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NYT Discovers the Panopticon

Posted by michael on from the stalker's-delight dept.

Erris writes "Should we be surprised at the NYT attacking search engines? This article seeks to blame Google for all privacy loss, as if someone else remembering and sharing the things YOU publish is worse than credit card purchase databases, phone records, credit records being created and shared by OTHERS without your consent. Libraries must really be evil."

2 of 335 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Its an innocent article by RedWizzard · · Score: 5, Informative
    The article almost seems to suggest Google should allow people the opportunity to remove listings from the index.
    It's more about the cache than the results list, but still Google will remove your site from the cache and/or the results list. Details here. I can imagine some search engines are not as webmaster-friendly as Google, but most of them are fairly reasonable. It's certainly pretty unfair of this article to target Google.
  2. Re:Perhaps... by jpdbest · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've seen a few pages on google where no cache was available which leads me to think that there's a way to disable caching also.

    There is a way to automatically disable caching pages by Google, not to mention a whole slew of options to prevent or remove indexing and archives. Have a look at this page:

    Remove Content from Google's Index

    They give the individual user many options to control what Google can and can't do with their content. If you wish to prevent the Googlebot from archiving/caching a web page, you would use this technique:

    If you want to prevent all robots from archiving content on your site, use the NOARCHIVE meta tag. Place this tag in the <HEAD> section of your documents as follows:

    <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

    If you want to allow other indexing robots to archive your page's content, preventing only Google's robots from caching the page, use the following tag:

    <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

    You would think that if the author of the NYT article was so horrified about Google indexing and caching pages, they might have given a more informative and _HELPFUL_ solution than:

    Google says its search engine reflects whatever is on the Internet. To remove information about themselves, people have to contact Web site administrators.