>As a society, we approve of jail being the mechanism to "forgive" a person's crime.
That's not really true. Serving prison time is neither a way to "forgive" nor a way to "pay debt back to society". Those are just common phrases some people use.
If felons were truly forgiven, they would have their right to vote restored. They wouldn't be denied a passport to travel abroad or denied a firearms license. Convicted felons of financial crime will be denied officer positions such as CFO in public companies. A sex felony will be a lifetime of reporting on the sex offenders registries.
Society has never perceived jail time as truly resetting the scarlet letter back to zero. Therefore, the debate is whether "Google results" is in the same bucket as "sex offender list". For many in society, they think it's wrong to remove those results from Google.
This is not how a lot of EU countries function - which is why there's friction there. The American "You are a criminal for life and will eternally be punished!" attitude is clashing with an EU mindset of being able to start a new life. Permanent records are hugely damaging for persons livelihood in these cases.
>Permanent records are hugely damaging for persons livelihood in these cases.
I agree and I'm not debating the harm that can be done. (My comment got many downvotes so I assume they think I believe felons should never be given a 2nd chance.)
No, my comment is specifically about the framework for arguing. I'm saying that phrases such as "forgive" and "pay debt to society" are unconvincing since society has never universally believed that. Consider even the EU country like UK where Google lost this case. If UK truly "forgives" crimes after a felony sentence is served, why do they have a sex offender registry? The parent I responded to is apparently based in Canada. Canadian border officers have denied Americans with prior DUI felony convictions from entering the country. That's another example of not being "forgiven". Also, Canada is another country with a sex offender list.
If we want to debate the "harm" to felons, then let's debate that. Do not use "forgive" in the text of the argument because it just leads to an inconsistency. Jail time is about punishment, not forgiveness.
It's about rehabilitation. And, despite all the exceptions, that is the principle under which European justice systems operate. Exceptions need to be justified politically, unlike felon disenfranchisement in the US which is seemingly unquestioned.
>It is not public, it exists to facilitate Police intelligence.
The "police intelligence" gives a misleading impression. Non-police residents can inquire about felons on the list because of Sarah's Law.[1]
In other words... "If I molested a child and served my 10 year prison sentence, I'm not truly _forgiven_ if people can check if I'm on a sex offender registry."
Therefore, don't use "forgive" as the framework. It should be clear that society really doesn't forgive and allow people a clean slate. If serving jail truly meant the "debt was paid to society", felons wouldn't be put on that list after jail was completed. Many defendents refuse a plea bargain of "guilty" because they don't want to be put on that list. To them, the lifetime sex offender list is worse than the jail sentence. It's an ongoing debt that's never repaid.
It's clear you're not looking at this from a neutral perspective. Given that the situation is significantly different than you imagined and your view has not changed.
> Many defendents refuse a plea bargain of "guilty" because they don't want to be put on that list.
This is not the US.
> Non-police residents can inquire about felons on the list because of Sarah's Law
This is no different than an extended check which any company allowing you to work with children can carry out. The difference is here that vulnerable new partners of the person can enquire if they see fit.
It is about keeping people safe, not punishing people. It's literally a criminal offence to reveal information about someone having to sign the register.
Yeah, I think that the EU is right in this regard, and I wish a similar principle existed in the US. But I was surprised that the EU court in this case ruled against one person simply because he served a 4 year sentence. His case was more than a decade old, and it was non-violent and non-sexual.
It seems like an inconsistent application of this principle. Sentences are often based on the amount of money involved. So while embezzlement by a CEO at a small company may well result in smaller losses and shorter prison sentences, the intent and conduct is exactly the same as a similar case at a larger company. If the smaller company CEO has a right to be forgotten, so does the larger one.
If you read the article it was a bit more nuanced than that. The one who had the right to be forgotten denied had a track record of misleading people about his conviction. The court (rightly, in my view) took this behaviour as evidence that his conviction remained relevant in a way that it was not for the other person (described as showing remorse). They didn’t just measure the length of the sentence.
IMHO, this is an encouraging, nuanced development. There has to be a balance between protecting people against serial offenders and rehabilitation.
I did read the article, but it simply said that the person had “continued to mislead the public”. At the very least I’d need to know more to call this fair, as we have no idea what that very broad statement entails. Is there proof that he continued to mislead the public? Has he been convicted of other crimes since then? What standard of proof was used to make this determination? If, for example, he has simply explained his side of the situation that led to his conviction publicly, and some people found that “misleading,” I would say this isn’t fair. If he has been convicted of additional crimes, then I would call it fair. So it depends on the specific circumstances.
