This Remainer's jaded heart grows a little warmer to note that European Union news is still reported from London. Thank you for that small joy...
Harvey Weinstein wants the 'right to be forgotten' law for the US! Along with Bill Cosby, OJ Simpson, etc!
Very good decision for Americans .
Read the 3 articles in the French press.
https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2019/09/24/le-droit-a-l-oubli-ne-s-applique-pas-au-monde-entier-tranche-la-justice-europeenne_6012818_4408996.html
1
google doesn't do anything about fake reviews lol. like there gonna do anything for anybodys best interests. lol. hilarious.
Google is the devil, using us all. What they do should be illegal. This ruling is a setback we must overcome.
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@Joe,
Exactly what does Google do that's "illegal." Ranting is not commenting - it's just ranting.
5
This is good news---especially since the Church of Scientology has been quietly removing negative articles about them.
3
I was going to mock the EU for not getting their citizens hired because of "holes in the resume", but after seeing my government consumed with "hearings" that center on non-illegal acts supposedly committed by a Supreme Court nominee when he was a kid, I want to take that power away from the partisan political HATERS.
We give organizations the right to recover via bankruptcy after seven years, but let tiny "gotcha" phrases be blunt instruments by our enemies for life.
1
A Right to be Forgotten is what all people who bad things want.
And who will decide what information meets the criteria for deletion? This law sets up a huge governmental bureaucracy, hidden from view and not accountable to anyone, with people who will review the millions of statements on the internet where people want information deleted.
It is government control at its worst. It is a horrible science fiction film.
2
& who decides "what's no longer relevant or not in the public interest"? Just yesterday the NYT ran an article about the perpetrator of a stabbing who successfully got a legitimate news article about his crime taken down & the journalist fired.
This law is ridiculous & ripe for abuse. To me, that's just the tip of the information/crime iceberg this law will effectively block the general public knowing about.
2
As usual about Europe, this articles is not well informed and does not explain the circumstances of that decision.
Computer and Communications Industry Association – the US lobbying group representing all US tech firms in Europe has pushed the decision by levering other legal bargaining powers.
You can read here in the comments all the American nationalists rejoice but the European law still protects Europeans in Europe and in some cases can legally obligate the US (or other firms but they are mostly American ) to remove or put in chronological order some of the private data.
For those who can read French read Le Monde for a much deeper analysis of the causality involved . With 3 articles.
https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2019/09/24/le-droit-a-l-oubli-ne-s-applique-pas-au-monde-entier-tranche-la-justice-europeenne_6012818_4408996.html
"European Court of Justice ruled that the privacy rule cannot be applied outside the European Union"
Um, isn't that kind of, ya know...obvious?
3
Commenter are missing the context of the problem of privacy data.
Typical uneducated American attitude .
It is a money and privacy problem not justice.
Another string from Americans to alienate the world : worst polluters, twice the energy consumption of Europeans per capita, pesticides and fertilyzers, and plastic everywhere in the oceans and the food chain and our blood, etc...
US firms cheating, invading Europe not paying any taxes, stealing private data and abusing citizens rights .
1
@JPH,
We're not perfect on this side of the Pond. I, for one, never made any claim to having all the answers to the US's problems, let alone the world's. But, we do have one good saying: "People in glass houses should not throw stones."
That said, you apparently haven't been to Asian countries or any of the old Soviet Republics with their massive pollution problems that, in many cases, are festering with no solution or action in sight. Makes the USA look like a pristine nature preserve.
Also, I seem to recall a significant number of EU and UK banks doing their own version of "cheating," not to mention Royal Dutch Shell and BP less than spectacular environmental records.
Maybe you can help this ignorant American - when were the Netherlands or UK admitted to the US Union?
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Would this law require, for example, Twitter to remove all posts (since the beginning of time) I made as well as all posts mentioning me? Where is the line drawn? Is there a line?
1
Here you can read the philosophy of Americans.
No wonder they consume twice the energy per capita than a European, twice the carbon foot print, pollute the world with their pesticides and fertilizers , have put plastic everywhere in oceans, the food chain and the blood of our children, they don't recycle (only 7 % ) , sell their fast food, soda sugar drinks and OGM all over the world and have 8 times more violent crime per capita than in Europe.
