You’re conflating two different things as if they were the same. Transgressions by bureaucrats is of public interest. The private life of a second-rate actress isn’t (even though it might interest the public, which isn’t the same thing). The criminal record of someone might or might not be. Forbidding to publish the name of the actress’ current lover or even the record of the criminal doesn’t prevent medias from publishing what is actually of public interest and necessary for a free society. And a “free society” isn’t defined by whether or not you can know with whom I sleep.
Maybe so - but you have yet to demonstrate it. A person can walk by your house, take photos from a publicly accessible street. What is the tipping point where it should be permissible to limit speech? We certainly should limit speech in some cases - but they should be extremely rare. Google indexing publicly available information is not even close to one of them.
As an aside, this would not qualify as harassment as it would not fit the criteria for that crime.
And the final arbiter of what is and isn’t of public interest is whom?
I don’t see how suppressing information is helpful to a democracy. An informed public is the basis of governance. To say “people don’t need to know this; they should forget that” is the height of arrogance. It cripples open discussion. Instead of the people telling the state what is important, we will have the state telling the people what they should know, or not. That is not how a free society should operate.
If someone commits a deplorable act because of some piece of information, the solution is not to suppress the information. The solution is to punish the deplorable act.
Something that’s much more significantly unhelpful to democracy is trying to base it on the kind of naive ideological purity that sounds good in dorm-room discussions while ignoring real-world examples of its many unintended consequences, such as the examples in this thread that you either didn’t read or are willfully ignoring. Indeed it is this clinging to absolutist ideals of “free speech” that is currently undermining the very foundations of US democracy by putting political influence almost entirely in the hands of the wealthy, and is the very antithesis of an informed public.
If successful democracies and policies of good governance could be based on bumper-sticker slogans, it wouldn’t be so damn difficult to get it right.
It would be a mistake to assume that examples offered were ignored or unread, rather than simply being unpersuasive. There are things that the US gets wrong where other countries get right - free speech is not one of them.
Allow me to repeat myself.
This seems to cover all the situations mentioned in this thread.
Having the state suppress speech based on who is saying it is also antithetical to democracy.
I’ll also note that speech today is far cheaper today that it was in the past; both the cost to start communicating and the marginal cost per word. That means the wealthy can now communicate to the entire nation, when in the past that was unachievable at any price. But it also means the barrier to entry is low enough for almost anyone to communicate in the public forum.
Because of cheap communication, it far easier now to organize the public than in the past. I think this is invigorating our democracy. Yes, the wealthy have a large microphone, but the public at large has a multitudiness one.
We’re never going to agree on this because there are subjective value judgments involved, but I think it’s fairly objectively clear that you did not, in fact, counter the examples mentioned. The whole point of my post #71, for example, is that information disclosures can do harm without there necessarily being any guilty party on whom to pin blame or punishment, and without providing any counterbalancing societal benefit. And the point of post #78 is, as I highlighted there, that the public interest in favor of disclosure must outweigh legitimate privacy concerns – the exact words of the court ruling.
The idea of characterizing any kind of privacy regulation as “suppression of information by the state” is just abject nonsense and libertarian hyperbole. The state “suppresses information” all the time, and legitimately so: would you want your complete lifetime medical history to be out on the public record so that a pimply-faced twelve-year-old could Google it and share it with his classmates? How about if a potential employer or tomorrow night’s date could Google it? Or how about some run-in with the law that you might have had when your were twelve years old yourself, being on the public record and accessible to everyone? Anyone who’d be happy with having every detail of their whole life an open book on the Internet is probably not actually human.
Indeed the problem, as in the RIAA/MPAA travesties per post #78, control of the political process by the wealthy, and millions of other examples is that privacy regulation isn’t strong enough. And the supreme irony of lack of regulation is that secrecy is often allowed to exist where the public does have a right to know, yet privacy isn’t protected when the public doesn’t. A case in point – speaking of medical records – is this shady organization that makes money by selling all kinds of confidential medical information to all kinds of interested parties, but what they share and with whom is mostly shrouded in secrecy. And then of course we have the wonderful NSA. Welcome to a free and open society!
As I said, good governance is a complicated problem and damn hard to get right, and involves the establishment of carefully considered balance, not blind adherence to ideological prescriptivism.
This is getting outside the scope of this discussion and has been extensively dealt with in other threads, but the simple answer is that your assumption is prima facie wrong because a ruling plutocracy does exist, its political dominance became egregiously worse with the explosive growth of the information age, and its ability to increasingly dictate legislation in its own self-serving interests is manifest – one could write a book about it, as indeed many have.
I just want to demand that Google, the Straight Dope, and every other tech company delete this post and throw it down the memory hole, because wolfpup made an error in attributing that quote to me, and I never want my name to be associated with something that I didn’t say. Correct the record, says I, and Fie! Fie! on all those who would deny my simple request to re-write history!
(Yes, mods, I’m being facetious, and yeah, he accidentally quoted me, and no, I don’t actually care that much, and no, I didn’t report the post.)
Easy : independant courts, enforcing laws passed by an elected legislature in accordance with constitutional rights.
There has to be a limit to what can be published. Even the most liberal USA has defamation laws. You can’t print that I’m a convicted pedophile if I’m not. So you have to set a limit in any case and someone has to be the final arbiter. So, don’t act as if somehow you could avoid the issue (unless you’re arguing that you should be free to publish absolutely anything about absolutely anybody) and Europeans or whoever are at fault for thinking that such an arbitration can be made. It has to be made, and every single society make it.
