate.

We can have that debate, but it will end in some gray area where a convicted criminal that has served his sentence should probably be able to clear his name in the search engines and where a politician that was caught in some scandal will not be able to do the same (because he was a public figure at the time).

Censorship requests can simply be stonewalled until the company is sued and then the judges can side with Google or the claimant on a case-by-case basis.

Pesky problem, civil liberties that apply to all people regardless of the whims of the government or the majority of its citizens. Free speech is guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Yes, keeping the information available where the EU's jurisdiction doesn't reach subverts the spirit of the EU's laws, but what alternative is there? By that standard, even delivering censored results to all EU IP addresses isn't enough - that's trivially circumvented with a VPN. And if the EU gets to have the spirit of their laws reach worldwide, then so does every other government.

But that way lies madness. Once Google is done censoring every search result that any government objects to (including results governments let their citizens object to), what will be left?

That's a very bad title. What the article states is that the EU would like those users that want to be forgotten to be forgotten from all google servers, not just from the servers in the EU. So it's not the EU pushing for the right to be forgotten to be extended to the citizens of all countries.

I've said this before, and I'm saying it again:

If EU courts and regulators want to give citizens the right to be forgotten, they should be doing away with restrictions on name changing.

Way before ordering a corporation to burn books.

they should be doing away with restrictions on name changing.

There are very few restrictions on changing your name in England. Is that not the case for the rest of Europe?

This is just the start of the inevitable slippery slope: the initial censorship doesn't work (and it never can, because information wants to be free), so they broaden, widen, deepen it. Then since it is still trivial to circumvent by technical means they add laws to try and restrict technical circumvention of the censorship. Then as loopholes are found in the laws against circumvention they have to broaden and deepen those. Soon it is illegal just to know things, to tell people basic knowledge of how to do things. And thus the only viable end point is totalitarianism. There's really no in between - if you want "free speech" at all you have to take all of it or none of it.

I disagree on a couple of points.

Information doesn't want anything. There may be a statistical tendency of information to propagate, but it seems to me that the only people who want information to want to be free are those advancing an agenda with a catchy slogan.

Further, the only viable endpoint is not totalitarianism-- one can argue about where on the spectrum we stand today, or might be in the future, but in the US we try to strike a balance. Unless you support being able to use whichever country's version of Google that permits things like searching for identity theft, illicit pornography, etc., it seems like we're OK with at least some restrictions on speech.

Assuming we accept the EU has the authority to pass such a law, then so long as Google wishes to operate within their jurisdiction, it seems fair that it abides by the law, vis., "deleting data as requested", not "make data inaccessible to those who cannot execute a second Google search on how to subvert the restrictions".

Why are there so many posts talking about censorship and none talking about privacy?

Because it's not a privacy issue. Privacy is the red herring. There's already ways to protect your privacy online. Additionally no one wants online privacy. People spend long hours making their facebook page

I understand that HN is on the side of absolute freedom of expression which entails that if anything has been public once, it has a right to stay to public till the dawn of times, so I hardly ever comment on these matters. I'm French, and I definitely do not agree with this opinion.

In 1978, the french government proposed to cross-reference (through digitalization) many of its databases (birth registry, healthcare, retirement fund, driver's license…). It encountered a very strong resistance from the public, mostly because of an news article in one the biggest newspaper (Le Monde) titled "SAFARI [the name of the project]: the hunt for french citizens" (la chasse aux français). Needless to say that such a system would have been a blessing for the German administration during WW2. It was 1978 and WW2 didn't seem that far away, either your generation or the one of your parents lived during the war. That's how France ended up with a law (Loi Informatique & Libertés) that regulates what one can do with databases storing personal information.

How's that related to the right to be forgotten? Bear with me.

This law (and up to minor differences, the EU directive on the matter), makes explicit what I consider to be a very smart and important idea: "purpose of data" (finalité des données). Basically, before you're authorized to store personal data (like email adresses, names, phone numbers, IP addresses[1]), you have to state what the purpose of this data is (to who and how is another matter, but that's not too difficult). Also, data should only be stored for a specific amount of time. This duration is determined by the purpose of the data. For example, if you have a database of all the people that used to be registered to your {nodejs,rails,lisp} newsletter but aren't anymore, you cannot keep that data for, say, 10 years. 10 years doesn't make sense given the purpose of your data. Note that if you anonymize the data, you're good to go. On the other hand, if you have medical data on cutting edge treatment of cancer, you may want to keep the data for 30 years if you need to contact a former patient when you discover longterm side-effect of your drug. And in this case, it's fine.