Then they put all their tech firms in Europe and invade the markets while cheating and paying no taxes while steal private data to sell it to 3rd parties without our consent .
And we gave them Inependance and paid for it !
@JPH,
You're being repetitious.
Yes, we understand that all Americans are bad and Europeans are all good. All American businesses are bad; all European businesses are good.
If you don't want our tech firms in your neck of the woods, your governments - you know, the local European governments with European bureaucrats and politicians running them, all elected or selected from European citizens - can simply strangle them with regulations or tax them into oblivion.
In the end, I'm not sure what you're complaining about - at least you have a "right to forget" law in place over there. Here, we do not. you have more privacy rights over there than we do over here. And, this ruling reinforced those protections. So, at a loss as to what you may be complaining about.
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We need to get over the privacy hysteria. There is no right to suppress truthful information or expressions of opinion. Criminals, including juvenile offenders, should not have the power to suppress information about their crimes.
If the information is false, defamation laws (already unnecessarily slanted in favor of plaintiffs in many countries) provide adequate recourse.
5
The idea of Google as a “quasi-judicial entity” is a bit disconcerting (and it appears that Google itself would prefer not to do this task). It is also inevitable whenever you try to regulate content on the internet.
For those who don’t like it, what is the alternative on deciding who gets to see what on the internet? A bureaucratic office in Brussels? Chinese censors? The Trump administration?
As disturbing it is to see private companies turning into quasi-governmental agencies, it’s even more disturbing to realize that’s probably the best alternative we have.
Once we have laws deciding who is allowed to see what on the internet, this is the inevitable result.
@Scott Pathetic ! Private companies governing are the best alternative we have ?
The so-called "right to be forgotten" is a very bad idea. Balancing this supposed right against the much more important right to information and free expression is surely a nightmare for Google or anyone else who tries to do it. How do you define irrelevant information? Irrelevant to whom? Whoever posted the information in the first place must have thought it was relevant to someone. If the information is false and malicious, then let the parties sort it out in court.
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History will wonder at a time when governments were limited to their jurisdictions while private companies were not.
This creates perverse incentives to locate servers outside jurisdictions. But ironically, the EU privacy laws increase the value of information about EU citizens and give the advantage to operators working in secret. To avoid a bit of extra work, Google just gave them legal cover.
Google built a boatload of goodwill from offering a free, groundbreaking, and essential service without a plague of advertising. Now we can't do without it, and it strives only to avoid stimulating a rebellion. Googles behavior is determined by the internal competition of its top management, who outdo each other to increase its power and reach and make a name for themselves.
Unfortunately, China and Russia are leading the charge of the world into pervasive surveillance and propaganda. They are doubly protected. As nations, they are protected from outsiders on their own soil; with their massive companies and technical abilities, they operate freely on ours.
Our dystopian fantasies are coming true, one legal ruling at a time.
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The right to be forgotten and the Internet are not compatible - any ruling / law will be messy as the kinks are worked out, but it would be nice if the US would try to develop something fair that does not interfere with freedom of the press.
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The US tech firms must have lobbied the European court surroundings to influence it . US companies have lawyers and lobbyists everywhere in all stages of the European commission to push and draw to sell their agriculture, their pesticides and fertilizers, their military warfare, their communication and internet businesses . Protect their fiscal fraud.
Not everybody thinks the same in the European administrations.
There are progressives tendencies like France , Portugal and Spain and Northern Europe , but also conservative forces like Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, the UK ( still in the EU ) , Germany, Ireland, who are heavily manipulated by the USA and capitalist lobbies .
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@JPH
What does anything that you wrote have to do with the right to be forgotten or with forcing that “right” on non European corporations?
1
I haven't been able to find the decision online yet, so I'll ask The Times: Will this permit any EU company to completely evade the right to be forgotten by simply setting up one server somewhere else?
If not, how? If so, doesn't the decision wipe out the right to be forgotten in the EU, too?
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@Bill Camarda
The law still forbids the transmission of personal information outside the EU without explicit consent.
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@we Tp
I presume if someone in the EU consensually provides personal information to a company outside the EU, say when buying something online, then that information is not subject to EU law?
@we Tp Thank you - that's very helpful.
