A ruling forcing Google to remove search results has been described as "astonishing" by Wikipedia fo

[RKP5637]

So do I!

"A ruling forcing Google to remove search results has been described as "astonishing" by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales."

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27407017

The European Courts of Justice ruled on Tuesday that an individual could demand that "irrelevant or outdated" information be deleted from results. Mr Wales said it was "one of the most wide-sweeping internet censorship rulings that I've ever seen". Google has said it is looking into the implications of the decision.

Mr Wales, speaking to BBC Radio 5 live, said: "I suspect this isn't going to stand for very long. If you really dig into it, it doesn't make a lot of sense. They're asking Google... you can complain about something and just say it's irrelevant, and Google has to make some kind of a determination about that." "That's a very hard and difficult thing for Google to do - particularly if it's at risk of being held legally liable if it gets it wrong in some way." "Normally we would think whoever is publishing the information, they have the primary responsibility - Google just helps us to find the things that are online."

He added: "I would expect that Google is going to resist these claims quite vigorously."

[merrily]

1. Astonishing to us, but maybe not to them.

The First Amendment is not the law of the land in every land.

Even in this country, prior to the First Amendment line of Supreme Court cases, libel laws were very, very strict, one's reputation being near sacred.

I don't know, but that may play into negative things about people that are very old or irrelevant . But, the ruling does put way too much power into the hands of google and should be fought.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

2. this is a first amendment issue?

the ruling appears to say that Google should remove or not display links to sites that do not match the search query (irrelevant) or remove or not display links to 'outdated' data (whatever that means). i am not sure how, even if this ruling were here, that it would be a 1st amendment issue...

sP

[merrily]

4. No it isn't and my post didn't say it was.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

6. ok, perhaps i misread

but, you said...

"I don't know, but that may play into negative things about people that are very old or irrelevant."

How does the First Amendment (to which you were referring in the quoted text) have anything to do with information being stored about people whether is was old or out of date? are you suggesting that websites are responsible for their data or that Google should be responsible somehow for what they are providing in a search result?

OK, I see you didn't want to get into hypotheticals and that is what I was thinking about discussing...

sP

[merrily]

9. Yes, I posted that sentence, but you quoted it out of context.

In my post, the antecedent for "that" in the sentence of mine that you quoted in your reply 6 was not the First Amendment, but "very, very strict libel laws." That (the kind of mentality that may be used to very strict libel laws) may play into thinking it's okay to curtail the free flow of info about people.

[merrily]

7. PS. I can easily see potential First Amendment issues if the USG were involved, but it isn't.

And, with all respect to both of us, I don't think we have enough facts to debate that hypothetical in any way that it would make sense to attempt.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

8. oh, i was really hoping to talk about that

i know this has nothing to do with the USA... but i was thinking in the future the hypotheticals would be fun to play out.

thanks, anyway...

i now return you to your regularly scheduled day.

sP

[merrily]

10. Well, my reply 5 gives an example.

So does the article linked in the OP.

On Tuesday, a top EU court ruled that Google must remove search results at the request of ordinary people in a test of the so-called "right to be forgotten".

The case was brought by a Spanish man who complained that an auction notice of his repossessed home on Google's search results infringed his privacy.

Do you doubt that that the USG forbidding google to report to Americans an auction notice when this man's name is searched would create a First Amendment issue?

ETA: Correction. My reply 5 gives two examples. Suppressing old info about Pope Bennie and the chilling effect on google.

[dipsydoodle]

3. Five key questions about the European Court of Justice’s Google decision

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/05/14/five-key-questions-about-the-european-court-of-justices-google-decision/

Seems to be down to individual member states whose data protection laws vary making it even more difficult for Google.

At the end of the day this may all come down to fines for non compliance which given previous threats against Google could be quite astronomic.

[merrily]

5. So, no chilling effect?

If Google can do this at all without slowing down searches, the threat of large fines will give google every financial incentive to drop more info, rather than less.

It's outdated info that Pope Bennie was in Hitler Youth. Some might say, perhaps correctly, that it's also irrelevant. But, I don't want anyone hiding that kind of info from us, either.

[immoderate]

11. Is information about the cretaceous outdated?

--imm

[merrily]

12. My impression was that supposedly outdated and/or irrelevant info about people was the issue.

Maybe only people now alive? Not sure about that, but it was a living man who complained.

[RKP5637]

13. Probably, guess it depends on which point of view. To me this is all ridiculous, as Google

is just an indexing engine for finding things. They can't be the cops of the internet. If so, then, all search engines could be abolished, and people could find sites by word of mouth, emails and the Yellow Pages hard copy for Internet Websites could come back.

If, something is wrong, then fault lies at the source, not the indexing engine. And then, what about Bing, Yahoo and a zillion other search engines. When I started reading this I thought it was The Onion! As a senior technologist, this is one of the most absurd things I've seen in awhile.