From the Internet to the national network: the right to be forgotten and not

October 31, 2006, a 18-year-old girl called Nikki Catsouras driving her father's sports car, one hit the Orange Co. one side of the toll station, the toll station concrete production, very hard, Catsouras moment beheaded. The California Highway Patrol was quick to protect the scene and take photos for evidence, given that the death was too bloody, and the local coroner did not even allow her parents to come and see her on the last side.

"About two weeks after the accident, I got a call from my brother-in-law," Nikki's father, Christos Catsouras, said in an interview: "He heard from a neighbor that photos of the scene of the accident were going crazy on the Internet." We went to the California Rangers and they promised to look into it. "Soon, two employees admitted they had leaked the photos," he said. As for motivation, a court document later wrote: "We sent nine horror photos of death to friends and family on Halloween, which was a prank, but they were widely forwarded and quickly spread wildly online." ”

Catsouras lost the eldest daughter, there is no way to see the horrors of the time, he also told the eldest daughter's three sisters, do not go to see the online pictures. "But they told me I couldn't do anything else." They all just persuaded me to say, ' Don't worry, things will be forgotten soon. But Catsouras could not wait, and he began to try the legal way-to remove the information from the Internet. In recent years, many people have made the same effort, actors do not want their personal photos to drain, and those who have sinned do not want their criminal record to hinder their job search, and despite the differences, they all hope to get something that has never existed in America: the right to be forgotten.

But it's a big difference in Europe, thanks to a case earlier this year. In 1998, the Spanish Herald published two small notices saying that some of the property under the name of Mario Costeja would be auctioned off to repay the debt. Later, Costeja's lawyer paid off his debts, but every time someone searched his name, the record in the newspaper appeared. In 2010, Costeja found Spanish authorities and made his own demands, hoping to get the Herald to delete the online records and ask Google to remove the relevant search links. The Spanish Data protection Agency, which is responsible for the local network privacy watchdog, did not pass Costeja's request to delete the Herald's Web records, but gave approval for Google's request. This spring, the European Court, the Supreme Court of the 28 EU member States, supported the decision of the Spanish authorities. The Herald can keep Costeja notices, but Google is barred from providing web search results related to Costeja's name. The court went on to say that, within its jurisdiction, any individual has the power to ask Google to revoke links that are "inadequate, irrelevant, or irrelevant, exaggerated, or have lost their validity" to them.

The outcome of the court's verdict was first apparent. Google has so far received 120,000 deletion applications and approved half of them. Other search engines in Europe, like Microsoft's Bing, also have a similar system. Most of the public is critical of the verdict, especially in the United States and Britain. "The New York Times" has an editorial criticizing: "It has the potential to undermine the freedom of the press and the press, and the news media, such as The New York Times, have a similar view, which suggests that some may use it to conceal and suppress the public's right to information, including the hidden links of some of the incumbent administrators, interfering with popular elections. In a recent report by the House of Lords, the ruling was referred to as "a principle-oriented error that could not be actually manipulated".

Jules Polonetsky, executive director of the "Future Privacy Forum" in Washington think-tank, said, "This decision will be remembered as one of the most important mistakes the European court has ever made." This has no meaning for free speech. If a particular site does something illegal, it should be banned and Google should not link to it. But the court put this complex, according to the specific case analysis of the matter to Google, let Google decide what to publish, hidden. Allowing Google to exercise the power of the court is enough to demonstrate its lack of understanding of the actual operational nature. ”

At the same time, the court's verdict caused anxiety among the people on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, the right to privacy trumps freedom of speech, and America is the opposite. "Europeans think privacy is a fundamental human right, and we think that freedom of speech or litigation is a fundamental human rights," said Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford Network and Social Center. "When it comes to privacy, the United States is usually protecting certain categories of sensitive information by adding some qualification, unless the conditions are met Otherwise never reveal. Congress has passed bills, prohibition of disclosure of medical information (health Insurance Circulation and Responsibility Act), education Records (the Buckley Amendment) and video store leasing Information Law (this law was made in the event that Robert Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court for an information leak). All of this information can be found in the course of obtaining my consent or conducting a judicial investigation.

America's respect for freedom of expression is well reflected in the First Amendment to the Constitution, which also determines that Costeja's lawsuit will never be passed in the United States. Costeja's record was public, and the newspaper reports were true, and the news media had a near-absolute right to publish accurate, legal information. (recently, a lawyer for Texas successfully passed his disciplinary review by the local Bar Association, and he filed an application to the court asking Google to remove the search link for the relevant content; But Google made a turnaround this time.) "Costeja's verdict is clearly not in line with U.S. law," Granick said, "So the question now is, is this really a good policy?"

