Comment Gross misunderstanding of EU ruling (Score 4, Informative) 135
The EU ruling does not require the information on a website to be deleted. Quite the opposite, it upheld the ruling against that by previous courts.
The EU ruling does not require Google to de-index the information. No, seriously, it doesn't.
What the EU ruling states, and this is made painfully clear by the court and also in the summary document, is that the link to the information not be coupled with the personal name. How Google chooses to implement that is Google's affair.
The Statute of Anne is ultimately at the heart of this, because this is where ownership of information is first taken out of the hands of corporations and guilds, and placed squarely in the hands of individuals. The Data Protection Act, which stemmed from (again) corporations claiming ownership of information belonging to others - but this time often getting it wrong with life-threatening consequences, was in many ways a repeat of that battle.
In the case of the DPA, the stakes were higher. Computer glitches and operator errors declaring living people to be dead spread from computer to computer like an incurable cancer. With no redress, even if it meant your bank account was closed, insurance got cancelled and house repossessed. Even if you got a company to fix the data, it would merely get reinfected. Politically aligned "vetting" companies were making a fortune selling bogus information to prospective employers, ensuring only ideologically approved candidates would get hired.
I don't think people remember those days.
European privacy rules are intended to transfer rights to individuals, as per Statute of Anne, and attempt to prevent malign, inaccurate data from harming said individual. So far, so good. I'm amazed at the number of libertarians who are opposed to individuals having rights. The more they oppose such a notion, the more I'm inclined to believe the philosophy suspect. If core elements can be ignored when convenient, they're not especially core.
The EU laws and ruling might not be perfect, in fact I don't believe for a moment they are. But I reject the idea that a corporation has more rights than a person.
Some time back, when I argued that freedom of the collective could not be neglected in pursuit of freedom of the individual, there was much opposition. Mostly along the lives that collectives have no physical reality. I fully expect these to be the people most opposed to the EU ruling, on the grounds that collectives (because that's what a corporation is) have freedoms.
In other words, I believe people prefer cognitive dissonance to having self-consistent beliefs or to admitting error. Much better to split the mind than debug an ideology. Microsoft would be proud.
I'd love to see a sane, rational discussion on the issue. Particularly with experts in IT security as part of it, as they're the experts in handling the conflict between access needs and access controls, and between risks vs benefits, especially on historical data which may include flawed data.