The European Right To Be Forgotten

Posted: 8/7/2014

Trigger

I meant to write a blog post immediately after this outrageous verdict by the highest court in the Europe Union (known by the German acronym EuGH or European Court of Justice) was announced to the public, but I was distracted.

Just read “«Recht auf Vergessen»/«Dieses Recht ist völlig verrückt»” (German language; translated roughly to this right to be forgotten is absolutely insane).

Here is a long published letter by Google to address some of the questions from European data protection officials (I did not have the time to read it all). It appears, e.g. that some of the filers of removal requests had obviously lied in their request or conveniently omitted to mention certain things.

Here is an article on the scathing  report by the House of Lords in the UK

Since this verdict came down two months ago Google had to process already 91,000 removal requests.

A Miscarriage

Again the highest judges revealed that they are clueless as to technological progress and overall. This is not the first time in history that the supreme judges of any larger jurisdiction of a Western country or union made colossal mistakes.

The verdict also reveals that the laws on which the verdict was based or which the judges used to interpret, just passed a few years ago, are already deprecated or obsolete by technological developments.

Why should a search engine remove links with perhaps pertinent information about persons, companies, etc. Can we seriously remove gossip from a society or even from our neighborhood?

Everybody knows that information on the Internet have to be taken with a huge grain of salt! Like any other information on the Internet or gossip we need to thoroughly double check it before we can assign any credibility to it.

How long will it take to correct it?

European Try So Hard To Be The Progressive Leader Of The World

This right to be forgotten or e.g. the precautionary principle or e.g. foreign policy by diplomacy and weak defense only are rather stark examples of backwardness and delusion.

The Return Of The Village

One of the consequences of the Internet is that individuals cannot easily hide anymore like in the past.

The much glorified anonymity of the big city is great for honest people and unfortunately also for crooks.