In what could be a landmark case, the European Court of Justice
ruled Tuesday that individuals have the right to control their data and can ask search engines to remove results. In other words, they have the "right to be forgotten." Zero chance of such a case happening in the U.S., although it did, I'd would prefer they let me erase myself from the NSA search engine instead of Google.
At The Atlantic, Matt Ford writes Will Europe Censor This Article?
The court's decision comes by appeal of Mario Costeja González, a Spanish man who sought to remove evidence of his home's repossession and auction from the Internet. González argued that the 1998 auction notice in the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia should no longer be linked to his name in Internet searches. Relying upon the EU's data-protection directive—a regulation governing personal data privacy—and the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights, the judges ruled that González's privacy rights override "not only the economic interest" of Google as a search engine, "but also the interest of the general public in having access to that information upon a search relating to [González’s] name." As a result, they ordered the links stricken from Google's search results.
"As far as I know, this is unprecedented," Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia who has campaigned against Internet censorship, told me. "It is certainly shocking to have come from the EU rather than from an authoritarian state."
The ECJ ruling didn't order the newspaper itself, La Vanguardia, to remove its original article, as González had also requested. Instead, the court simply ordered Google to remove all links to the auction notice from its search engine. Ironically, the ECJ's ruling explicitly mentions González's auction notice and financial trouble. Will the court order that its own decision be made unsearchable online?
The court recognized what some European legislators call "the right to be forgotten"—the idea of giving ordinary citizens more control over their personal data, including its deletion. Its ruling sets a precedent for both national courts and the ECJ itself in future cases. "If an individual no longer wants his personal data to be processed or stored by a data controller, and if there is no legitimate reason for keeping it, the data should be removed from their system," stated Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Justice, when describing the proposed right in 2012. A European Commission memonoted that the right "is about empowering individuals, not about erasing past events or restricting freedom of the press."
Legally obscuring a person's past isn't an entirely new concept. [...]
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2006—Billmon: Surveillance Polls Don't Matter:
Billmon gets "a little crazy in the head" as he contemplates the arguments over whether two-thirds, or one-half, or one-fourth of Americans support being spied upon for their own alleged well-being.
The whole point of having civil liberties is that they are not supposed to be subject to a majority veto. Hobbes may not have believed in natural rights, but our founders did. And their opponents, the anti-Federalists, were even more zealous about restraining the powers of the federal superstate, which is why they forced the Federalists to write the Bill of Rights directly into the Constitution.
It defeats the purpose of having a 4th Amendment if its validity is entirely dependent on breaking 50% in the latest poll. It would be nice to have "the people" on our side in this debate, and obviously a lot of them are, even if Doherty's plurality still prefers Leviathan's crushing embrace. But some things are wrong just because they're wrong—not because a temporary majority (or even a permanent one) thinks they're wrong.
...We can't do anything about how a corrupt, oligarchic system works (or rather, doesn't work) but we can at least stop accepting the other side's terms for the debate. What the government is doing is illegal and unamerican, and that would still be true if the polls showed 99% support—in fact, it would be even more true.
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Hear hear! And Amen! |
Tweet of the Day:
Texas was going to execute an intellectually challenged man. That’s what they do there: execute them or elect them governor. #inners
— @HaroldItz
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show,
Greg Dworkin rounds up the collapse of 3 major Gop narratives: climate change, voter fraud & ACA repeal. Why are Republicans cut off on all paths by facts? Aversion to science carries a high price. Sandy Hook truthers still bonkers. Don't kiss your camel (not a euphemism). Grayson for Bonkersghazi committee? An excerpt from Greenwald's new book makes the national security state sound like cartoon super villains. Rand Paul on drone policy: principled or opportunistic? Or some of both? Snapchat's central premise of turns out not to be true. What happened to our being saved by libertarian tech bros?
High Impact Posts. Top Comments.