Viktor Mayer-schonberger, a 48-Year-old professor at Oxford University, has been striving for "the right to be forgotten" by means of knowledge. Viktor grew up in the Austrian countryside and his father was a tax lawyer. His father bought a primitive modem in the 1980s, and Viktor began to live on BBS, where he wrote an early anti-virus program that he sold when he was more than 20 years old. Viktor said: "Although my father indulged my interest in computer science, he still wanted me to take over his career as a lawyer." "He finally went to Harvard Law School, his early experience in the computer industry, combined with his experience in developing antivirus programs, inspired his interest in data protection laws.

"Europe's emphasis on data protection is rooted in the bloody history of the 20th century," Viktor said. "The regime, in order to fight the Nazis, has launched a human-rights-based system that hopes to make society more just and fair." But in fact, it turned out to be a totalitarian society, full of surveillance and control, and at the time there were two radical ideologies, all of which ended up in an alarming state of scrutiny. ”

With the overthrow of the regime, in 1989, new democracies amended the laws and actively implemented them, aiming to prevent the recurrence of such violations of privacy. In the following years, the EU has introduced a series of detailed laws dedicated to protecting personal privacy. Viktor said: "We have a general belief that no one-no matter any country, any company-can protect our rights against infringement." ”

In 2009, Viktor published a book titled Delete: Big Data trade-offs. In the book, he says, after the war, with the advent of the Internet, people's concern about privacy began to shift to the Internet. The East German intelligence agency Stasi (Stasi) records are on paper, kept in filing cabinets, difficult to locate and retrieve. But digital and inexpensive online storage makes it harder to forget than to remember. The advent of cloud storage, so that information preservation more durable, retrieval is also more convenient.

Viktor said that Google, which accounts for about 90% of the European web search market, did nothing wrong with the information. But he tells a related history, in the Netherlands in the 1930s, the Government retained a comprehensive population registration information, including the name, address, religion and so on of each citizen, at that time, this information was originally intended to promote the government's management and improve welfare programs. But after the Nazis invaded Holland, they used the information to hunt down Jews and gypsies. Viktor said: "We can't predict what will happen in the future, even if we live in a democracy now, it feels safe, but the Dutchman thought so." We do not know whether the future government will still be worthy of our trust to protect our privacy. ”

American law has no right to be forgotten, and the Catsouras family has no right to force Google to delete related photo links. Keithbremer, their lawyer, was very helpless: "We know that people can find these images just by googling the name of Nikki, or by typing in the word" Sleepy girl, "but we can't do anything about it. "As a temporary measure, Catsouras to Reputation.com founder Michaelfertik for help. Reputation.com tries to manipulate Google's search results by adding additional information. In this way, Google search for the number of related links, Fertik also help the Catsouras to contact each site, requesting them to take photos. "We've removed photos from more than 2000 websites," he said. "Fertik a little bit about their efforts, but they can be easily found."

Some criminals are desperate to erase their lives and to ask Google to revoke their criminal record, too. "There are 60 million to 100 million people in the United States who have criminal records, and that only includes convicted ones." "Because of the existence of the Internet, the consequences of having a criminal record are getting worse," says Sharon Dietrich, a lawyer in charge of Community legal services. "Dietrich and others have joined the" delete Record "campaign, which advocates sequestration or the deletion of criminal records after a certain period of time.

Some 30 states currently allow the deletion of criminal information to a certain extent. Dietrich and her partners are trying to clear the data from the business background survey Company's database. But even if the law is adjusted, Google's presence remains a headache. Dietrich said: "In the past, the criminal record will be forgotten over time." Although they exist, you cannot find them. But now, people forget this kind of thing became a luxury. I had a client who said he couldn't find a job because he had a criminal record, even though he had been out of prison for 30 years. ”

If individuals or companies want to delete information on the Internet that they do not want to be known, they still have a legal weapon: copyright law. Unauthorized publication of photographs or other copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright owner is illegal. "He needs to get the copyright of the photo," said Bremer, a lawyer at Castouras. "So he had a lengthy negotiation with the California Highway Patrol, but it didn't.

Those victims of the Internet virus being compromised and causing information leaks are better suited to using copyright laws to defend themselves. In August of this year, Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and other celebrities leaked their photos online (sources have not been identified), and Google has always had a system to block copyrighted material. Many film companies often complain about copyright infringement on YouTube. And Google has a set of programs to identify these behaviors, and then delete the relevant links. Many of the photos leaked by the stars were self-portraits, so the women were copyrighted and some of the photos were taken by their friends. Lawyers have copyrighted nearly all of the photos that may have been copyrighted, finding websites that share them, including Google, asking them to delete them. Google and many of its websites are committed to complying with copyright laws, so it's hard to find them online now, even though they still exist. One of the lawyers said: "Now these pictures are like a tree falling into the forest, the link is still there, but you can not find them through the search engine, it is not the same as not." ”

The European Court resolution put Google in a rather awkward position. "We think of ourselves as a newsstand or a card catalogue," says Kent Walker, Google's attorney general. We don't create information, we just allow people to find that information. A verdict like this is hard for us to decide what to write in the card, which is forcing us to do what we don't want to do. "Other Google employees have also voiced their dissatisfaction that Google is just a medium between readers and publishers, and that they have no interest in interfering with the content of the information."

