Fair enough, I should have been clear that I was only referring to search results, not news aggregation sites which could be held to a different standard just as print news.

Google makes no claim to the veracity of their information, beyond trying to keep obvious attempts to game result sour of searches.

Which causes all sorts of potential slander and defamation headaches. Slander can be as simple as repeating an untruth, thereby sullying someone's reputation. As a private company without any special legal status, I would expect they should embrace the possibility that a simple request for removal from their index might prevent a more protracted legal proceeding. In fact, refusing to remove material when reasonably requested would likely qualify easily as obstruction.

Not really, they are following an accepted practice since the start of the internet [...] If you don't want them to crawl your site, a simple HTML tag will stop them unlike window washers who you may have to pull a weapon on to convince them to leave your property alone.

Except that, because Google is indiscriminate, they will repeat and amplify, for profit, any untruths that they happen to find on obscure websites. Suppose I accuse you by name of being a terrorist. You can attack me legally, but most likely my blog isn't worth the effort. But Google enhances and duplicates my outrageous claims to anyone, especially if I've been clever about it. So now you have a problem. While technically I originated the terrorist claim, Google is slandering you in this case orders of magnitude more than I. And both legally and practically, you really need to tell Google to stop.

Actually, the onus should be on the original publisher to remove the material, not on the indexer. That ensures any link to the original information is now gone, not just the search engine results; which really ensures it is "forgotten." Google et. al. may make it easier to to find the information but since they are not the originator they have no liability for what is said.You do have a good point in that Google i stye easy target to go after rather than actually ensuring information is forgotten. However, the EU could require the hosting site to remove the page or, if they are a non-EU site not to serve it to EU IP addresses.

So while it may be practical to stop Google (and any other research engine that has a physical EU presence) I do not think Google should be legally liable for any material they index simply because they make it easier to find something someone does not like.

I would say that is one POV. Independent of wether or not you consider Google to publish information, the challenge is how to decide what is legitimately able to be removed. When is their a demonstrable public interest in the information that outweighs a right to privacy?

I would propose just the opposite - obtain a court order to remove the material from the search and then Google would comply. This would assure that Google doesn't just wind up removing results simply because someone somewhere in the EU requests it; rather it would ensure there really is a valid reason to remove it. If the EU wants to assert a right they should provide the mechanism to ensure it is applied in a reasonable manner.

Here is where we fundamentally differ in viewpoint. Google search is really no different than a card catalogue. It points to where information can be found but makes no claim to the value or veracity of the information. To require them to become keepers of the truth is,IMHO, unreasonable and diminishes the value of the search if anyone can decide what needs to be removed and get it removed by a simple request. If Google then must decide what is a valid request they are put into a legal position where a court could hold them responsible for providing a link to information that had been subject to a removal request. If you want Google to be the gatekeeper I think they should also have a safe harbor provision that lets them be the final arbitrator of what to remove and require a person to obtain a court order against the original publisher of the material requiring them to delete it from their site.

Finally, how do you address cases where a company has no presence in the EU, but is reachable from the EU? Should they comply with removal requests? Should EU based companies with no presence in China remove material the Chinese find offensive, threatening or otherwise want removed?

The defacto accepted approach to this problem is censorship, I believe. The underlying question you should be asking is: does it make more sense for Google to comply with data ownership laws while remaining accessible, or is it better to become completely inaccessible? The fact is that Google doesn't have the power in this relationship. Note that they faced exactly this problem in China a few years ago, and lost the market then. If they refuse to comply with EU laws, they could lose the EU market too.

I am not saying their shouldn't be a mechanism to address a right to privacy but in the absence of clear guidance it can have many unforeseen consequences.

Yes, we both agree on that point. Where we disagree is that I feel the right to censor one's information from private third parties where there is no direct business relationship is already a clear and practical way to address the problem.

Note again that if Google was a highly regulated public agency with a clear mandate to balance and advance the public good, as many people seem to think they are, but they are certainly not, in any way, then the problem would be more complex.

