European court decision punches holes in free knowledge

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A recent European Court of Justice (ECJ) decision is undermining the world’s ability to freely access accurate and verifiable records about individuals and events. The impact on Wikipedia is direct and critical.
In Google Spain v. AEPD and Mario Costeja González, the ECJ ordered Google to remove links to a 1998 newspaper announcement of a real estate auction connected to a Spanish citizen’s debt.[1] That decision represents a crude implementation of the “right to be forgotten”—the idea that people may demand to have truthful information about themselves selectively removed from the published public record, or at least made more difficult to find.
In doing so, the European court abandoned its responsibility to protect one of the most important and universal rights: the right to seek, receive, and impart information.
As a consequence, accurate search results are vanishing in Europe with no public explanation, no real proof, no judicial review, and no appeals process. The result is an internet riddled with memory holes—places where inconvenient information simply disappears.

As of today the Wikimedia Foundation has received multiple notices of intent to remove certain Wikipedia content from European search results. To date, the notices would affect more than 50 links directing readers to Wikipedia sites.
The decision does not mandate that search engines disclose link censorship. We appreciate that some companies share our commitment to transparency and are providing public notice. This disclosure is essential for understanding the ruling’s negative impacts on all available knowledge.
The WMF will stand by its commitment to build the sum of all human knowledge through the protection of all of its sources. We will be posting notices for each indefinite removal of Wikipedia search results.
Lila TretikovExecutive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
[1] The decision is here: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:62012CJ0131.

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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Great initiative! I just miss the actual links to the associated pages in the transparency report of the WMF. Having a jpg/pdf of those Google warnings is good, but having *actual links* to the relevant pages appears more important in my eyes, contributing to explain how stupid this “right to be forgotten” is, since it seems that it’s mostly used by gangsters or rogue politicians as of today…

The ECJ ruling was an important step towards implementing human rights against big private companies in cyberspace. It calibrates the right to access information and the right to be forgotten in a fair way. The results that have to be removed from a search engine index are unlawful. This is by no means a sign of censorship, but rather one of compliance to European law. I would expect the Wikimedia Foundation to respect the law. Instead you announce that you have put up a pillory-style page you consider an act of transparency, listing all those cases that you have become… Read more »

The court decision does not grant the removal information either from the Internet, or from Wikipedia specifically, but just gives the right to the common citizens to also be able to tweak the search engine’s completely nontransparent page ranking algorithm. I specifically private cases relevant to the particular person. Once again, this is a decision that impacts the search engine algorithm which is not some impartial mathematical representation of the truth but is already heavily manipulated by many big commercial and state actors from around the world (from record labels to law enforcement). As a long time Wikipedia contributor and… Read more »

@schneeschmelze:
I suggest you distinguish more carefully between your own personal opinions and “the European perspective”. Many German commenters disagree with you and have been extremely critical of the ECJ ruling, among them longterm Wikimedians such as Benutzer:Historiograf (“a disastrous miscarriage of justice”, http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/876866916/ ), and various legal scholars (see e.g. the list at http://www.internet-law.de/2014/05/kommentare-und-anmerkungen-zum-google-urteil-des-eugh.html ). There is currently some further German community discussion at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Diskussion:Kurier#Recht_auf_Vergessen_.E2.80.93_Google_l.C3.B6scht_erstmals_Wikipedia-Link_aus_dem_Index , which likewise does not support your far-reaching claims of a “deep divide”.
Regards, Benutzer:HaeB (= T. Bayer; personal comment not representing the views of the Wikimedia Foundation)

@haebwp: The considerations you mention are not reflected in Ms Tretikov’s statement. This is a one-sided view, as is yours because, again, you only discuss those that support your point of view. I have not referred to ano other’s view because I have made a statement of my own on the matter. The point is that the WMF does not speak in my name, and this is all that I would like to say about this. Period.

The EU Court ruling made public (police) pages about sought paedophiles disappear from the search results, further to these peadophiles personal requests to Google.
Read about it here (in Polish):
http://futurepresent-past.blogspot.com/2014/07/trybunal-sprawiedliwosci-ue-i-google.html
or contact me (the author) for translation or more info.

In my opinion, all that content that invades into someone’s privacy should be removed if affected person makes a claim to remove that. Unfortunately, that is not happening in real sense.

An example of personal information that was made public by the government is the court record documenting Jimmy Wales’ divorce. That information is made available for free here — http://mywikibiz.com/File:Wales_divorce_compressed.pdf …and it is my universal right to impart that information, correct?

I am quite unhappy with this position. The WMF should keep in mind that in Europe not only freedom of speach is a basic right but also the right to privacy. The court decision doesn’t give Google or anyone the right to censor anything. It give people the right to remove very private information about them. Something we COMPLETELY agree with on Wikipedia and bend backwards twice to do anyway. Okay, the implementation sucks but not the principle. I am very unhappy with the WMF position on this. I am even more shocked that Jimmy Wales is speaking up in… Read more »

[…] not grant any of those requests. For more on the right to be Forgotten, we invite you to read our statement opposing the scope of the relevant European Court opinion and its implications for free […]

[…] Wikimedia Foundation has expressed its strong disagreement with the judgment and outlined its risks for the free knowledge movement in an earlier […]