One of the problems that besets the USA from an outside point of view is slavish adherence to the market.
ALthough in design you have the most Free Press, most Democratic elections and Best Judicial system in the world, both are so affected by the market that you end up with the best press, Government and Legal system that money can buy. The rest of the world does not wish to follow that road, and chooses alternatives that limit the power of money.
The problem is the word ‘Business Model’.
The legislation in the UK is set up to stop corporations (or individuals) collecting information to give them more power over individuals. Every person has the right to demand of a data processor for a small sum of money, all the information saved on them in an automated retrieval system. This stops employers running open blacklists of people or collecting negative information about employees or customers to use against them.
Google has chosen to try to make money in a jurisdiction using a method which is controlled by privacy legislation. It is not a pillar of democracy but a money making corporation attempting to subvert the law.
Having written all of the above, I can see that Facebook is at severe risk under this law. Data Protection covers information collected but also information given voluntarily by individuals. I can see Facebook being forced to remove personal information from its system where the person regrets publishing it. Given the embarrassing nature of much young people’s postings and their later more conservative lives, I predict that Facebook will have to make that process very effective if it wishes to do business in Europe.
Nor is that libel in the UK!
Since the man was tried and convicted, I really don’t think that would be held to be something that should be hidden. This is actually an area where Google won’t even have to make a decision - convicted? That’s valid to keep on record.
It wouldn’t be libel under even the UK’s ridiculous libel laws.
Charged but not convicted might be different, however. At the moment you can seriously damage someone’s reputation for an indefinite period, worldwide, by accusing them of something that they are then tried for. Lots of people believe in “no smoke without fire.” The police, social services, etc, would still have access to that information, and the articles themselves would still exist, but they wouldn’t turn up on a simple Google search using the exonerated defendant’s name.
It would aso apply to victims who get named in the press. Like the underage teenage girl who went off with her teacher a few months back; it would be quite reasonable for her, in the future, to ask for her name to be disconnected from that story. The news articles (etc) would still exist, but if you Googled her name you woudn’t see them.
How that would actually be done is a technical matter that I have no clue about, however. I’m not even sure if it’s possible. Google seem to think it is, but how?
Look back on page one and you’ll see that what sparked my first post was Pjen’s breezy assertion that “We already accept that, for instance, convictions become spent and cannot be mentioned legally in news coverage after a certain amount of time.”
I requested a cite, and Chief Pedant figured it was the Act he linked to – with the big fine sub-headings on “Rehabilitated persons and spent convictions” and “Defamation”.
I think US Law and UK Law are closer on this point than you realise Publishing such information maliciously would be likely to be actionable in each jurisdiction. Publishing with cause would not be.
The difference is that storing the information in a retrievable manner is also illegal in the UK.
According to latest reports Google Germany has already set up a system to remove such stored information from Google searches.
Cite?
Pjen, meet Pjen. It seems like you have some catching up to do.
I’m not confusing privacy and accessibility, I’m suggesting something more subtle. I’m suggesting that the ability to access a new and unprecedentedly vast volume of almost unlimited information using a search tool of unprecedented and growing sophistication is so different from anything that has ever been possible before that it’s qualitatively something entirely new. And, as such, that it may not be unreasonable to impose unprecedented new safeguards on it.
You can look at the individual items retrieved and argue that they were all “public” information anyway, but I will argue that the sum total of all of them, brought together in seconds by a search engine open to anyone, is greater than the whole. Hence my use of the term “paradigm shift”. A sort of analogy would be the data mining done by rewards miles companies, which generates entirely new and hitherto unavailable information from patterns of behavior. I agree with your suggestion for securing privacy, but I ask whether, in these circumstances, that is sufficient.
European Law is an Ass if Internet = newspaper. Is it?
What the flying fuck does that have to do with privacy laws?
Why don’t you ask Pjen?
Adrian Bayley had proven by his own actions that if he was released, he would rape again. The previous judges have proven by their own actions that they will let a serial rapist out of prison despite clear evidence that he would rape again. Making it illegal to disclose these patterns of behaviour makes it more likely that they would continue, because public awareness of the fact that judicial negligence has enabled these crimes makes it less likely for a judge to get away with such negligence in the future.
You do know that jurors aren’t allowed to Google defendants, right?
With a Huxley-Orwell connection, this reminded me of my own view: As much as I agree with the European sentiment, it seems too late: Pandora’s box has been opened and we enter a Strange New World. Perhaps a future generation will re-attain privacy, but it’s too late for Generation Z. And what about Facebook’s data? The NSA is doubtlessly mining Facebook data; what about other entities?
Then how do you suggest a search engine be developed and supported with the infrastructure necessary to operate it? The people who do the work deserve to be paid for it. It costs money to run server farms. Certainly, at the outset Google could have positioned itself as a premium pay service, and thus avoided the need for jumping into the sordid pool of marketing and advertising. We wouldn’t be having this discussion now, not only because their wouldn’t be privacy law conflicts, but even more so because the whole WWW would not be nearly the thing that it did in fact become.
One of the costs of doing business in any jurisdiction is the necessity to meet the costs of complying with the laws in that jurisdiction. Europe has a law that says that personal information can only be stored and transmitted by an automated retrieval system if the data controller has a legal right to do that. Google is making money by controlling data, storing it in a retrieval system and providing it to third parties. The only reason it has to do that is making money for Google Corporation through advertising. Unfortunately for Google, ‘making money’ is not one of the defenses to illegally collecting data.
It was Google’s choice to try to make money by controlling data in Europe. If it wished to do so it must comply with the relevant take-down legislation. That is a cost to it of doing business in Europe.
Even under that model it would still be acting outside the law.
Is that with regard to the entire operation, or just legal takedown orders, if not obeyed?
It is illegal in Europe to collect personal data unless it is authorised. Authorisation requires meeting certain standards- necessity to service a client/employee list, crime detection, academic research etc. Being a money making corporation hoping to profit in some manner from the random or organised collection, storage and transmission of personal data is not one of these standards.
To make sure we’re on the same page here, your definition of personal data does include anonymous profiling or pattern recognition based on search and click history, is that correct? If so, does this also mean that Amazon and Netflix recommendations are illegal? At least I assume they would be, since I’m at a loss to understand how that functionality could work without some kind of tracking.
Or could that be construed as servicing a client list, and therefore permissible?