Since it’s a report of a U.K. high court case, I think it’s safe to say there was documented proof. I mean, you can read the court transcripts if you like, but UK judges aren’t in the habit of letting unsubstantiated claims into the courtroom.
Is it up to Google's lawyers to do extensive investigations to find out that this guy had "a track record of misleading people"?
What if Google decides they don't want to pay for that? Then all that nuance will be gone.
If google wants to ignore an erasure request for journalistic and public good/interest reasons, yes.
Responsible Journalism can’t ignore stuff like this, so I’m not surprised that the Judge would expect google, after making the journalism case, to demonstrate some of that attention to detail.
This is basically an impossible burden to bear. If everyone who had anything whatsoever bad about them on the internet decided that the tiny burden of sending a letter was a worthy use of time then fighting the 1/10 which were the most dubious would ruin google financially.
This is like a network where you can cause a network to waste a GB of data by sending a KB of data.
The only reasonable response in that situation would be to invest only the money available to fight the worst of the worst requests and blanket accept almost everyone's request to silence anyone else.
If you turn it around and make a single request take a few thousand dollars worth of legal fees and many hours of work then worthless requests which are likely to be denied wont be bothered with but the most worthy may still be seen to.
When the lie is essentially acting like the record was already expunged, that is a terrible reason to deny expungement. It's not quite catch-22 but it's getting close.
You're right and it makes sense but how is someone like Google supposed to handle these requests case by case? Or are they supposed to hire an army of lawyers and send thousands of requests to be decided by the courts?
Requiring the publication to make the change is more feasible. In a hypothetical defamation situation the courts in the US have made this costly to do. In a conviction scenario Google search results can prevent people from being employed. I had a relative of a friend which had a published DUI which made it difficult for him to seek employment years after the issue. Employers have the ability to find criminal convictions and decide whether or not to hire an individual. Almost everyone googles people prior to contact.
- That people who want their data removed are criminals. That's hugely not the case. Does a teenager who was plastered all over social media / newspapers have to change his/her name because someone targeted abuse at him/her?
- Even if they were jailed for a transgression, they paid their part to the socienty. For serious transgressions, the authorities keeps tabs on them. For non-serious things, why does it matter? They paid their part.
GP is not assuming anything. Literally the first paragraph in the post:
> The man, who has not been named due to reporting restrictions surrounding the case, wanted search results about a past crime he had committed removed from the search engine.
Any example of somebody being abused/targeted and Google refusing to remove them from search results? The only cases where they fought back were people trying to hide their criminal record (most often politicians, white collar crime).
You need to convince a judge that you have a "good reason". France has only recently loosened its restrictions on what names people are allowed to have.
In some countries that's very hard to do. But why should you? If you committed a crime and spent your time in jail, why shouldn't you get a second chance? There are certain jobs that you cannot take depending on the crime you committed (esp working with children) but for most jobs it should be absolutely irrelevant if you committed a crime in the past.
Varies by country. Germany normally forbids changes except by marriage/divorce (I think), while the UK doesn’t really have legal names, just lots of databases run by people who want an official-looking document before they update anything (and even then my university will just refuse to reprint degree certificates with a new name).
I (an EU citizen) want to keep my right to think whatever I want about a criminal - and that includes looking at or keeping records. I feel like this 'right to be forgotten' hurts my safety - I don't want to forget that someone murdered someone or raped someone, these things are unforgettable and definitely unforgivable - and I want to know about them, and I want employers to be able to look them up.
No one is getting murder or rape convictions removed from the record. This is considerably smaller scale stuff, and the story itself mentions that two men jointly fought to have news of their conviction removed, one who got 6 months in jail, and one who got 4 years, both non violent white collar type offenses, and only the guy who got 6 months actually won. The second guy lost.
Yes, treatment should be always the same - the records stay. Two things though - many thigs that are considered a crime shouldn't be a crime, and second, if the crime is minor or irrelevant, the record won't hurt the person, otherwise it's a proof that it's not as irrelevant as you think. For example in my country, you will get even parking offenses (repeated, but still) written in your record. It hurts nobody because nobody cares.
> if the crime is minor or irrelevant, the record won't hurt the person, otherwise it's a proof that it's not as irrelevant as you think
Let me tell you a little thing called marijuana possession charges and how they make students ineligible for student aid and government loans/grants. Even getting charged with possession of a single joint is enough to bar a student from receiving aid or loans. Such charges or convictions are the reason employers turn people away all of the time.