I think our main point of disagreement is how to do this. My concern is the EU directive essentially makes anyone a potential censor simply because they don't like something and thus have a way to limit the ability to find the information. If the EU wants Google to be the gatekeeper they should provide some clear guidance eon what should be removed so Google can act in a manner that balances a right to privacy with the public's right to know. For example, Google could say any criminal conviction more than X years old should not be indexed, statements made by political figures are not subject to removal, etc. Of course, that also means the EU politicians would actually have to think about the impact of their laws and regulations rathe than just be able to blame Google when something goes wrong. Unfortunately most politicians, anywhere, are loathe to do anything that may actually require them potentially subject themselves to criticism.

1. Apparently a final ruling has not been reached. While a court has found the operator guilty it's not clear if that will ultimately hold.

2. None of TFA provide any details of what the ruling was based on, beyond the TOT node being used for illegal activity by someone else. Without more details, it is impossible to conclude that merely running a TOR node is illegal; the only conclusion from TFA is someone was prosecuted for running one. A relationship between the operator and the user committing fraud, or if the operator new the user was using the node of illegal purposes, is vastly different than merely running a node where a user is using it for illegal activities. The former is much more reasonable to prosecute than the latter.

3. As others point out, in keeping with /. traditions, the car analogy is bogus.

Google doesn't publish any of the information it indexes. A real world counterpart would be to expect every librarian to vet every article in very newspaper, magazine, encyclopedia,book or other document they catalogue for fraud. As unreasonable expectation for them as for Google. Google makes no claim to the veracity of their information, beyond trying to keep obvious attempts to game result sour of searches.

First of all, Google is not intruding an property without permission no taking any action to

Not really, they are following an accepted practice since the start of the internet, i.e. searching for specific terms and returning the results. Unlike Kibo and his all seeing grep; they use those sort results based on their algorithms and store information for quicker access. If you don't want them to crawl your site, a simple HTML tag will stop them unlike window washers who you may have to pull a weapon on to convince them to leave your property alone.

A more relevant real world example would be requiring publishers to remove material from their archives so it would be as if they never existed.

I would say that is one POV. Independent of wether or not you consider Google to publish information, the challenge is how to decide what is legitimately able to be removed. When is their a demonstrable public interest in the information that outweighs a right to privacy? Should the press be shutout from Google searches because what they publish could be embarrassing, damaging, and possibly wrong? Get a bad review? Take it down. This path, taken to an extreme, means no negative information would be searchable, no matter if it is true or not.

Finally, how do you address cases where a company has no presence in the EU, but is reachable from the EU? Should they comply with removal requests? Should EU based companies with no presence in China remove material the Chinese find offensive, threatening or otherwise want removed?

I am not saying their shouldn't be a mechanism to address a right to privacy but in the absence of clear guidance it can have many unforeseen consequences.

My guess is they didn't want risk legal action once the court ruled. They can clarify later at while still complying even if their actions may be stricter than needed. Given the pace of getting a definitive answer and legal framework out if EU regulatory and legislative processes what Google did seems a reasonable approach.

It appears the "right to be Forgotten" rules apparently have no provision for appeal or to give the supplier of the information the right to decide if it was a valid request. It appears the data holder could decide the request was not a valid one; however given the requester could litigate such a decision it seems many will simply take the expedient route of deleting links.

Quite frankly, an appeals process would be an onerous burden on the data holder since they would then be placed in the position of deciding who is right and possibly face legal challenges. If they want to build in an appeals process then the legal liability and burden out to be on the person making the appeal, not the search engine. After all, Google isn't deleting their content just ignoring it per EU directive; and anyone with a VPN can still go to a non-EU proxy to get access.

Agreed. That's similar to what we do as well.

Having tried similar rings, here are some issues we ran into:

1. Latency. Nothing breaks up a train of thought than having too wait while the tablet tried to draw on the screen.

2. Such setups ar e by nature 1 to many; i.e. only one person can draw while many can view. It's real hard for someone to make a quick note or addition like you can by walking up next to them, grabbing a marker and drawing.