However, in the context of the current information economy, it is not credible that Google is merely a passive medium. The metaphor of "card catalogue" is a serious misleading. "Google is no longer a card catalog, it is now a library, a bookstore and a newsstand," said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Washington DC Electronic Privacy Information Center. These areas are already in the domain of Google. The verdict is a great, forward-looking decision that actually strengthens the freedom of the press. The court is actually telling Google that if you want to continue to search the business, you have the obligation to comply with privacy. But this is not for news organizations, which have their own websites and have their own readership.

Google does not publish anything original, but the court ruled that Google's search results are often more important than the information on other individual sites. A private company called Reputation.com discovered this a few years ago. Reputation founder Michael Fertik, a supporter of the right to be forgotten, said the court's decision was feasible, saying: "It's not just about freedom of speech, it's about privacy and dignity." For the first time, dignity was treated in American law in the same terms as copyrights and trademarks. If Sony or Disney wanted to remove 50,000 videos from YouTube, Google would immediately delete them unconditionally. But if a video, your daughter and someone else kissing is photographed and uploaded to YouTube, you can't ask to withdraw the video. This is wrong, putting the cart before the horse. ”

In a conference room at Google headquarters, a Google lawyer showed people the process of executing a court decision, called David Price, 33 years old. He: "We were all silent when we received the verdict, but we had to work on it." ”

This work has two main parts, the first part is technical work-Create an infrastructure software architecture to remove links. This is not very difficult because Google has applied the system to the maintenance of copyrights and trademarks. Similarly, Google can block certain dangerous content or links to illegal activities, such as malware, child pornography.

"The second part is a bit of a headache," Price explains. "We have to create a management system to accept these applications and then take action." "Google has designed a form that, in the country where the verdict is covered, can be found on the appropriate search page." Currently supports 25 languages, German users can login via Google.de, Spanish users through google.es. (But direct search google.com is no use, this is the U.S. search page, it is regrettable that the United States is not within the jurisdiction of the ruling state.) An individual applies for a real name--an anonymous application is not allowed, and a link is attached that they want to block. (Most applicants submit about 4 links at a time.) The applicant is also asked to provide an explanation: "Why delete the link, it complies with the legal requirements of which delete conditions? Irrelevant, not relevant, negative energy?" If the application is accepted, Google will send a notice to the webmaster, inform the content of the problem, the webmaster can decide whether to delete or not.

To better decide whether to delete the disputed link, Google has raised dozens of lawyers, paralegal and other personnel to review the applications. Price will meet with the team two times a week to discuss the decision and try to keep the consensus. The main study was whether the applicant was a public figure, whether the link came from a reputable source or government website, whether the applicant was the first person to publish the information, whether the content involved political speech and criminal charges. Because the court's verdict specifically points out that the relevant considerations should be "the role of the content in public life", Google is reluctant to delete links between politicians and other prominent figures. The job is really hard, Price says.

Google has not leaked decisions about specific cases. But they have revealed some cases, but the details of the case-related personnel are hidden. Google, for example, agreed to "delete the documents that the applicant launched a group of online chats with many years ago" and "to apply for the deletion of allegations of child molestation that had been acquitted five years ago". Google has also rejected a request by a news media to delete another media report about itself, as well as a civil service claim to "delete reports of convicted child abuse scandals". Google has also temporarily refused to delete a link to a criminal case that has been acquitted in 2013, because its timeliness is still in place. And rejected a writer's request to delete a link to his work, since the article was recently published and was intended to be disclosed by the author.

Of course, the controversy cannot be avoided. Earlier this summer, the BBC was informed that Google wanted to remove a blog link to Stanley O ' Neal, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch. "Why did Google forget me," said Robert Peston, the BBC economic editor and the author of the blog post, in a reply? On the occasion of the deletion of this link, Peston also wrote that it confirms that "the right to forget" will be abused as an accomplice to curbing free speech and restricting legitimate reporting, as many in the industry fear. How did a public figure like "O ' Neal" successfully delete his own news link? When Petson carefully studied the decision, it was found that the request to delete the link was not made by O ' Neal, but by a reviewer of the article, Maybe the reviewer doesn't want to have his name searched. Now the search for Stan O ' Neal can be linked to Peston's blog, but searching for the reviewer's name will not find this blog post. But all this reflects the complexity of Google's decision-enforcement task. Price can only say: "We are constantly trying." ”

The European Court's decision applies only to search engines and does not involve social networking sites. But people are noticing the principles behind the decision and automatically bringing it to Facebook. From Google's headquarters to the north for 15 minutes, is the headquarters of the Facebook, two companies are very close to the distance, it is easy to have Lenovo. The status on Facebook is not public, and most of the posts are only visible to friends. But the terms of Facebook's access rights are less understandable to users. As a result, many people will publish Facebook photos privately. This possibility is even bigger than Google's search results.