The GDPR does not apply to records kept for personal purposes. If you want to scour the web on a regular basis and write down all the names of criminals in a notebook, then you are still free to do so.
Employers can already request that potential employees hand in a certificate from the authorities that they have no relevant convictions in Germany. (Führungszeugnis) All convictions past a statutory limit are not listed. There’s an extended version for especially sensitive positions (working with children, security sensitive positions,...) that lists convictions that are no longer part of the normal official limit.
If anything, you were probably feeling safer without being connected 24/7 to all the problems in the world. I'm really skeptical you were more afraid of strangers because you couldn't access public records about them.
No, I'm feeling safer because employers are able to look it up and thus make better decisions. It has nothing to do with me looking up random strangers.
Employers don't look up candidates on google, they look up criminal records with the authorities. It has nothing to do with the right to be forgotten. It was possible before, and it will be possible in the future.
I don't know where you live but here employers aren't allowed to look up things other than what is provided by the applicant anyway. Googling the name and using that for hiring decisions is simply illegal. Just ask all the relevant and legally allowed bits in your application process.
Except that most people aren't removing those convictions. With your rigid midset you are punishing thousands of people who have been abused by social media and have done nothing wrong. Destroying their lives permanently.
Could you give me an example, please? I really can't think of a situation when a crime is so irrelevant that nobody cares (and thus the record isn't needed) and yet the record destroys lives (and that proves that people care, BTW) and thus must be deleted.
Low level dope fiend?
Visiting a prostitute, or selling sex?
I can think of a number of crimes, which are pretty much irrelevant for a character assessment.
This is extremely relevant for someone that was formerly a prostitute or drug addict. Even with laws in the US to wipe underage prostitution records there is still a major issue of people even knowing it exists. The people that get convicted of underage prostitution sometimes are trafficking victims. So in the US we are so harsh that we punish previous human trafficking victims indefinitely. It’s a balance. Employers have the means to identify those convicted of crimes.
Is google publishing articles about this? Or are they simply a card catalog? Want to be forgotten? Why not address the publisher of information and not merely the index of it?
These things shouldn't be considered a crime in the first place, and I asked for real examples. I won't turn down a candidate for my sw dev position because they used to be a prostitute.
HR will also filter out candidates without an university (sometimes even specific, expensive ones) and you're not complaining about that. What about fixing HR instead?
> If felons were truly forgiven, they would have their right to vote restored.
This is a very US-centric attitude and very undemocratic in my view.
In Germany, for example, people in jail are generally allowed to vote. They could even set up a voting booth inside the jail if there were demand. However, there usually isn't and inmates vote by mail.
In the last 25 years, only 80 people, who were found guilty of treason, have lost the right to vote.
However, people whose sentence is at least a year in jail are excluded from running for office for 5 years.
> Society has never perceived jail time as truly resetting the scarlet letter back to zero.
Some jobs here require a so-called "certificate of conduct" which you can get from the police and which lists criminal convictions. The entries in this certificate expire after a certain number of years, depending on the the crime. The maximum time a conviction can be in the record is 10 years after it has been served. Afterwards, it's deleted. (It is not deleted from police records but from what a company could find out in a background check by going through official channels.)
I quoted the original number from a newspaper article which didn't go into details. But I was curious myself, so I contacted the author of the article and did some of my own research.
The German federal statistics office publishes a report every year which lists how many people have lost their right to vote or to hold public office according to §45 (2) and (5) StGB (German criminal law) [1]. Unfortunately, the reports do not distinguish between these two cases. In any case, the numbers are vanishingly small in recent years. I looked at the last 12 years for which there is a report (2005 - 2016) and it's only 15 cases, so a little more than 1 per year. Again, it doesn't distinguish between losing the right to vote and losing the right to hold office.
The people who lost their rights according to this law were mostly convicted for crimes against the state, the public order, or misconduct in office. To make it more precise, the report lists crimes such as joining a terrorist organisation, obstruction of punishment, forcing a subordinate to commit a crime, criminal assault while in office, corruption, etc. The original newspaper article summarized them as crimes against the state which I translated as treason.
However, it seems that the law was applied more often in the past. I found a secondary source [2] which lists 178 cases between 1978 and 2008. The primary source [3] is a dissertation which costs 80 €.
That's a very US-based list. Many countries around the world do not remove citizen rights to the same degree the US does. Not all countries have a sex offender registry. There is a culture in the States of looking on incarceration as a penalty for crimes. Some countries look on it as a rehabilitation tool and manage lower recidivism rates.
