Item — HN Reader

> I think if people want to hide stuff like revenge porn, or obvious slander, then fair enough. But unindexing legitimate journalism is stupid.

The difficulty with following that logic is in the blurry middle area. Where is the line drawn and who makes that decision?

2 comments

For starters, they could require a court order for each case. That would certainly limit the amount of requests.

That sequencing is probably not in compliance with the law. The fact sheet put out by the European high court makes it explicit:

http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets...

"In practice, a search engine will have to delete information when it receives a specific request from a person affected... Google will then have to assess the deletion request on a case-by-case basis and to apply the criteria mentioned in EU law and the European Court’s judgment....

The request may for example be turned down where the search engine operator concludes that for particular reasons, such as for example the public role played by John Smith, the interest of the general public to have access to the information in question justifies showing the links in Google search results. In such cases, John Smith still has the option to complain to national data protection supervisory authorities or to national courts. Public authorities will be the ultimate arbiters of the application of the Right to be Forgotten. "

I interpreted 'they' as the lawmakers, not google.

Yes, that's what I meant.

Easy. Remove the special exception the EU randomly added to Google and Google only. Laws that are specific to a single company are obviously bullshit.

Then we just end up back in the previous situation where you had to get the site that posted the content to remove it, which had a fairly well defined set of requirements. And tada! Just like that there's no problem anymore.

The EU added no special exception or a previous situation to go to.

This is simply the result of the courts interpretation of the law as it is and it applies to every search engine not just Google.