It does not. If you know the address from other sources, you can access it regardless of Google.
What’s to stop a small band of independent people from creating personal web sites with lists of stuff that Google (or others) are forbidden from displaying? Obviously, Google would be forbidden from listing such sites, but there would surely be tons of mention of it on discussion boards such as this.
This is information. You can’t cut if off, because people like to share, from pictures of kittens stuck in saxophones, to lists of forbidden documents.
I think it would take a court case and a judicial ruling to force Google to not index it. Or do the current rulings prevent indexing of any sites that link to the banned sites, and also prevent linking to those sites and also prevent linking to… etc.
They’d have to shut down the entire damned internet. What they’re trying to do is like Sisyphus trying to push an exponentially increasing number of boulders up an exponentially increasing number of hills.
I wouldn’t bet that the article is reporting the ruling correctly.
Who gets to decide that a country behaved badly? Any country can choose to put sanctions on another for any reason and try to enforce them via courts. China might decide to sanction Australia, for instance. And you say “mean things”, but those mean things might be something that have extremely obvious and direct adverses consequences on an individual.
You happen to like the sanctions on Iran and dislike the hiding of (IIRC) a sentence some criminal got, but it could be instead that some really horrible person wrote an horrible article about some saintly individual, ruining his life (let’s assume he’s been accused of child rape and cleared, but the old front page articles are still out there where his employer and neighbours can find them), while the USA might want to enforce sanctions on some totally innocent country in pursuit of some evil and nefarious geopolitical purpose. I’ not sure why in general sanctions would justify the use of such methods and individual rights issues wouldn’t.
And of course you can imagine many other situations : for instance the New-York case about Argentinian bonds I mentioned, which had severe consequences on Argentina even though it’s not guilty of any human rights violation. Or some country going after a company distributing child porn from Kazakstan, or any number of other scenarios.
Still, it’s enforced. And it would be even if the motivation was even more dubious. You can approve or dissaprove of the concept in general, but you can’t really say : I approve of it, except when it’s my ox that’s being gored (in this case : “I think the right to express my views is more important than the right to privacy”. Fine, but that’s just your opinion. Apparently several senior judges of the ECHR, presumably well aware of these kind of issues, think differently).
You can’t stop people from downloading pirated material, either. Doesn’t prevent courts from trying to enforce copyright laws. Preventing google and other major search engines from indexing it would severely limit the access to this information, since most people won’t search any deeper. In the same way barring a major international site from offering pirated content would limit piracy.
With the additional difference that you can deter piracy by occasional huge lawsuits against some poor schmoe who was careless about it. This has a chilling effect on many others who might be tempted.
But independent indexing of banned documents can’t be attacked that way. If my personal web site has a list of files that France doesn’t want anyone to see, France isn’t going to be able to sue me. (It would deter me from vacationing there…)
And, yeah, if I used a major ISP, they might sue them…but it’s possible for individuals to be their own ISPs, or to use small ISPs that don’t have an international presence.
Your mention of ISPs brings up an interesting point. If European countries can do this to Google, what’s to stop them (or countries elsewhere) from threatening large international ISPs in attempts to censor anything they please worldwide.
“We’ll fine your country X branch out of existence if you allow anyone anywhere to access any site that says nasty stuff about our dear leader.”
Except that any leaks of the list of “banned” links might draw more attention to the content then if it hadn’t been banned. People who wouldn’t have had any interest in it would then have both interest and access. So the attempt at censorship ends up being worse than useless.
Really? It’s exactly what Mr Shefet has said he’s seeking for relief. All you have to do it type is name into Google and… Oh, wait, I guess that doesn’t help very much.
In any case, Mr Shefet posted a page stating that his accuser (who says Mr Shefet lost his law license and had been charged by police in some fraud scheme) has psychiatric problems. Whether or not that’s true, does the accuser now have the right to make Mr Shefet’s web page disappear, too?
If someone criticizes NSA surveillance programs, would you make the same response? “Fine, that’s just, like, your opinion, but tons of judges say they are legal, so there!”
Judges are good at interpreting law, but they aren’t the moral arbiters of the quality of the law.
I went to Yahoo, typed in Daniel Shefet, and in the first few results found what they’re probably trying to censor. Currently if you Google his name you’ll get a bunch of news articles about the case, the ones I looked at don’t give the link, but a curious person can then do what I did and find it on Yahoo.
I think this exactly proves my point, and even if Yahoo removed the link, the controversy over the censorship can be as unfairly damning as the actual content in question. Not that I don’t have sympathy for Shefet, but it seems like what they’re trying to accomplish is hopeless.
I haven’t been following the details of the latest twists and turns in this developing saga, but I’ve tended to be in agreement with the general principles advanced by the ECHR and I quite disagree with some of the arguments being made here which I think are entirely missing the point.
One line of argument seems to be that since there are other ways of locating the information in question, the ruling imposed on Google (and potentially other indexers) is futile. This seems to me to be missing the point. What the ECHR appears to be addressing is the relatively recent phenomenon where the kind of information that has always been available in one form or another to anyone willing to look hard enough has suddenly become very quickly and very easily available to anyone, and that this in-your-face difference is a fundamental paradigm change.
It’s undeniably true that there is a fundamental qualitative difference between information that is known to some and perhaps recorded somewhere and information that is, in reality or in effect, front-page news, even if that front page is just one created by Google. The ECHR isn’t trying to purge the Internet of all instances of such information, it’s merely trying to counter this ominously powerful and pervasive effect of new technology where easily and casually found information could be unfairly harmful to an individual. The fact that the information is still there, somewhere, is not likely to be relevant to potential employers, landlords, or anyone else doing a casual search, nor do I think these people are going to be finding and scouring “banned lists” to see what they can come up with. If they’re that determined they may as well hire a private investigator, and that’s something that’s always been possible and not at all what the ECHR is addressing.
