Not yet.
That is the “so what”. Not admitting that is simply being obtuse.
"Hey, if some one wanted to go on a mass killing spree they could go out and strangle people, so what’s the point of weapons regulations? "
According to the article linked in the OP, people can request to have links to articles removed on the grounds that the information is inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant. I asked earlier how we define inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant but I really didn’t get an answer. According to the same article the links to the following articles were removed:
[ul]
[li]A September 2010 article about multi-millionaire Tory MP Jonathan Djanogly, who admitted hiring private eyes to spy on his local party members.[/li][li] An article from 2008 about drunken University of Bristol student Alex Fiallos, who drove his Mini Cooper round the university campus like a scene from the Italian Job.[/li][li]A story about Scottish referee Dougie McDonald, who admitted lying to Celtic manager Neil Lennon about the awarding of a penalty in 2010.[/li][/ul]
Let’s pretend that I’m a researcher in the EU looking into the use of dirty tricks against party members, the impact alcohol has on campus life, or corruption in sports. Wouldn’t you agree that each of the above articles is relevant to my field of research? “But, Odesio, you magnificent Adonis!” I can hear you say “If you’re a researcher you’ll no doubt have access to all the news reports you could need without resorting to Google!” First, thank you for recognizing my Adonis like physique. But you’ve made my life as a researcher a little more difficult by preventing me from accessing this information without access to some database like LexisNexus. What if I’m just a regular guy doing some research into the above subjects for my on edification? You’ve made it a lot more difficult for me to learn anything.
So I hear apologist for the EU decision saying that it only prevents violations of privacy in cases where the identity of someone isn’t relevant. That appears to be untrue from where I’m sitting.
I agree Odesio that the ruling seems vague and ripe for abuse by unscrupulous individuals - if you consider me one of the apologists. This concept has to be hammered out better and I don’t blame Google for dragging their feet implementing it.
False analogy. Murder is inherently evil - research isn’t. In fact, I’d say that the desire to acquire knowledge is inherently good.
Sorry it’s not a false analogy. It’s correctly pointing out that ease of use makes a qualitative change.
Something is part of the public record if we decide it should be part of the public record.
There might be an interest in keeping public the trial itself (basically so that people can’t be sentenced secretly), but that the public should have right to know that someone was sentenced for something 30 years ago doesn’t seem obvious to me at all.
And similarly, maybe name changes are part of the public record here, or there, or even everywhere, but there’s no obvious reason why it should be. I’m not sure what fundamental right of yours is breached if you can’t find out that your neighbour John Smith was previously called Priscilla Turtledove.
So, I’ve no issue with access to either information being restricted (and I can see very good reasons to restrict it).
It is already unlawful in the UK for the press to repeat information about “spent” convictions after they become spent. I believe that is also the case in the USA with sealed court documents, juvenile crime and such.
It is the question of ready availability and the storage and transmission of information. In the case of spent convictions the original court reports and news stories survive in the libraries, but repeating such information after the date of the conviction expiring is unlawful.
Yes, we do.
I’m not totally convinced that it leads to "pretty big restriction of the public right to know, or that you need “pretty high standards”.
About 99,9999% of informations that could impact on privacy are of exactly zero interest for the public (“Clairobscur with his lover in a public park, picture on page 3”), about 99,99% of the rest has only a prurien interest (“semi-celebrity topless on a beach with her lover, photo on page 3”), about 99% of the rest is of very dubious interest (“politician running for congress has extra-marital affair. Photo on page 3”), and 90% of the rest, though having an interest, might conflict with other public interests (“convicted pedophile moved into our community, photo on page 3”).
So, I’m not really sure what “public right to know” we’re taking about, here. Public right to see semi-famous boobs? Whence come this “public right to know”? And to know what? I’m not sure what fundamental liberty is impacted by not allowing papers to publish my picture in the park without my consent and to detail my (supposed) sex life. I’m not sure what threat it constitutes for democracy.
So, it seems to me, given that extremely few privacy-impacting informations are actually of public interest, that it makes perfect sense to at the contrary protect privacy by default, unless there is an actual compelling interest not to, and let the courts decide on dubious cases.