You may start to see where I'm going. We have basically the same idea in the right to be forgotten. Yes, it impedes freedom of speech as american people think of it. Sure. But, you know, in Europe, we have a different freedom of speech, which also traces back to WW2. I can't go around saying that I hate black people and that I'm a nazi. I'm gonna be fined/thrown in jail for doing that. And a vast majority of Europeans do agree with that. Basically restrictions are nothing that promotes hate/racism and libel (you can't say that somebody's a serial killer before he's convicted for example.)

And you may think I'm backwards, turning away from the blinding beauty of technology (right to be forgotten? that's not how the internet works!). Thinking that Freedom of speech as the US knows it is the way to go everywhere is universalism, pure and simple. So, please remember that countries and people have a history.

Yep, the internet doesn't work that way. And I am aware the I can host my server in some random third world country and get away with mostly whatever I host. Or I can use a tor hidden service. But that's not the point. 99% of these cases will be about data hosted by legitimate businesses, which have a name and address and that will be compelled to remove the data. In my opinion, the slope isn't that slippery. After all, you'd be hard pressed to consider EU countries as being way too censorshipy (?) — in general, not just when talking about Internet.

And yes, law will always be stupid when you pit it against technology. But unless you advocate total deregulation, it's a matter of how much idiocy you can accept.

Finally, a thought on jurisdiction: european judges consider that they have authority if the intended public is european. So yes, google.es, google.co.uk and such are subject to european law. Wether or not google.com is subject to EU law has not been tested in court (it probably has, but I can't remember any specific case), but even in this case, it would be perfectly acceptable (from the court standpoint) to alter google.com for EU IP addresses and leave it untouched for other addresses. So, no, nobody's gonna tread your freedom.

Ironically, I don't really have an opinion on Freedom of speech (US vs EU). But I find that the EU has struck a nice balance when it comes to that. Knowing that companies must destroy data that has my name attached to it when it's not relevant anymore is very appealing.

In the end, the US and the EU, in this case, disagree on principle, which are like axioms. You can't prove me that one is better (in the general framework of modern civilization, ie, let's say The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to keep it simple.)

[1] this one is tricky, but this comment is already long enough

Well it's not a question of which one is better (although I know where I side on that one), it's a question of whether or not the EU principles will be allowed to extend to servers operated out of the US.

   But, you know, in Europe, we have a different freedom of speech

I would say Europeans in general have a different understanding of freedom. In the US the concept is usually always you have "the freedom to..." whereas in Europe there is often something more like "the freedom from...". Yes, I realize that you can pretty much write every freedom so it becomes the other, but when you actually think about it and not try to nit pick that's pretty accurate.

In general I feel like in Europe there is not this holy grail of abolute freedom like in the US. It's often limited by personal rights, privacy etc. Americans don't seem to understand that this isn't just the EU on some kind of acid trip, but that Europeans simly have different values.

Censorship contradicts freedom. To me its that's simple.

I think your emphasis on the "purpose of data" is spot on, and I agree that it's very much needed in this age of "big data" when data collected for one purpose can be easily stored, crunched, and used for completely different purposes. The U.S. sorely needs a similar guideline, if not a hard law.

But this has nothing to do with free speech in general. The two issues are orthogonal to each other. They're not "basically the same idea". It's entirely possible for a country to regulate the direct collection, use, and distribution of personal information in one way, while regulating free speech in general in another way.

My phone company's collection of my personal information has little to do with free speech, it's a contractual obligation that they incur in exchange for getting my information. It's just like when Hertz rents me a car and tells me "you can only use this car for 7 days, you can't use it to drive for Uber, and you can't sublet it to other people." Hertz can charge me a hefty fee if I use the car in a way that they disallow. Similarly, I can sue my phone company for damanges (or have the government fine them) if they use my personal information in a way that I disallow. And if the law provides standard rules on what is allowed and what is not, well, that could be convenient for all of us.

On the other hand, if someone publishes embarrassing facts about me on their website without my permission, now that's a matter of free speech, and whether or not I can tell them to delete those posts should depend on how much actual impact those pieces of information are expected to have on my life and the lives of people around me, as well as the potential impact that a system of censorship might have on the general quality of public life in the country. It's probably a good idea to let citizens hide the list of sex toys they bought. It's probably not a good idea to let the President hide the list of bribes he took.

Since these judgments are cultural, reasonable people can disagree about them. In America, flying a Nazi flag doesn't count as a harmful thing, only a disgusting thing. In Germany, due to its unique history, it's considered a very harmful thing. But I don't think this shows any disagreement "on principle". Both agree that harmful speech is not protected; even in America, you can be punished for shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Different cultures simply have different ideas about what is harmful.

Again, this has nothing to do with the usual collection and use of personal information that your excellent "purpose of data" law is concerned with.