Elliot Schrage, vice president of public relations at Facebook, said: "We are unequivocal in one thing-we allow people to delete what they create." You upload your own pictures and posts and you have the right to delete it. "But while Facebook gives you the power to delete your own posts, what about other people's posts?" Facebook allows users to "tag" photos and videos to mark identities. Users can cancel their own tags, but they cannot delete the actual photos. If you have Facebook delete photos, videos, or whole posts, the operations team will consider your request. The team will also delete pornographic posts and allow users to report "Harassment information", "Advocate violence", or "disagree with my views" and many other posts. When making a decision, the Facebook team has its own set of standards. The Facebook team left enough room to explain the court's decision on the right to be forgotten.

"The conflict between privacy and free speech is inevitable, and the question is how society sees these conflicting powers," Schrage said. It was not the technology that created the conflict, it was just a dramatic revelation of the conflict. ”

There are already signs that European regulators will give Google more restrictions. A July conference was held in Brussels, Europe's Belgian capital, to be the European data regulator known as the 29th Working Group on Law. Some officials believe that Google's enforcement of European court rulings is not enough. Some officials objected to Google notifying the publishers when they deleted the links, which they believed would only encourage the publishers to republish, and that the execution of the sentences was futile. Some also believe that Google should not just delete links from Google sites in specific countries, but also remove them from Google's main site, Google.com. For these requests, a Google executive wrote to the European Working Group explaining that, in Europe, Google has diverted search applications from different countries to their respective national sites, with only less than 5% of European search applications directly passing through Google's main site, And most of these requests come from European travellers traveling in the United States. (Google has also raised staff and set up a working group to repeatedly explore how to better enforce the court's decisions.) )

The decision was quickly triggered by a chain reaction, with each country dealing with the same things, there are different ways and the bottom line, in the global internet age, it is almost impossible to satisfy all countries. Costeja's case was tried in Spanish courts because the lawyers involved were Spanish and sued Spanish newspapers. "So many countries have also said they want to set up their own rules for the internet." "This means the end of the global internet age and the emergence of the national Internet," said Jennifergranick of Stanford University. Everyone in the global internet age has access to the same Web site, while in the national internet age, the state decides which information is accessible to people. The whole of the Internet is fragmented, and Europeans will have different access to us Americans. ”

Clearly, for now, the Costeja case has created a big problem for Google. But imagine that if in the future France establishes its own definition of "forgotten right", Denmark creates another one, and all the countries of the world enact laws based on their own laws, their cultural traditions, and impose various obligations on Google. "The real risk is its aftermath," says Professor Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School, Beckman Internet and social center, who reads: "The court's verdict in the Costeja case may be reasonable, but if the Brazilians come and say: ' We just want to conform to our legal search results. ' And then what? This becomes a contest of who can make Google obedient. "Search companies may decide to adjust their search results to the least offending country-all search results are based on the rules of the most demanding countries." As Zittrain said: "In that case the efficiency is unimaginable." ”

Viktor that the European Court of Justice has taken the most important step. "This is a pragmatic solution," he said: "The underlying data will not be deleted, and the court is actually setting up a buffer zone." If you're just looking for a deleted link on grass google.de, you may not be able to find it, but if you're willing to spend more time, maybe just 10 seconds, you can go to google.com. That is, if you don't take the time, some things can't be found, which is equivalent to a buffer zone that reduces the chance of people seeing things they shouldn't see. ”

The era of unregulated internet seems to be coming to an end, at least in Europe. To Christos Catsouras's delight, he and his family filed a lawsuit against the two men who leaked the photos, including negligence, mental injury and invasion of privacy, despite the eventual failure to secure the copyright of the photos from the California Highway Patrol. Several years later, appeals were repeatedly dismissed, but they upheld the appeal, and finally, five years after the death of Nikki, in 2012, the defendants and plaintiffs reached a settlement on the eve of the trial, amounting to a settlement of $2.4 million. Christos Catsouras that the European Court's verdict was a bigger victory, saying: "I cried when I heard the verdict, and it was a great verdict for those who have had my experience." I think I'm satisfied, the only thing I want to do now is to go to Google and let them erase those links. The