[okfn-discuss] Right to be forgotten ruling

Tue May 20 11:45:28 UTC 2014

One thing in the official press release struck me:

<quote>
the
Court holds that the operator is, in certain circumstances, obliged to
remove links to web pages
that are published by third parties and contain information relating to a
person from the list of
results displayed following a *search made on the basis of that person’s
name*.
</quote>

Does this mean *any* search including the person's name, or just searches
*only* containing the name? So if I searched directly for "social security
debts Costeja González" would the search engine be allowed to continue
returning the result? Probably not, but is there a potential solution
combining the right to be forgotten (more like a right to the possibility
of being forgotten then) and the public interest here? I am ignoring any
associated technical difficulties for the moment.

As long as only searching for the name returns the undesired results, their
content will hardly ever be forgotten ever, but if they only show up in
more specific searches then only people that are actively looking for e.g.
criminal records will find it. So there is a (bigger) chance that the
undesired results are forgotten and still a possibility for the public to
find it relatively easily.

I am not really convinced this works, but it would be nice to have a good
combination of forgetting and archiving.

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 11:47 AM, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>wrote:

> On 20 May 2014 07:22, Tony Bowden <tony.bowden at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 20 May 2014 02:06, Anna Daniel <a.daniel at griffith.edu.au> wrote:
>> >  My position is that a fact is a fact and should remain so.
>>
>> Most facts don't fall into the "universally true for all time"
>> category. This isn't just pedantry — a lot of the discussion in this
>> area comes down to this sort of framing. We naturally treat some facts
>> as having an obvious time component, but generally aren't as good at
>> doing so with classes of information with a longer half life.
>
>
> Good point Tony.
>
>
>>  > If it's been released into the public sphere it should stay there.
>>
>> Many countries already have laws that recognise a value in allowing
>> information to decay — e.g. expunged records or spent convictions
>> under Rehabilitation of Offenders laws. There are certainly
>> interesting technical challenges to achieving things like this in
>> practice, but that doesn't mean that the underlying goal isn't a
>> worthwhile one.
>
>
> Excellent point here - I was also going to mention this re convictions.
> The interesting questions are the interaction between those technical
> challenges (and the differential burdens they may impose) and those
> worthwhile goals.
>
>
>> > Secondly, putting the
>> > liability onto intermediaries rather than content owner (person/entity
>> who
>> > made the decision to make the data public) is a dangerous precedent
>>
>> Anyone republishing information — even just in a passing reference to
>> it — is already open to lots of legal challenges in most jurisdictions
>> anyway (e.g. libel). I don't believe anyone is claiming that the
>> intermediaries must proactively decide what they can and can't publish
>> — simply that (as with lots of other areas), once their attention is
>> drawn to problematic material, they have to remove it
>
>
> Very good points too. It is quite correct that one has legal (and moral)
> obligations to correct "libellous" and generally incorrect information. I
> think the issue in this case is that one was essentially working with
> official or semi-official info which one would normally assume to be
> reliable plus the processing in an automated way (no editorial function).
>
> As such, the potential scope of the ruling is both very broad and could
> potentially have a significant negative impact on many projects (including
> open data ones) that prepare databases by collecting and processing data
> from various sources.
>
> Rufus
>
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