Wikipedia Reports 50 Links From Google 'Forgotten', Issues Transparency Report

netbuzz (955038) writes The Wikimedia Foundation this morning reports that 50 links to Wikipedia from Google have been removed under Europe's "right to be forgotten" regulations, including a page about a notorious Irish bank robber and another about an Italian criminal gang. "We only know about these removals because the involved search engine company chose to send notices to the Wikimedia Foundation. Search engines have no legal obligation to send such notices. Indeed, their ability to continue to do so may be in jeopardy. Since search engines are not required to provide affected sites with notice, other search engines may have removed additional links from their results without our knowledge. This lack of transparent policies and procedures is only one of the many flaws in the European decision." Wikimedia now has a page listing all notifications that search listing were removed. itwbennett also wrote in with Wikimedia news this morning: the Wikimedia foundation published its first ever transparency report, detailing requests to remove or alter content (zero granted, ever) and content removed for copyright violations.

Right to force others to use stone tools

[sinij]

Dear humanity, welcome to the Information Age. Why do we call it Information age? Because we developed technologies that allow us to retain significant portion of all information and knowledge produced, from mundane to crucial. As such, your right to forget should not, cannot trump our right to remember.

Re:As a European...

[Opportunist]

I can actually support the intent of the law: To give people a chance to redeem themselves. People live, people make mistakes, sometimes horrible mistakes. Horrible enough that they make the news and that they are spread on the internet. But even they should have a chance to see their misdeeds eventually forgotten, to allow them to turn the page over and start over.

Of course something like that is quickly picked up by crooks who only want to be "forgotten" to repeat their offenses.

So how about a compromise: You have the right to be forgotten. Once. Everyone can trip and fall, and everyone should be allowed to get back up without people constantly trying to kick him back down into the gutter. But if you do it again, you didn't want to be forgotten to improve and redeem yourself. You only wanted to get another chance to repeat your offenses.

And then it should come back for you to haunt you forever. No need to build a national "hall of shame". I'm fairly sure something like this will be built before the ink on the law had time to dry.

Re:I like this law

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why you make your own website with your name that will rank higher than any libeler could make.

When will they be re-remembered?

[TubeSteak]

If the person dies, can Google re-enable the search result?
Or have these pages gone into a permanent black hole as far as search engines are concerned?

We lost freedom

[aepervius]

People apparently forget, that before google we all enjoyed a right to be forgotten. The *original* article were and are still available. They are simply not made conveniently extremly easy to get. And this was as it was before google. This is not censorship, as the original article are still available. Now with google you cannot ever be forgotten. A society which cannot forget , is a society which cannot forgive, is one where freedom are reduced. Understand this : freddom is not at what society willingly accept. Freedom is to be found at the edges what society may not like, like gay mariage, like smoking pot, or whatever legal or borderline legal variety of things. If you get caught and society never forget you have a much harder time, and people will simply forgoe their freedom rather than get fucked for life.
paradoxically if you remove the right to be forgotten you reduce the freedom of people because they know if they get caught in the gray zone, then society will never forget and they get fucked

Google is an asshat for reporting intentionally and I hope the european regulator whoop their ass for that. And most people do not understand that with their cry of censorship they are actually removing freedom to us all.