My right to be safe from a rapist is greater than their right to not be on a registry. If they want to avoid being on a registry, then avoid raping people!
> My right to be safe from a rapist is greater than their right to not be on a registry. If they want to avoid being on a registry, then avoid raping people!
This is a problem that should be fixed with laws, not with Google.
In many places, an 18 year old who sleeps with a 17 year old is a "rapist". Someone who breaks into a house and forces them at knifepoint to have sex is also a "rapist". One of these is a much greater danger to society and that should be reflected in our laws. And, to a certain extent, it is. Many places have judicial procedures where the first kind of "rapist" can have that offense reduced to a lesser class of crime after some level of incarceration and probation. Google should not be allowed to unilaterally undo that.
We need to quit treating people who go to prison as if they have a scarlet letter even after they have served their time. If they are that dangerous, they shouldn't be let out. The problem is that, in the US, we want to incarcerate people but not pay money for doing so.
If felons were truly forgiven, they would have their right to vote restored.
I have always thought that was outrageous. I think people should be aloud to vote even while they're in jail. The current system could allow a group to wipe out their political opponents by simply passing a law outlawing a common activity, then selectively enforcing it. I mean that's basically what the war on drugs was about.
Not so odd historically; the enactment of disenfranchisement for all felonies (as opposed to particularly major or election-related ones) started in the South as part of the Jim Crow policies to disenfranchise Black voters. Together with the use of the criminal justice system to disproportionately target Black people, this allowed starts to disenfranchise those voters without an explicit racial reference in the law.
Some US States are working to turn this around and have introduced [edit to finish thought: bills to change it]. It will take a while. Given that many states used felony charges and laws that don't allow felons to vote to control minorities, it may take a long while indeed.
Wikipedia actually has an interesting map on the subject for the US (below the fold/ToC):
There's a big difference between allowing people in prison to vote, and in never allowing them to vote again after they are released. People in prison by intention don't have the same civil rights as normal citizens, and so withholding the right to vote doesn't seem unreasonable. Withholding it in perpetuity seems outrageous.
I don't think it's unreasonable to suspend the right to vote to some (or indeed to most) prisoners.
But I also don't think it's unreasonable to allow some prisoners to vote, especially where they are imprisoned for short sentences and where it is in the interests of rehabilitating them to do so.
I don't see the point, though, in taking the right to vote away from prisoners.
It's not like stabbing someone makes your opinion on taxes less valid. Or drug dealing makes your opinion of the education system invalid.
Even if you rob someone, your opinion that the poor (a.k.a. probably you) should be financially supported by the government is not less valid.
There can a point be made that you're not exactly participating in society while you're in prison, so if we act like politics always perfectly reflect people's current needs and don't cumbersomely shape over decades, then you could argue that they shouldn't be allowed to vote over other people's society, therefore should only be allowed to vote when they're going to be released in the next legislature period. But that's just not the case. A moron in presidency can and will negatively affect people's lives for a long time after he's gone.
Lastly, I suppose, if you view prison primarily as punishment, then taking away their right to vote just extends that.
Nothing basic about it. The "War on Drugs", as we know it today, was literally started by the Nixon administration as a means to control liberals and minorities.[0]
I was completely and utterly horrified when I learned that the US strips such fundamental citizenship rights—which ought to be inalienable—from felons. It’s really preposterous and gives lie to the whole idea of ”the land of the free”. And don’t get me started on those ridiculous sex offender lists...
> If felons were truly forgiven, they would have their right to vote restored. They wouldn't be denied a passport to travel abroad or denied a firearms license. Convicted felons of financial crime will be denied officer positions such as CFO in public companies. A sex felony will be a lifetime of reporting on the sex offenders registries.
You should be made aware that none of those happen in most EU countries. Most people here feel that things done in the US like public sex offender registeries are abhorrent.
Note that in many countries, the UK for example, you can vote and get a passport if you have a criminal record. I think it makes sense that this verdict was delivered in Europe where it seems the view on ex-convicts is a bit more generous than in America.
There are 3 reasons to send people to prison: retribution (punishment), rehabilitation and removal (from society so they can’t commit any more crimes).
Now, should retribution be infinite? Is rehabilitation impossible? Should a criminal be permanently removed from society?
We generally answer no to these questions except in rare situations that are front-page news and enter popular vocabulary. That’s why Google is in the wrong here.
And they know it too - the only reason they want to do it is a few more ad clicks.
Mostly agree with you here but small nit to pick. There's no such thing as a firearms license in the United States. Felons lose their right to own (or even possess?) guns.
