Re: European court reaches verdict with profound impact in Internet

The problem is not as black and white as you paint it. The real problem with the Internet is that legislators do not know how to legislate rights and regulations to deal properly with civil and human rights and intellectual property rights and the US based companies are the ones profiting the most.

Privacy International, based in the UK and the European Digital Rights Platform, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and many more have over the past ten years given accurate reports of how privacy rights are violated, large scale by corporations selling consumer data to anyone including federal agencies.

With the advent of the Internet of Things there exists the real danger that mobility tracking data, cell phone data, short range and remote sensor tracking data as well as medical data generated through wearables and medical apps end up where they should not.

The freedom of speech and the right to access to information cannot be a free pass to big data mining to sell private data to the highest bidder, in casu medical data to e.g. pharmaceutical companies, which btw are allowed to show commercials hawking medical drugs and pharmaceuticals on TV only in the US and when I last checked in New Zealand.


It boils down to who owns the private data about an individual once it is on the Net, the US stance is that, it  is -subject to certain restrictions - public domain, the European Union is that the individual has the final say, and to a certain extent rightfully so.

Again when I made the suggestion that the edit on an offending item on the Internet be "updated" through mediation of a national agency supervising privacy and digital rights, two options remain, removal of the offending item itself, or tagging the item with an update.

The former would exempt the search engine company, the latter would exempt the creator of the offending item.

What we need to avoid at all cost is the notion of 'digital profiling', whether it be done by search engine algorithms or the individual erasing 'inconvenient' personal history.

Already I have been receiving some buzz about possible meetings between privacy and digital rights organizations to start making sense out of privacy, digital, human and intellectual property rights in the emerging new field of the Internet of Things, big data mining and the Internet of humans.

Do not get me wrong, I think Google and US search engines have a right to exist and do what they do, but who ends up doing what with their search engine results is out of their hands.

I hope that in the end common sense backed by expert technical advice from those most knowledgeable prevails and in fact the industry must now together with privacy and digital rights organizations work out practical and feasible scenarios.

So we are back to square one, the global digital bill of rights proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, not just some European Union bill.

 
Milton Ponson
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On Saturday, May 17, 2014 9:08 PM, Simon Spero <sesuncedu@gmail.com> wrote:
 


IANAL but:

Surely all Google, or any US search engine, would need to do is close down all local subsidiaries in states that are subject to the ECJ.  EU member states would be free to attempt to block all access to google (or to refer the reasonableness of the preliminary ruling back to the ECJ; the explicit decision to allow the content provider to continue to serve the document at issue).   

Showing willingness to cut your population off from the big three search engines because the EU loves Spanish criminals would be an act of quite remarkable political courage in the week leading up to what could be the surliest European Parliamentary elections to date. 

If any litigant were to seek enforcement of  a judgement of this kind against Google in California, I would expect to see summary judgement granted against them, as in the district court trial in LICRA v. Yahoo! ; the 9th circuit rulings against Yahoo! were based on ripeness, and the case was remanded for dismissal *without* prejudice.