this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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[Australia] Government to overhaul privacy laws, including opting out of advertising, a right to be forgotten, and new rules for small businesses (www.abc.net.au)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
35 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/4017115

Related material, not all as optimistic as the ABC news article:

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The "right to be forgotten" should not be looked at as a good thing. Its reason for existing is honestly pretty gross. It's about censoring people's access to news if the subject of that news doesn't like it. Literally, Google v Costeja is basically its origin, and it's a case where Google was forced to stop linking to news articles about a person despite those articles being entirely accurate. This is bad for two reasons:

  • First, the news is accurate. It reported on events that had occurred—in fact, the reporting was legally mandated by the Spanish Government. This was not in dispute. Access to accurate information simply because it portrays someone in a bad light is an awful kind of censorship.
  • Second, it went after the wrong subject. Google's job is to link people to websites. If someone wants information taken down, they shouldn't be asking Google to de-index it, they should be going after the news site. If the law wants to allow the information to be made inaccessible, they should require the news site to take it down. Or better, they should be required to issue an update or retraction alongside the previously-accurate article.
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If someone wants information taken down, they shouldn’t be asking Google to de-index it, they should be going after the news site.

How? How can you ask a site run in a foreign country, by people who don't speak english, to remove some content about you?

Also - just because content is accurate doesn't mean it's legal. A video of two people having sex is "accurate". That doesn't mean it should be shared online if they haven't consented to that.

As far as I know, Mario Costeja González never did anything wrong? All he did was sell an asset in order to pay off a debt. The media's coverage of the event did long term harm to his reputation. I think it's a perfectly good example of a reasonable takedown request. The normal rule for people with financial difficulties in Australia is to erase all records after five years (e.g. if you're overdue paying off a loan, that black mark against your name will be forgotten if you do eventually pay the loan off and then don't miss a payment for five years).

Kids also do stupid shit all the time, and these days those mistakes are often posted online. They shouldn't ruin your reputation for your entire life.

I'm sure this won't be a universal right. There will be rules around when someone can ask for content to be taken down. I'm reserving judgement until I've seen those rules... and even then it's pretty normal for new legislation to miss a few things and be amended later.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'm not going to address the ridiculous bad faith arguments made in your first two paragraphs.

As to the third, he didn't do anything wrong per se, but he was required to sell off assets to pay debt. This is a simple fact which occurred and the news was required to report on it. If a law existed requiring the news organisation to take down those records after 5 years, that would be entirely reasonable. But that law did not exist in Spain, as evidenced by the fact that the newspaper had been asked and refused to remove the news. It's ridiculous to censor it via Google simply because he doesn't like it. If there's not a lawful basis to remove the article from its original source, there shouldn't be a lawful basis to remove it from Google. (This is different to, say, removing pirate links from Google, because they are illegal and a lawful basis does exist for removing them, even if practical matters around jurisdiction prevent actually enforcing that law.)

There is never a case where a news site in a country should keep an article up, but search engines be required by the Government of the same country to de-index the article.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

John Barilaro demonstrated you can do the same thing already, this just gives the same right to people who can't afford a team of KCs.