No more than a publishing company’s decision about whether a fact is libellous.
Something done on a small scale vs. a mass scale changes the action fundamentally in many cases of privacy. On a small scale, a person can walk by your house and look at it and the homeowner can and should do nothing about that. There is no expectation of privacy for the outside of his house. However, if he were famous, and paparazzi, fans, and others hung around outside 24/7 snapping pictures and yapping, I can see a situation in which he has a legitimate claim to harassment, especially if all of that is directed by one person
What I think is that that ease of the internet making information so readily accessible creates a third status between public and private where people have some expectation of privacy, but not too much. I think that the line should be drawn, the debate is where, not that the line shouldn’t be drawn at all. I would say that your beliefs would be valid 50 years ago, but they failed to change with technology. Certainly if we invent teleportation, or the ability to open a portal to look at any spot on earth, we’d create new laws to limit that new freedom to make it more in line with our existing beliefs on privacy
Its still overwhelmingly positive, they are the exception
That’s hilariously naive. The U.K. applies laws to the telecommunications in their country. It doesn’t matter where the server is if it’s being broadcast through their territory.
Given your expanded stance, it seems Pjen was not off point at all. Israel demanding Google to fuzz up satellite imagery is clearly counter your Cyberspace Independence views. No?
Don’t we pretty much have to argue about the definition of privacy? Because what this ruling is about is the European Court ordering the concealing of true, factual information because it might embarrass somebody. It seems to me that this is a pretty big restriction of the public’s right to know and a free press and all that. It seems to me that if you’re going to set up something like this, where articles can be unindexed at the request of the subject, you have to set pretty high standards for that…if the information is libelous, or if it violates privacy or can be shown to cause actual, measurable harm. So we have to talk about what privacy is and how much privacy a person is reasonably able to expect.
I’m not a fan of British libel laws either. Once something is a matter of public record, like, say, a criminal conviction, there is no right to privacy.
I am no fan of British libel laws either but that is beside the point. All countries have libel laws.
And it is not what is at issue. Here it seems to be the privacy of people parallel to the case- innocent people who are accidentally associated. Should they have the right to privacy?
I think there should definitely be some limit to how newspapers behave when their actions can severely harm persons who are not guilty of any crime and really not guilty of any wrongdoing. There should be some privacy right there. I’m not a big fan of Google’s business model or the way it presents itself as an ethical company when it’s really not (I don’t believe companies should necessarily be super-ethical, but I like my companies honest about what they are.) Obviously I don’t think a police department should be making hiring decisions based on who someone’s father is.
But I also don’t think search engines should be required not to index published newspaper articles just because of whom they might reference. I feel if there is regulation it should be on the media level, not the search engine level. Search engines should be “dumb” in that they just grab what’s most relevant to search term. Privacy rights should be protected more “at the source” in my opinion, when protections are necessary.
Also in terms of things like “targeted lists” and “collecting information on persons”, that’s not really how the technology of search engines works.
Now, Google absolutely does collect information on individuals who use its services, in an anonymized form to better serve up advertising (Google is an advertising company, with most of it coming from their search ads, anything else they pretend to be represents either no real revenue for Google or even losing business propositions.) But the actual search engine algorithm and its results isn’t really a collection or storage of information on persons, at least not in terms of applying to the legal act you mention (and that I’ve briefly looked over.)
I think it’d be a complex technical legal question, but I think at least technologically search engines don’t really work that way. You can’t type “union rabble rousers” into Google and there is a dataset put together by Google with a list of names of persons who are union activists. You will instead get a lot of articles relating to labor relations, some of which will mention individuals by name. That’s not really the same as the type of “lists” you’re positing, because there is no repository of information like that at play in how the search engines work.
Is Google “forgetting” things only in countries where it is legally required to do so? If yes, then what’s to stop people in said country from plugging in a browser proxy and getting the information anyway?
How is a person’s name private? That is what he or she presents himself to the public as, regardless of any registration laws.
And if a newspaper wants to say that Jane Smith used to be married to Ted Bundy, serial killer, why would any free society prohibit that? The readers can make their own determination of what level of scorn should be heaped upon Jane, if any at all. I can’t fathom a society that portends to have freedom of the press try to restrict them in this way.
Personally, I think the root of the problem here has nothing to do with privacy rights or How the Internet is dealt with on a global scale, and everything to do with the fact that the British press tends heavily towards a general lack of ethical standards.
I’ll be damned if I know how to get a large number of British journalists to have any sort of code that values truth and actually makes decisions that weigh the utility of the press with the potential fallout from reporting, but let’s recognize the real bad guy in these situations, and it isn’t Google.
Seriously, it’s not even as difficult as that. Instead of using google.co.uk, just use google.com (it’s an option on the google.co.uk homepage), or just use Google which disables the redirects to localised versions completely.
It seems like the ruling is even stranger than that. Because you have the situation where it’s legal for the press to print the story, but then after some time has passed, it becomes illegal for Google to index the story. So this is bizarre.
It seems as though the law mainly restricts private citizens, while having no effect on institutions with extensive record-keeping capabilities - like newspapers. In fact, it prevents citizens from using alternate sources of information other than the UK press, and it prevents people from checking the veracity of facts published in the newspapers. I’m sure that the papers have written a lot of stuff they’d prefer be forgotten.
Okay. But you were the one who brought up libel not me.
My answer is no. And it’s strange to me that this only affects the internet. Why can’t a British subject demand that the local library redact articles from their newspaper archives if it’s got information which is embarrassing or no longer relevant? If it’s okay to access the information at an archive it’s okay to access online.
No, it isn’t. Because it’s precisely the ubiquity of the Internet and the unprecedented power of Internet + search engine that has given rise to these rulings in the first place. It is a qualitatively different and transformative power, and pointing out how some things in the past were similar in some ways isn’t meaningful. No, a modern computer isn’t just a fast version of a Boroughs hand-cranked mechanical calculator, and a jet plane isn’t just a fast version of a horse.
Not to start a pissing contest or a hijack, but the Israeli government certainly thinks so with, to the best of my knowledge, little criticism from the public.
FWIW, I do agree with your comment though.
I agree, but the principle is the same. Yes, I can find out more about Jane Smith by sitting at my computer than I could have by doing hours of research at the local library 30 years ago. Not to sound like a smart ass, but so what?
Either the information is truthful, non-private, and wanted by an interested public or it isn’t. Technology or the delivery mechanism isn’t relevant to that question.
There was an interesting article in the new issue of the New Yorker about the issue. The author wrote that fundamentally there is a cultural difference between Americans and Europeans that results in this different worldview. Americans tend to think that, when the two are in conflict, free speech is more important than privacy. Europeans believe the opposite. Those conflicting views are reflected in their laws.
I think the idea is to prevent casual browsers from easily finding the information. Determined searchers will always be able to find the information.
For example, a simple search by a prospective employer won’t bring up an “irrelevant” arrest record if there was never a conviction. Most people won’t go through the trouble of using a proxy, or going to the main site, just to see if they’re missing something.