In my opinion, informations that the public would actually need to have are in fact often shielded. “What’s the CIA is doing here, exactly? Oops, you don’t need to know. Secret. Terrorism.” While people are arguing for the rights of paparazzi to sell pictures of boobs to people magazines as if disputing it was an assault against democracy, when it’s only an assault against gratuitous curiosity.
That last sentence is simplistic in the extreme and fails to appreciate that a sufficient quantitative change in “technology or the delivery mechanism” can constitute a qualitative change in our entire social fabric. It reminds me of the equally simplistic and equally false assertion that if you haven’t done anything wrong, then you shouldn’t be worried about any level of government surveillance, warrantless searches, and the like, because, hey, what could possibly go wrong?
Here’s just a random example that comes to mind that illustrates some of these aspects of our information society in that respect. I may not have all the details exactly right and I may even have created a composite of several stories – it doesn’t matter, it all goes to illustrate the same points.
A few years ago, a Canadian woman traveling to the US to visit family was denied entry at the border. She was shocked to discover that the reason was that ten or fifteen years prior, she had attempted suicide, and the immigration officer exercised his power of discretion to deem her “a danger to herself and others”, and banned her from entry for life. Which, given all the subsequent circumstances of a successful and normal life was clearly ridiculous, but the story continues…
Outraged, the woman complained to local officials and the story was picked up by the media. The story gained even more traction when speculation arose about how US immigration could have gained access to her medical records, and the health minister got involved by making a public statement that health records were absolutely confidential, which spawned yet more stories about the incident.
It then appeared that when her family called 911 for help, the police were also dispatched along with medical responders, which under the circumstances is probably routine. There was presumably nothing for the police to do, but the procedure here is that the officer makes notes of every incident he is involved in, and some of these notes, at the discretion of the officer and/or various bureaucrats, may make their way into CPIC, the national police information database – another aspect of our Orwellian information society. And US immigration does have access to CPIC, and of course they also have access to the entire Internet via Google, and they use both. The information could have come from either one. It most certainly will come from Google now.
Now we begin to see how this kind of thing snowballs. It may be possible to appeal and expunge inappropriate information from formal records, but now the story itself is on the worldwide, uncontrolled ad hoc public record – a story that got legs mostly because of how ridiculous it was, but that nevertheless lays out for the entire world to see, and to pass judgment on, this one tragic incident in someone’s life. This is not something that will eventually be relegated to microfilm in some dusty newspaper archive library; this is something that will be available to anyone in perpetuity in a matter of microseconds – potential employers, potential mortgage lenders, potential landlords – anyone and everyone. And unless this person becomes famous for something else, it would likely be at the top of the Google results. And if I remembered the person’s name and mentioned it here, then that, too, would be dutifully indexed by Google – a story about a story about an incident that was itself about something that happened decades ago and is fundamentally no one’s business.
A story of someone being denied entry at the border because of a 15 year old suicide attempt seems to me to be one of enormous public interest: Why did this happen? What are the entry rules? How does the government know about this? Etc. Etc.
Should we expunge such a thing from the public databases so that nobody ever knows about it?
I think this decision is going to bite the EU in the ass at some point in the future. When powerful people begin to effectively censor the internet to prevent unflattering articles from being accessible I have no doubt we’ll see much gnashing of teeth. You’re creating a memory hole and I hope news organizations and others clog your court systems by challenging every request to have a link removed.
It is of current public interest, that’s why it’s a news story. But I was initially responding to this:
“… 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.”
I pointed out that it’s not “strange” at all, and it may not be okay to be able to access the information online, in perpetuity. That’s what this example – and there are any number of other real and hypothetical examples – was intended to illustrate. It’s not OK because of the personal harm that it can do. That’s what the issue of “privacy” is fundamentally about.
You’re engaging in an entirely circular argument – “it’s of great public interest to know how our information society can totally screw a person’s life, so let’s screw this person’s life as an object lesson by permanently recording the story on the Internet for all time, and let’s continue screwing this person’s life decades after all the rules have changed and the object lesson is completely irrelevant”.
