I'm a nigh-absolutist on Free Speech, so this European Court of Justice "Right to be Forgotten" ruling against Google has me doing The Shaq Face:
Europe’s highest court ruled that Google must delete some search results people deem embarrassing.
Oh for the love of~! So we really wanna pick a fight with
The Streisand Effect, hanh?
Sweet Black Jesus. Yeah, I'm sure this'll end well.....
More than 1,000 people have now asked the search engine to be forgotten, including a former member of Britain’s Parliament seeking re-election, a doctor who received bad reviews and a convicted pedophile.
....good night ladies and gentlemen, you've been a great crowd!
I'm sure you can already see the slippery slope this sort of thing might invite. Imagine a world where say, Michelle Bachmann can force Google to de-index links about her hiding in bushes.
Much of the coverage focuses on the supposed tragedy of how this case bitterly pits Privacy Advocates against Free Speech Advocates in this grand clash of civilizations and values. Such a conflict certainly exists in a broad sense, but regards to THIS ruling? Eh...I'm not so sure, because one side sounds kinda conflicted while the other definitely sounds pissed.
European Commission vice-president Viviane Reding is enthusiastically defending this as "a clear victory" on her Facebook page. Not many happy supporters in the comments, but there's whole lotta of rage and 1984 references.
I listened to NPR's coverage of this last night, and they interviewed someone with a long background of advocating for both causes. He sounded sympathetic to the privacy side but....like....come on, right? You could practically hear his eyes rolling through the microphone.
I mean, when a normally staid guy like Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is shrieking words like "ridiculous" and "bizarre" and "astonishing" to every media outlet that'll listen, you know a nerve has been touched.
Wales and others have also noted that the law the court based its decision on was written in 1995. You know, that magical time when AOL was your ISP, Saturday Morning Cartoons were king, and Tupac was still alive. In other words, said law is "prehistoric" by internet standards.
Rigo Wenning (legal counsel for the World Wide Web Consortium) even argued that the archaic language of the law left them no choice but to rule in the manner they did:
OPINION: WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE WRONG RESULT? NOT THE ECJ!
The decision has merits. It states the obvious: Google can’t just claim to be a cache and escape responsibility while making business on top if the functionality it controls. The decision is a clear warning for Google to continue the argumentation around: It’s not us, it’s just the engine. Search engines are processing personal data and they control the processing of that personal data. That means they are part of the relevant actors and can’t just hide in the woods of being an innocent middlebox that does nothing.
The decision identifies an additional impact on the privacy of individuals by the search engine over the publishing of the information. A fair assessment will follow the court in this analysis. But for the non-lawyers reading this: Having said that something impacts my right to privacy doesn’t say anything about the consequences that impact triggers or is supposed to trigger. Those consequences are not implied by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. It only means we have to address the question somehow. Nobody really questions that.
The decision shows why the Directive 95/46EC is outdated and needs urgent replacement. A court is not a parliament. A court is supposed to apply law, not to replace it. The ECJ did strictly apply the law. It could have been less strict and follow the Austrian position, but that would have been at the very limits of a possible argumentation. The Austrian position had also two branches that remained unexplored: One could argue that the search engine will only be forced to remove the entry from the index once the publisher has removed the content or one could argue that the search engine is only responsible if all other publishers have already removed the content. The latter would be a factual denial of the protection as duplication is so easy and frequently used in scenarios that follow the Streisand effect. The court hinted to this and made it one reason to have an independent right against the search engine operator. As Thomas Stadler already indicated, the funny thing here is that the ECJ is by its prominence responsible for the Streisand effect on M. Costeja. So the entire procedure had the exact opposite effect on him. While some people in Catalyuña knew about his difficulties of 1998 in the past, now the entire European union knows about it. Should we remove the court decision from the index?
Emphasis definitely mine. That last bit is some sugar frosted irony, ain't it? Let's see it re-stated with more snark and less legalese:
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 Atlantic: Will Europe Censor This Article?
HA!
Of course, Mr. Wenning's analysis is the perfect segue into the Elephant In The Room about why a E.U court might seem so hostile to Google nowdays. Take a guess. Starts with a 'N' and ends with an "A".....
Google responds with the argument that made me laugh hard already when it was used to excuse the reading of people’s emails for the gmail advertisement: We do not actually read your email, the engine is doing that. Referring to uncle Harry or the man on the moon for things that one has diligently programmed and that one fully controls is a joke and will always remain a non-argument when confronted with real courts. If I would be the NSA, I would use the same argument in the current debate. From a legal point of view it was impossible for the ECJ to give in to this argumentation. Google said: We are only a cache and the court responded no you aren’t. It was inevitable, given the argumentation.
Still stung by the overreaches of the N.S.A., collaborating with American tech companies, the Europeans are challenging what is far more accepted here: the right of Big Data to have All Data, the right of knowing to trump the right of privacy.
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He thinks the ruling rebuts Big Data’s “infantile desire for immediate gratification where you get to know everyone else’s secrets even as you seek to keep your own.
Maureen Dowd - "Remember to Forget"
So in essence, this is also a rebuke to Big Data and its collusion with our Surveillance Industrial Complex overlords. Perhaps it'll even knock them down a peg. If that ain't a silver lining, I don't know what is.
...the IT industry has to get active. Data protection is for the IT industry like environmental protection for the car industry. It makes their technology socially viable and it needs investment, e.g. standardizing the control interfaces for search crawlers.
Maybe sorta good for us in the long term,
total fiasco for Europe in the short term. I suppose I can live with that.