But somehow, you think that this freedom to publish should be extremely extensive and that trying to limit it is an assault on freedom.
Unless you can demonstrate to my satisfaction that being able to publish the details of the sex life of random people, the criminal background of a citizen who has been law-abiding for the last 30 years, the birth name of a transexual, and so on, is necessary for a functional democracy, your opinion on the matter is at best arbitrary.
Most of the time, what is threatened by laws imposing the respect of privacy isn’t any kind of fundamental freedom, it’s the right to report and read juicy gossip. Which I would have no much qualm in curtailing.
My apologies, Ravenman. The quote should have been attributed to Odesio. Not sure how the mix-up happened; I think my response may have started out as a reply to multiple posters and then got edited and simplified, or something. My mind is a blur on the details of how I screwed up a simple quote, but it wasn’t intentional. 
“The state” isn’t some independant evil force looking down on people. “The state” is the embodiment of the collective will of the people.
And again, tell me how publishing with whom I sleep is important for a good governance.
Nope. What we will have is the people telling “the State” what they believe should be known, or not. “The state” then pass laws and enforce them according to the will of the people.
You think that the people want to be able to know anything. That’s probably true. But they also don’t want their sex life or past criminal record to be known by everybody. That’s undeniably true also.
Argue for whatever balance you want, but don’t pretend that limiting your access to your neighbor’s criminal record somehow threatens democracy, and is an act of tyranny. It’s intended to protect his right (and maybe someday your right) to live a peaceful life at the expense of your curiosity (judged unwarranted by society at large, not by some oppressive “state”).
And this help the victims of the deplorable act how, exactly?
An example of what you’re saying is the infamous outing of pedophiles (including a number of people who in fact weren’t) by a British paper. I certainly think that society (“the state”, for you) has an interest in preventing this and its obvious consequences.
Let’s assume that an underage boy is accused of having raped an underage girl. I happen to want to know every single prurient detail of the rape, along with the name, address and picture of both the victim and the defendant. Do you think that democracy is well served by giving me access to this information, and good governance is threatened by denying it?
Nicely said, clairobscur, thank you. It addresses the seemingly unique contemporary view among some in the US that the government – especially the federal government – is somehow The Enemy. I know sometimes it can seem that it is, but that’s not due to the nature of government, but to the nature of the political processes that have been allowed to fester with corruption and domination by the most powerful vested interests instead of the people.
It was not always so, and is not so elsewhere, at least not nearly to the same extent. In November of 1863, while the Civil War was still raging, a great National Cemetery was dedicated, and some guy named Edward Everett spoke for nearly two hours at the ceremony. Then some other guy spoke a mere ten sentences. The other guy’s name happened to be Abraham Lincoln, and he ended his brief dedication by saying: “It is rather for us here to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave their last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
I wonder what Lincoln would have thought of the contemporary view that this government was a thing to be feared, to be shunned, and to be beaten down to the point where – to quote the estimable Grover Norquist – it finally could be drowned in a bathtub.
We can use the dictionary definition of privacy, I don’t think it needs to go beyond that. Its information, true or not, that others wish to be limited in knowledge and/or accessibility. Like I said before, to me its mainly a matter of accessibility. Whether what is accessed is information or not matters less to me than the accessibility does. That’s why I’m not interested in getting sidetracked defining what privacy means. What do you want to make inaccessible? Your medical records, dating history, embarrassing Facebook posts, pictures of you on a public street? Why do you want to do that, balance that with the right of others to publish it, or to keep it easily accessible, and you have your debate.
For the record though, I’d rather keep things accessible, but I can understand the very legitimate reasons why someone would want something to be erased because it is doing them harm through no fault of their own. I’d rather the restriction be on the person or the media company doing the publishing than the search engine
No, there’s no such law. Whoever handed over such records might get in trouble but there’s no law imposing such burdens on the press.
Except the court ruling doesn’t say that you can’t publish that stuff. You still can. The court ruling says that that stuff, having been published and publicly aired, after some time has passed, be no longer available to easy access. So, publishing the information is still fine. It’s just that after you publish it, you can only let people see it for a little while.
Just to ask, is it at all possible for someone, like a victim’s family, to protest the “deindexing” to anyone?
Does the law forbid the keeping of databases and lists only with respect to identifying specific individuals, or does it also apply to aggregate data–e.g. the percentage of Algerian-descended residents in Monmartre?
There is such a law. Note I said unlawful, not criminal. The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 removed the defence of ‘truth’ from a defamation action where the media unreasonably transmits information about ‘spent’ convictions.
They can protest, but to whom. The way this is set up is placing the corporation in jeopardy of action which might cost them time or money. Google have been told that they must not unreasonably give easy access to information that people feel is private and thus unlawful. The court has provided no guidelines, merely said that Google has a duty of care to avoid this. Much like the requirement that they do not defame anyone- it is up to the media concerned to decide what is a risk of action and what is fair comment or otherwise protected up to the point where the person sues for libel. Similarly in this case, Google is required to not invade privacy, but case law will need to build up what is private.
I suspect that Google is being over careful in this matter for two reasons- 1/ to ensure that it is not brought before the courts, 2/ to bring the law into disrepute.
If we are talking of the Data Protection Act in England, that is only information that identifies individuals. Aggregate data is fine.