It’s deeply ironic to me that so many of the supposed champions of individual freedom are prepared to throw individuals under the bus for some putative public good, and it’s largely left to European social liberals to argue for personal civil rights.
ETA: I’m not necessarily saying that this ruling is exactly correct in all its details, or that the implementation may not be challenging, but I do understand and support the principle.
Cases like the one in the OP (where European judges take it on themselves to decide what information the public is entitled to on the grounds of “privacy”) make me glad 1) not to live in Europe, and 2) worried about the future of an Internet where access and rules are increasingly determined by bureaucrats eager to punish the news media and keep their transgressions hidden.
And you’re engaging in sophistry and have failed to allayed any of the concerns I have about the right to be forgotten. It is in the public’s interest that court & government documents are easily accessible in perpetuity both in order to maintain transparency and for individuals to be able to do their own fact checking. It is in the public’s interest that the government not have the power to censor information that is available over the internet.
We have very different ideas about freedom of speech. For example, here in the United States we don’t tend to convict people for saying something grossly offensive on Facebook like you do in the United Kingdom.
The U.S. and the U.K. are kind of the outliers wrt free speech amongst free western societies, true.
Yes, we do, and about the very closely related issue of personal privacy. And while the US and some of Europe may be at opposite extremes, let me illustrate by example one major difference on matters of privacy between Canada, which is somewhere in the middle, and the US.
It seems to me that one striking difference is that Canada has as one of its signature pieces of legislation the Personal Information Privacy and Electronic Documents Act, while the US has as one of its signature pieces the DMCA.
And here is how this has been playing out recently.
Facebook agrees to address Privacy Commissioner’s concerns
Facebook has agreed to add significant new privacy safeguards and make other changes in response to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s recent investigation into the popular social networking site’s privacy policies and practices. The company’s decision to implement the Privacy Commissioner’s recommendations is a positive step towards bringing Facebook in line with the requirements of Canada’s privacy law.
Canadian music industry lawsuit dismissed on privacy grounds
“… motion was brought to compel the ISPs to conduct investigations to match the IP addresses to the relevant ISP customers and thus reveal their identities … the CRIA motion was denied by Mr. Justice von Finckenstein, who analyzed the request against a five-part test that must be met before third parties can be compelled to provide information to a litigant in a suit in which the third party is not involved.” Among the five-point tests that must be met was included “the public interest in favour of disclosure must outweigh legitimate privacy concerns”.
Meanwhile, south of the border…
12-Year-Old Sued for Music Downloading
The music industry has turned its big legal guns on Internet music-swappers — including a 12-year-old New York City girl who thought downloading songs was fun. Brianna LaHara said she was frightened to learn she was among the hundreds of people sued yesterday by giant music companies in federal courts around the country. “I got really scared. My stomach is all turning,” Brianna said last night at the city Housing Authority apartment where she lives with her mom and her 9-year-old brother.
RIAA Lawsuits Hit 71 Year Old Grandfather
RIAA lawsuits hit 35,000
The RIAA alone had managed to sue upwards of 35,000 people after their win against Napster, and when they had finally announced in late 2008 that they would stop filing lawsuits on a grand scale, they still reserved the right to sue particular offenders whom they deem to be the worst. In the meantime, the duo turned their attention to the Internet Service Providers, in an attempt to exert a measure of force on those companies to handle offenders by disallowing them internet access, a move which the European Union has declared something of a human rights violation.
Maybe. I think a lot of Americans who watched The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo were taken aback by the protagonists being sentenced to serve time in jail for defamation.
But maybe the public good achieved is more important than the hurdles you will have doing your research?
I have an actual example of that with French law. It forbids keeping databases (and even handwritten listings) mentioning ethnicity in almost all cases. This is an actual problem for researchers who would want to study, say, socio-economical differences between black and white in France. But who is to say that this limitation on researchers isn’t worth it? The historical origin of this law is the “Jewish files” kept at the time that were used for arrests during WWII, and currently and more pragmatically, preventing things like banks taking into account ethnicity or national origin to grant loans (a recent court case). Is it more important that researchers can research or that black people will get loans? The answer doesn’t seem obvious to me. Same with the scenario you’re presenting.