Depends on the state. For example, Illinois has Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) cards which are required for possessing firearms and ammunition. One criteria for obtaining a FOID card is not having committed a felony.
This doesn't happen in Europe. Part of the social contract over here is that criminals who have served their sentence have the right to have their fundamental rights restored. That in fact is the justification for punishment in the first place.
A society that takes on the authority to punish individuals must integrate these individuals after they have payed their debt to society. If they wouldn't the punishment would be arbitrary, cruel and serve no purpose.
1. Removal of social offender from society
2. Rehabilitation of non-conforming individuals
3. Punishment enough to deter future offenders
There's a tangental argument about whether or not incarceration achieves these goals, but the social stigma from being incarcerated isn't the point of any of these goals, and is instead just a cultural byproduct.
Those are just bad ad hoc consequentialist justifications for incarceration. If you really believe that, you can justify life sentences for every minor crime. Since it keeps criminals off the streets and increases utility. Or you can justify having incredibly short sentences. Since the correlation with longer sentences and greater deterrents is pretty small. Criminals tend to think they won't get caught and have high time preference. And I doubt it's terribly effective at rehabilitation.
You can certainly justify discriminating against people with criminal records that way. It's by far the best predictor of job performance. High social trust is probably the most important aspect of a society. Letting known criminals get into positions of power is not an ideal way to achieve that.
The main reason we have prisons is justice. The basic human desire for fairness and consequences for wrongdoing. No one wants to see a murderer get away with it. Even if there is some compelling argument why punishment won't increase utility. For instance, people tend to strongly oppose having sentences done by statistical algorithms. That are vastly better at predicting recidivism than human judges. Because they feel unfair.
And that same desire for fairness is also why people prefer criminals get a second chance.
> Society has never perceived jail time as truly resetting the scarlet letter back to zero. Therefore, the debate is whether "Google results" is in the same bucket as "sex offender list". For many in society, they think it's wrong to remove those results from Google.
I mean, on the most basic level, a prior offense is an excellent predictor of a future offense. If I want to hire somebody to supervise women or children, I'd like not to hire somebody who (at any point in their life) victimized women or children, because it's not too much to ask!
I, for one, don't think a murderer should be forgiven. A murderer gets to live, and the victim is no longer alive, there is fundamentally nothing you can do to be forgiven for murder. To me, that is as it should be.
At very least, the perpetrator of a crime should not be left to decide whether or not I forgive him, and to enforce that through the courts.
I'd like not to hire somebody who (at any point in their life) victimized women or children, because it's not too much to ask!
And you should get that - by making an official request for those records, and presenting documents that show that the person is applying to your job which involves supervising women and children.
None of which requires it to be at the distance of a click.
I, for one, don't think a murderer should be forgiven. A murderer gets to live, and the victim is no longer alive, there is fundamentally nothing you can do to be forgiven for murder. To me, that is as it should be.
I, on the other hand, would rather not get robbed because your draconian policies left the murderer alive but unable to get a job.
> If I want to hire somebody to supervise women or children, I'd like not to hire somebody who (at any point in their life) victimized women or children, because it's not too much to ask!
Sure. But let's make that list formal, with recognised judicial ways of getting on it, and recognised judicial ways of getting off it, rather than just "this newspaper said it", which leaves people without recourse unless they can afford lawyers.
That would make sense if you were never guilty of it, but I disagree completely with the idea that somebody who has been ruled guilty (without a successful appeal) has a right to be forgotten only for having served their time.
It depends on the crime. Some crimes are serious and you'll never escape those. But most really don't need to be recorded for life. Rehabilitation is an important concept for a just system, because without it there's less incentive for criminals to remain free of crime.
> For adults, the rehabilitation period is one year for community orders, two years for custodial sentences of six months or less, four years for custodial sentences of over six months and up to and including 30 months, and seven years for custodial sentences of over 30 months and up to and including 48 months. Custodial sentences of over four years will never become spent and must continue to be disclosed when necessary.
That's not really true. Serving prison time is neither a way to "forgive" nor a way to "pay debt back to society". Those are just common phrases some people use.
If felons were truly forgiven, they would have their right to vote restored. They wouldn't be denied a passport to travel abroad or denied a firearms license. Convicted felons of financial crime will be denied officer positions such as CFO in public companies. A sex felony will be a lifetime of reporting on the sex offenders registries.
Society has never perceived jail time as truly resetting the scarlet letter back to zero. Therefore, the debate is whether "Google results" is in the same bucket as "sex offender list". For many in society, they think it's wrong to remove those results from Google.