So companies, unlike people, can actually be in several places at once, legally. This court ruling is further proof of how absurd past SCOTUS rulings based on 'corporations are people' actually are. A corporation like Google can claim anything about you or me in countries A through N, but something different in EU countries as though both were true and correct, even if those claims conflict. "Fair is foul and foul is fair."
People in contrast can only legally be in one jurisdiction at a time even if subject to multiple sets of laws. If you testify that 'A is A' in London, that can be cited against you next week when you claim in New York that 'A is B'.
The fact that something is unregulated in the USA but regulated in the European Union does not mean that absence of regulation here is equivalent to regulation there. The failure of this decision to protect European Union citizens from information stored beyond the EU serves to mostly nullify a reasonable privacy regulation. On the Internet we are all citizens of the world in fact. Failure of courts to recognize what that means amounts to a false claim of jurisdiction from the world into countries that choose to regulate Internet information. If Google makes false information from offshore available to EU searchers as part of its EU business, it is violating EU law.
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@Speakin4Myself I think China, Cuba, Russia, et al would love that argument---using existing local laws to force international bodies to delete ALL negative information.
I've written to a number of companies that have information on me and asked for them to delete that information. Which they did. Unfortunately, if you do anything, like buy a house, car, etc it all comes back again, so you have to contact everyone again and make the request. Google has removed my info, too. But, how many companies out there have your information? That's the scary part. I was married before, about 40 yrs ago, and when my ex passed away recently the collection companies sought me out to pay the bills. I didn't respond, but they found my name, address, and phone number.
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@Dan O
You are not responsible for the debts of an ex-spouse, any more than you are responsible for the debts of another person who happens to have the same name as you. The ex-spouse's estate is responsible for her debts, and if the estate is insufficient, the creditors are out of luck. It's the executor's responsibility to deal with such matters.
You were right to ignore the false claims from the collection agencies. If they threaten you, that is extortion.
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The internet changed "remembering."
It used to be that what was in last year's newspaper was beyond recall, except for a dedicated few doing research on microfilms in a library or newspaper file room.
Today, it is at anyone's fingertips, forever. It never goes away.
We will need a cultural adjustment to deal with that. I think it will be not an artificial forgetting, but a more forgiving view of the past. There is no sign of it yet.
I don't think it can work to erase data worldwide. It might or might not be nice, but that falls into the category of "wouldn't it be pretty if." It won't happen. It can't.
We need to look past our current harshly judgmental and unforgiving attitudes.
Some things ought not to be forgiven. Repeated wrongs in a pattern should be remembered.
However, one mistake ought not to erase a life of other things. Today, it tends to do that.
Look at Al Franken. What is the balance of his life? Justin Trudeau? Winston Churchill post Gallipoli of WW1 would never have come back to be Prime Minister for WW2, as things stand today.
We are all the losers for these attitudes. Forgetting required by law doesn't really work, but it seeks to do something we need to do in other ways. Be more forgiving. It would be good for us, for ourselves, not just for the objects of that.
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@Mark Thomason. I think this post summarize the current situation (dilemma?) very nicely. (1) Due to the availability of information on the internet for all eternity, we tend to view old and dated information (e.g. an event) as if it happened today, without applying the norms and context of that time. (2) Due to the spread of information on the internet to all parts of the globe and millions of billions of people, the reactions are often completely out of proportion. Also, other relevant facts are not taken into account as they are not accessible or known in other regions. (3) Due to the speed information spreads on the internet, reaction is quick and often unbalanced as other facts that come out later may take time to surface. Meanwhile, judgement and the resulting damage has been done. (4) Due to the fact that most information is limited in scope (headline news, twitter post, etc.) the judgement and consequences are made based on a very small subset of the facts, resulting in overreaction.
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We are not going to "forget " in the EU that Google and all US tech firms, who are registered there fiscally , and not in the USA , cheat and pay not taxes while invading the markets, destroying the European economies and inflicting a 20 % deficit due to their fiscal fraud .