The other line of argument I have a problem with is one that tries to characterize this as some kind of slippery slope on the way to government censorship of the Internet. That’s just silly paranoia. There’s a vast difference between a court standing up for the cause of human rights and the spectre of tyrannical government censorship!
So the argument is that because speech is easier to transmit now, we should have less freedoms? That is a terrible thing, and I’m glad that anti-freedom movements apparently are stronger in the EU than in the United States because such an assault on basic human rights would never be tolerated here.
You guys are basically saying that it should be against the law for me to collect newspaper articles, published freely, and then provide a searchable index of what is in those newspaper articles. I assume services like EBSCOHost will also be outlawed in France?
What’s odd is that I believe most of these people wanting “privacy” are complaining about news articles that appeared initially in local papers. So the persons who actually would know who they are, and thus the only people they’re likely to care knows their “secret” are likely to have already known about it due to it appearing in the local paper. Likewise, it is the choice local papers make to keep articles available online forever, there is nothing stopping a local paper from killing links older than a certain age–in fact some do (and put them behind an archive paywall.) But the court has no problem with the original record, only the index.
I think we have to conclude the ruling could only be based on nonsense or is a politically motivated move targeted at a foreign company. Either way it’s an assault on basic human rights and should be denounced.
This is a better line of reasoning than I’ve seen before in the thread, but it’s still not very compelling to me. The internet has been around, in a functional form, for about two decades, and google has been around for more than 15 years. What we’re looking at isn’t a paradigm change; it’s the inexorable but slow progression of technology. The EU’s attempt to stop it reeks of Luddism and is doomed to either failure or censorship. I say this because we simply don’t know where technology is going to go in the future, and it’s possible that the EU’s ban is widely circumvented by extra-EU search engines. On the other hand, it’s also certainly possible that search becomes dominated by a few huge companies who choose to operate in Europe, and that banned information becomes exceedingly hard to find. I find it highly unlikely that EU’s rule is going to strike the perfect balance of difficulty, which is one reason I’m opposed to it.
I don’t particularly think that this will lead to increased censorship, but it’s s possibility I don’t think we can rule out. What the EU has done is say that information deemed by a judge to be irrelevant or outdated is subject to lessened free speech rights. That’s a substantial change from the past, and if extended to other media could meaningfully reduce freedom.
It is worth pointing out that this is not a ruling of the ECHR but of the ECJ.
The ECJ is mainly concerned with inter- governmental and trade issues and interpreting the various treaties that bind the various countries into the European Union.
It is not a ruling based specifically on human rights (either free speech or privacy) although this is a consideration, but on commerce and regulation.
The question is- Should a commercial body be permitted to process and analyse information in a way that harms the countries or citizens of Europe given their basic beliefs. Nothing in the ruling stop the media from holding this information for its own use, or from publishing it. It does claim to regulate the activities of private organisation.
So if I had technology that could download, index, and publicize every email you have ever sent and received in your life, business and personal, you would of course gladly defend my right to do this as a “basic human right”? :rolleyes:
If I had a device that could see straight through the walls of your house and monitor and record all your movements 24x7, you would define my right to do this as a “basic human right”?
I’m guessing you would not, just as I’m guessing that you are completely missing the point, as evidenced by your very odd concept of what a “human right” is. The point is that as new technologies become more potentially invasive and potentially harmful, they are radically changing the balance of privacy in society and the damage they can do to fundamental human rights, and so it becomes justified to place restrictions on those technologies to maintain the acceptable balance that a free society has come to expect. One that is, indeed, necessary in a free society, as opposed to some ideological libertarian one that regards absolute “free speech” as a sacred matter of holy Gospel, no matter what damage it does or what lies it promulgates.
How free is use of information in the USA? I remember in my misspent youth in California assisting with the collection of licence plates and individual identities of the drug squad of the local police forces. All this information was in the public domain. They closed down the Free Press newspaper that published the information. Would this be legal now or not?
You’re talking about things that aren’t publicly available information. It’s apples and oranges.
For the record, the page I found on Shefet isn’t a news article. I hesitate to say more or even post a link. I don’t want Straighdope to end up being removed from Google’s indexes. (I suppose my hesitancy says something about the chilling effect this has).
Well emails are generally considered private, so you’d have to obtain them by theft or some other illicit method. But you’d be free to publish a summary of all emails you sent to Martin Hyde, or of any emails you managed to collect from other people in correspondence with him. The only limitations on your actions is copyright, not privacy rights.
The distinction between private emails and actions is that actions are public information, and the idea that someone has a right to hide public actions is extremely foreign to most Americans. The “right to be forgotten” inherently implies a right to control what other people think–and that’s why the analogy doesn’t hold.
Likewise, about the camera? In fact, you could probably set up a powerful infrared camera on private property and train it on someone’s else, following their movements 24/7. Now, they’d be free to physically block the camera through some sort of obstruction, or to socially shame you into removing it, but it’s probably your right (they might be able to shut you down under “Intentional infliction of emotional distress” or some other newfangled tort, but that’s besides the point). The law doesn’t have to have a remedy for every single ill society suffers.
Oh, and if actual falsehoods are being spread online, we have libel law to take care of that. This is basically limited to true but embarrassing information.
Yes, thank you for correcting the mistake, and the original ruling back in May was also the ECJ (CJEU). In any case, I was commenting on the philosophy behind the May ruling, which according to this, was much as I described it: