I remember seeing a really cute 24 year old EU legislator once. I forget her name. But would probably not be hard to find out - there can't be many people in the EU parliament.
@FaheemMitha Haha I didn't mean for you to actually watch the whole video. It was just to get an impression of her. She doesn't look as bad as in your photo, and one can easily take a better photo of her than that one, but you have to admit she's not the most photogenic person ever.
Well, the green party in Germany started with thick sweaters and woolen socks in Birkenstocks. That was very non-mainstream back then. But times changed, I'm not sure the pirates will make it long-term. (Less because of politics, more internal trouble, methinks.)
But at least their name didn't hold them back as much as the Pirates.
> At first glance, perhaps this seems reasonable. If Google has decided that a lawsuit against a company supposedly controlled by Goolnik is no longer relevant for those searching on Goolnik's name, then it's potentially reasonable to delink those results (though I have trouble seeing how the factual information that the lawsuit happened and that Goolnik was associated with it is no longer relevant. It seems abundantly relevant.)
However, the second order censorship here is much more troubling. Because the story is no longer about some long ago event which Goolnik might now wish to have hi…
@Cerberus Not that specific article, but I know this stuff is going on.
From what I understand, the authorities have been okay with newspapers writing about this stuff abstractly, e.g. mentioning that an article has been removed that mentioned someone being charged with shoplifting, but once they say "an article about Person X shoplifting was removed" then they are more likely to find that it should be removed for the same reasons as the original article.
> we'll keep writing about this story, because it's newsworthy no matter what the EU Court of Justice thinks or whatever whoever sent the request things, whether it's Thomas Goolnik or someone else.
There's kind of a line-drawing issue here, unless you think that absolutely nothing should ever be taken down (which is certainly a position you can take, but it's pretty far from how things work in practice).
So, if you figure that there are some things that are sufficiently minor for RTBF to make sense, like say an article from 20 years ago that's like "local kid Jefromi likes math"...
@Jefromi If you are a kid, your name becomes less relevant, I suppose. On the other hand, if you are now an adult, wanting to censor stuff about your childhood for some reason, and if you do so in a remarkable way (which is why a newspaper would write about you), then your identity becomes noteworthy.
If it's some tiny dumb thing where really no one would care about it except for the fact that that person happens to have requested removal, not a great battle to fight. Yes, there's public interest in knowing that things like that are getting removed (so you could mention it in an anonymous, generic way). There's not really any public interest in people knowing who requested removal.
While on the other hand, if it's someone who was convicted of a crime getting articles about the crime or their trial getting removed... a newspaper would have a lot more cause to disagree and fight that.
@Jefromi Then every such detail should be judged by a judge, based on laws. Now the ECJ has basically taken away a huge swathe of power from local judges and legislators, and forced it upon an unwilling foreign company (by no fault of this company, of course). But, yeah, you know my position.
@Cerberus Yup, I certainly agree that it's insane that the policy details were left to be decided like this. (Though the courts and DPAs have certainly still been involved.)
I don't think they've actually taken away the power; if you disagree with a decision you can still take it to DPA or court.
It's more like they're getting out of doing any work unless people disagree about it.
@Jefromi I don't know. If I write about your removal of this search result, then for some reason I find the removal relevant. It makes perfect sense for me to want to add a short description of the thing that was removed, of you and your position, and the procedure.
@Cerberus Sometimes, yes, but in practice there's a very very good chance Google either makes the same decision a judge would have, or there's a fight about it and a judge or DPA ends up making it.
I really wonder what lobby has been pushing for the right to be forgotten. Although I think the ECJ is not very lobbyable, there must be some organisations or movements who have been wanting this for years.
@Jefromi I really doubt that, because e.g. in Holland "irrelevant" is not a criterion at all.
It's a little better now than it started out, because Google now has some amount of precedent set by previous DPA and court interactions to use as guidance.
It probably does apply, but Dutch judges would never censor something because of irrelevance, since there is no law that says it should be. Only now they will have to abide by the ECJ's ruling in some way.
The idea is very much that the default is to prioritize the individual's right to privacy. If there's public interest in knowing the information (and associating it with that individual), then that can possibly trump their right to privacy, and if not, then it gets removed.
My main problem with the ECJ is that it is a blanket ruling, and that it doesn't say "things that violate a private person's privacy should be removed upon request" and then define that thoroughly, and that it doesn't say you have to go to court for every instance of it.
I would point out that requiring you to go to court all the time might not scale terribly well; it'd probably be fair for there to be well-defined policies that people are supposed to follow, then disagreements can go to court.
I don't know, I actually wouldn't want this to scale. I think removing information is bad per se, so it should only be done as an exception, and well considered every time.
Make clear policies for when this should happen, sure. But those policies should include something about harm done. And they should still go to court, even if it be in a quick, cheap procedure.
I'm just saying that if you did actually agree that there's a fairly large amount of stuff that should routinely be removed, e.g. a page that exposes your home address, it seems fair to not burden the courts with that, because there are way more productive things they could be doing.
You can just let the individual request removal directly, then if they don't get it they can go to court, or if the company wants to refuse removal, they can go to court.
Same way you'd deal with, say, someone having a dispute with a store about a purchase.
Yup, which I did say. My point is just that not sending everything through courts isn't really an issue here. The issue is that it's not well-defined and is possibly too broad.
@Jefromi You can look at it in two ways. Either 1. there is no law but a mere ruling, and it is to vague. Or 2. if the intention was to censor things that are open to interpretation, such as slander and threats and things that are less well defined than an address, then that should be decided by a judge.
I suppose high court rulings are typically vague, and it's left to other institutions to sort out all the precise ramifications.
But yes, usually that sorting out is done through subsequent litigation (which would never have worked here, hundreds of thousands of requests) or directing the appropriate agencies to make laws/policies.
@Cerberus Most of it is way less exciting than slander and threats.
@Jefromi Only if the high court has to judge on some law that is really open to interpretation should the high court have some freedom. And then it can send their ruling back to the appeals court to make it more precise, as it usually happens. But here the high court is not only vague, but it also writes new laws out of nothingness.
There's a lot of "this person won some stupid contest" or "this person happened to be on the street our reporter was on" or forum posts etc where the user can't delete their account.
@Cerberus Perhaps so, that'd certainly have helped define policies more effectively.
@Cerberus Yeah, mostly - I'm a little wary of "writes new laws out of nothingness" because often that's what courts end up having to do, e.g. mandating that schools stop being segregated in the US.
@Jefromi Right, well, this seems to be a sensitive, complicated area, where I would like to see legislators deliberate and come up with very specific laws, based on listening to various groups and organisations.
Our High Council only creates new law-like rulings when the law really isn't clear about something. But, if something is not obviously illegal, nor clearly against the spirit of the law, they will say: the law does not forbid it, so it is legal.
The High Council even often adds their opinion that parliament really should legislate this or that issue.
That doesn't sound different from the US; I certainly didn't mean that the Supreme Court actually writes full legislation.
But sometimes they have written things like "school segregation is unconstitutional" which in effect is like passing a nation-wide law, minus all the details.
@Jefromi Generally, yes, but of course up to some limits. And continental courts generally are given a little bit more freedom to decide that something is right or wrong based on "reasonableness", or about the spirit of the law—so they have more freedom than your ordinary courts, I think, but less than your Supreme Court. But I'm sure it varies per country a lot too.
@FaheemMitha They are usually in the global top 5 I think.
@Jefromi I know. And something as big as that wouldn't happen in Holland.
There is the State Council (different council) that has to evaluate new laws, and parliament has to reply to their complaints, but eventually they can ignore their advice, and they do that now and then.
@Jefromi Yes, or, that is to say, it won't be the courts that can stop them, officially. Although sometimes the High Council does say a law was obviously written incorrectly and reasonableness prevails, but never the constitution. In practice, it may amount to the same thing to some degree.
@Jefromi Medium. The King presides it, but the vice-president leads it in practice. He is appointed for life, but by parliament, so not wholly independent. But the main problem is that their advice can be ignored.
Yeah, though it seems a little insane that sometimes they can ignore it for some amount of time before someone tells them forcefully enough that they can't.
In Germany, anyone can take a new law to the constitutional court, I think. So they don't need to wait for an actual case to present itself, but a law probably isn't tested before it comes into force.
On the other hand, your constitution, just like the European human rights, which perform a similar role, is interpreted extremely broadly by the Supreme Court.
A lot of the biggest problems in the 20th century (notably civil rights movements) were really things that should've been settled a century before by constitutional amendments but no one ever bothered to enforce them.
On the other hand a lot of it requires broad interpretation as you say.
Yes, pretty much - there was supposed to be equal protection under the law for everyone from the 14th amendment (ratified after the civil war), but it took a hundred years for people to get around to realizing that we were still systematically discriminating.
While I am in principle against using things as vague as human rights to base things on that are as important as high-court rulings, in practice it has mostly worked fairly well in the ECJ—but only because of the people who happen to be on the benches, not because of the human rights themselves, I would say.
The first section's the big one: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Obviously it's not specific in the way laws would be, but I think it's pretty clear that it wasn't supposed to allow things like laws that make it illegal for black people to use the same water fountains as white people.
So a good parliament should immediately make a law that clarifies whether or not black people are so unclean or whatever that it warrants exclusion from certain fountains.
Yeah... unfortunately what actually happened is that the south kind of ignored as much as it could of all of this, and there was some mix of letting them get away with it and not being able to really do anything about it.
Think of the recent things like Alabama ignoring the same-sex marriage ruling until someone told them to stop being babies, except it's a state that you just had to go through the bloodiest war in the history of the nation to get to stop having slaves and now you have this not entirely great reunified nation.
You mean to avoid the civil war entirely? I dunno, there was some amount of political movement toward banning it and then Southern states started seceding.
And seizing forts held by federal troops and so on.
> For years now, we've been warning about the problematic "ISDS" -- "investor state dispute settlement" mechanisms that are a large part of the big trade agreements that countries have been negotiating. As we've noted, the ISDS name is designed to be boring, in an effort to hide the true impact -- but the reality is that these provisions provide corporate sovereignty, elevating the power of corporations to put them above the power of local governments. If you thought "corporate personhood" was a problem, corporate sovereignty takes things to a whole new level -- letting companies take forei…
Of course, the West is trying to forge a pact to exclude the BRIC countries, to enforce their envisioned world order upon the rest of the world, now that they are still in power.
I don't really keep up with international news. Partly because there is too much of it. The same applies to lots of other kinds of information, unfortunately.