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@JPH First off, most multinationals and registered in multiple countries. Yes, through creative accounting this gives them the ability to record the profits elsewhere depriving a country of local taxes. In the case of Google, Apple, and many others, itis my understanding that most of these companies are registered in Ireland which has a reduced tax rate. I believe Ireland is a member of the EU (I Googled it :-)). So it is the US that is being cheated of taxes with this practice. Trump and others are trying to bring this cash and taxes back into the US with no success. I live in Canada and many receipts I receive for online purchases have an address in Ireland even though I bought something here in Canada. Taxes for the sale that should be staying in Canada are going to Ireland, which is Europe. It may be Europe is unfairly benefiting from this arrangement. I’d welcome more knowledgeable comments on this.
How does this work? if the information is 'transferred' outside of the union for storage reasons or simply someone posting the information on a foreign blog, how is it contained. I understand the decision but I wonder how you would actually do it.
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@Paul exactly my question. I live in Canada. If I set up a blogging website and a European posts to it something they want taken down later, I can’t see the EU having any jurisdiction (or moral right) to force me to take down the post. This would only work if the law became international and countries agreed to enforce it across boundaries and locally.
The Right to be forgotten by all EU- based servers.
8
"Right to be forgotten" reminds me of the "memory holes" in George Orwell's 1984:
". . . and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building."
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In the age of the internet with its unparalleled reach and “memory” the right to privacy and the right to be forgotten (in certain circumstances) should be regarded as essential rights. We live in a new age where technology has reached deeper into the public and private lives of people in a manner that was previously unimaginable. We have to find ways to deal with this reality that both respect the dignity of the individual while balancing broader rights and obligations. We are merely at the beginning of that journey and there will be many turns and twists. But at least the EU and the European Court of Justice are attempting to grapple with the enormous philosophical and human rights issues involved rather than taking refuge in the absurdity and pretence that some fundamental rights are absolute while others are not.
But this is a sensible decision. The EU can make decisions for itself. It cannot make decisions for other democracies. Those democracies must grapple with these issues and arrive at their own conclusions. Nor of course can it make decisions for totalitarian dictatorships like China whose statist approach to these matters perfectly illustrates the dangers which the EU is attempting to avert.
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@JohnR The EU's law is just rubbish. Just because people live in the EU, do they not have a right to know that someone they may rent a room to, or hire, or marry, once stabbed someone as in the case the Times reported? That is just crazy.
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@KarenAnne
This is an interesting take. The premise of the law for many is based upon the concept of revenge porn. If someone is convicted of a crime, that information would continue as part of the intended purpose. At the very least, it would be restricted to law enforcement. The law does not appear to expunge crimes off the books but rather make it more difficult to view personal information. I admit that my knowledge of the law is limited but I always worry about extreme assumptions. With a world where we have no privacy and every part of lives is tracked and measured, somehow we need to find some balance.
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I wonder if the quid-pro-quo will be that the ECJ will rule that the US FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act) is also unenforceable in the EU?
4
No.
The reasons for FATCA go far beyond personal anonymity and are aimed primarily at minimizing tax evasion, money laundering, hiding money from corrupt/illicit activities.
Persons engaged in these alleged activities anywhere in the world surely would desire privacy for obvious reasons but this law isn’t about returning to the old bank secrecy laws of the past. It’s about simply letting old, possibly irrelevant but personal news/information, stay old and it seems, inaccessible or hard to find.
If there were no internet, the info would require much more work to track down than a few clicks and so harassing people or digging through someone’s past wouldn’t be such an easy, and tempting thing for some people to do to others.
But...if one is in the EU and wishes to get past the new privacy barrier, wouldn’t a VPN be a work around, much like it is in China, as used to connect to the uncensored world outside the state controlled web. People could still surely upload stories/info that perhaps would have a shelf life now when it comes to appearing in EU search results but NOT when it comes to appearing in search results outside the EU.
Searching online with a VPN served situated outside the EU ought to be a fix, I think.
FATCA isn’t going anywhere. It’s legitimately difficult to trace well concealed money, but the right to be forgotten won’t have any effect on that. And it’s not that hard to find, if you do a little sleuthing. Just very slow and lots of steps involved.
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@Colleen
Yes, it looks like VPNs will now completely destroy the right to be forgotten. This is probably ok for some of the right's intended purposes--for instance, casual Google searches within the EU will no longer return embarrassing information--but means that some of the other purposes will be undercut. I'm guessing EU employers will routinely use VPNs when evaluating potential employees, for example, unless further regulations make it illegal to do so