In the end, utility won out over cool technology

A few points:

1. He contends he isn't revealing any trade secrets and thus complying with the non-compete in that regard. To me, and INAL

2. The length of time he is not allowed to work for a competitor seems excessive, especially since the are not compensating him in return for not going to work for a competitor. 18 months of unemployability based on your most marketable skills seems unreasonable, and I would expect a court to throw out that clause.

3. Twelve months of not working with previous clients seems reasonable to me. He just needs to not call on any clients he worked with at Amazon so unless Google was hiring him to poach Amazon clients he should be able to do that with no problem. I say that because when I was in a similar situation I had a 12 month no solicit clause and had no problem keeping it. Oddly enough, my non-compete actually only was a non-solicit so I could and did setup shop doing the exact same thing I did at my employer except charge less. Technically, if they called me I could work with them since they did the initial contact. My lawyer found the clause bizarre but also pointe rout they labor law is constantly changing due to court cases and legislation so chances are something written a few years ago would have sections that were no longer enforceable; which is why he suggest companies periodically review and update non-competes.

He also said courts tend to take a dim view of agreements that prevent a person from working in his normal field unless they are getting reasonable compensation for not working. Merely being paid while you worked there is usually not enough, despite what some companies would like you to believe. He also pointed out they can't withhold pay you are owed because you fail to sign something or not return company equipment; despite what they may say. Of course, IANAL and the laws may be different where you live.

Amazon has deep pockets and they could be bullying an employee here. Many non-competes are thrown out when court challenged. This case could come down to how poorly Amazon may have treated this employee. A non-compete is not a writ of slavery.

Computers will fix this kind of thing by default.

My sense is that the MEAN Stack (Mongo, Express, AngularJS, Node) is sort of winning. There's some packaging of it over at mean.io.

Personally, I'm really getting interested in Meteor (www.meteor.com). Watch the videos, and realize I saw a smart non-coder go from zero to *ridiculously* interactive site design in three months.

While Detroit has a long history of missing trends and stupid decisions, I think this may be as much a case of very different POVs and culture crash.

Detroit, coming from a manufacturing POV, is probably asking themselves:

1. What liabilities am I assuming if I do this? How many, and how expensive, lawsuits will result from this?

2. How do I sustain this in terms of support and parts over the life of a vehicle?

3. What will it cost?

Google is coming from a technology POV:

1. We can do all this cool stuff, don't worry if it's all beta we can iron out the bugs as we go.

2. If it doesn't catch on we can kill it and move on.

3. Don't worry about the support infrastructure, that will eventually come about.

As long as each has a different set of needs, wants and POV discussions will be difficult at best.

I agree, with an added thought. It wasn't just data mining but a controlled experiment that altered the data they received. That, IMHO, cross the line between "let's look at the existing data" to "let's conduct an experiment."

Another part to his argument seem to be "the impact was so small as too be negligible and thus it was OK." However, the researchers did not know the results would be negligible so using that as an excuse after the fact doesn't fly.

Facebook didn't simply set out to make tweaks and see how users responded; they setup a controlled experiment on subjects without their consent; a practice that appears to violate ethical and possibly legal guidelines for behavioral research. I agree it could push them to continue to do such research and not reveal it; but when it inevitably leaks that they are doing that it will create a PR nightmare. Facebook could have simply asked people to opt in to the study and provide the standard information regarding the study and this would be a non-issue. For those looking for info on humane research protection guidelines in the US google Office of Human Research Protection.

People aren't evil. The simple fact is if a publisher sells a book at a fair price people would rather pay money than simply download the book.

Case in point against DRM are the musicians and comedians who are offering a "pay what you want" model that is so successful these guys make MORE money than they would through a traditional publisher, with less advertising and less overall effort. Time is money.

So yeah some guy will offer the book for free... and a few people will see the link and realize they can BUY the thing, and they'll do that instead. The people who download it wouldn't have bought it anyway. How many books do you read at Chapters? Do you buy EVERY BOOK?

Nope.