Slashdot Mirror
'Hidden From Google' Remembers the Sites Google Is Forced To Forget
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "Hidden From Google, the brainchild of a web programmer in New Jersey, archives each website that Google is required to take down from European Union search listings thanks to the recent court decision that allows people to request that certain pages be scrubbed from Google's search results if they're outdated or irrelevant. That decision has resulted in takedown requests from convicted sex offenders and huge banking companies, among thousands of others."
... that takes the info from Hidden From Google and reinserts it back into your searches ;)
Fox: "I think we should call it... your grave!" Cast: "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"
I hope this makes people think twice before filing a forget-me request. It ensures they'll be remembered.
He will do great - right up until he is sued into oblivion.
The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
StreisandEffect.com ?
Table-ized A.I.
> That decision has resulted in takedown requests from convicted sex offenders and huge banking companies,
Note that those are requests, not actual removals.
The law has a very broad public-interest exception, none of those requests will pass muster under the law.
In fact, the recent hoohaw about google delisting certain newspaper articles was ended when Google admitted that those delistings were not consistent with the law.
Has it all anyway.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I feel sorry for those who legitimately should have stories removed. Falsely accused, slandered, etc. Though if the site takes the time to put the truthful rebuttals up front it would mitigate that.
For those legitimately outed I have no sympathy. With one exception: someone whose criminal record has been expunged. That is a legal proceeding, which carries weight. Of course the site owner opens himself and the site to prosecution for slander. Forget international borders, someone anywhere in the world can sue you in the US for slander.
It looks like at least some convicted persons are obtaining their "right to be forgotten" before even completing their sentence.
For example, "Manuel Abrantes" was convicted to five years and nine months for pedophilia and other crimes on September 3, 2010, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... Adding that up, Mr. Abrantes wouldn't have completed serving his sentence until June, 2015 - but it's already time that his offense should be forgotten?!? "Carlos Silvino" was convicted to eighteen years in the same case.
A search for these names on google.co.uk shows the tell-tale language: "Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe."
It seems to me that the above phrase may itself turn into a "Scarlet Letter" of sorts, causing searchers to use alternative search engines or simply use google.com instead of google.co.uk, for example, to dig in an find the items that the person named was making an effort to hide.
As a United-Statesian, I'm used to the idea that a conviction for that sort of criminal activity is typically treated as data that follows a person around for the rest of their lives - perhaps a European can tell us when it's considered appropriate to forget about a convicted sex offenders offenses?
Personally, I was expecting Google to add a specific link to the request to remove search results in a similar way to the mechanism that Google uses for DMCA take-down notices, where following the link takes you to chillingeffects.org which shows the DMCA letter - most conveniently lists all the URL's that a publisher is asking Google to remove.
An expunged conviction is still factually something that happened. Under the First Amendment, it's never libel to state a true statement of fact. If the matter is of public concern, the plaintiff in any defamation action must prove that the statement was false. And if the plaintiff is a public figure knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for truth must be proven. In addition to the robust First Amendment protection of free speech, there is 230 of the CDA, the federal Speech Act barring enforcement of most foreign libel judgments and local anti-SLAPP laws. I really can't see any ground for any legal action in the US that would be consistent with the First Amendment. Also courts have held that the First Amendment does not permit liability for republishing facts of old expunged convictions.
If it's legitimate slander, then go after the people publishing it, not a search engine.
If you can't get the original article taken down, then you have no business trying to get search engines to forget it.
What happens when Google visits his site? Is that another take down request? I see the possibility of infinite recursion here.
Barbara Streisand to the white courtesy phone.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Freedom of speech and of the press guarantee the right to publish FACTUAL reports regarding events, current or historical. In the absence of misrepresentation of the facts, there's no reason that these articles should be "erased" from Google's search index. Of course, even with the erasure, other sources will rise to provide this information, e.g., this new site.
We already have laws to protect the innocent under most conditions. Slander, Libel, and defamation did not vanish when the Internet popped up. They are harder to enforce, sure, but they did not go away.
In the case of your 5% innocence (which is as useless as most other statistics in my opinion) any of those people could have sued the source for damages. If found guilty, sources are forced to change or amend content and generally issue public apology.
This "forget me" law does not do anything to address the root problem. How does someone in the US sue someone in German for libel, or visa-versa? They don't, or at least common people could never afford to do so.
The other point to mention is probably more important. This law was never described as a means for individuals to prune their personal history. The law was intended to prevent bad information from remaining prevalent on the Internet. Such as bad science that had been discounted (not just from conspiracy sites, but that was a large portion of the case "for" this law.
The way it has been implemented, it has a gaping loophole allowing abuse by individuals. Laws that suck should not be passed, but, people keep on believing the bullshit bureaucrats tell them.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
10 days ago, I wondered how long it would take someone to make a website to anti-censor google. I guess I got my answer.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I believed the requests were only to remove certain key words? So if someone puts up an article about Forest Whitaker and Battlefield Earth, F.W. could get his name removed from the search results in that context. However, the original article would still contain his name, and you could still find the article if searching for Battlefield Earth.
Change your name into John Smith.
Alternative solution: use your own name in so many different and unrelated places on the internet, that people must believe there is at least 2 or more of you with the same name.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Indeed. WayBackMachine respects robots.txt retroactively, which is insane in my opinion, because it means what WayBackMachine says the web looked like in, say 1999, can change at any moment. For example, if WayBackMachine has 10 years of archived data for a site which then comes under new management that decides it wants to erase that history, they can just put up a robots.txt on the current site, and WayBackMachine will not only stop serving the current version of the site, it will also stop serving all the previous ten years of data. This happened to the original jumptheshark.com, for example.
I cant find a single example how this can be helpful, not harmful
and what about fucking.... fucked up... fucking insane...
DOXBIN?
google isn't doing a damn _thing_ about doxbin! google caches and serves thousands of social security numbers, stolen cc #'s by caching
DOXBIN... now through the truly evil darktor.com servers....
The page has 15 examples from a current estimate of 70,000 take down requests.
Don't these bureaucratic fools realize that they are not able to control the internet, and that the relative lack of bureaucrats is what makes the internet strong? Yes they can control a company like Google through threats but the moment they create a distortion in the market by pushing the internet one way, there will be an opposite and equal reaction in the exact opposite way.
So the NSA pushes things like NIST one way and the result is that the hard core crypto world will now move away from NIST. If youtube is forced to censor then 100 uncensored video sites will show up.
People are told they can't get netflix so proxy companies pop up to sell what was otherwise a fairly speciality service. I mean how many people were buying international proxy services 5 years ago?
I am willing to bet that in some countries where the government censors are at war with the internet that it is a national sport to get around them.
On a side note, I can tell you that if my local government (Nova Scotia, Canada) ran the Internet that you would be paying $200/month for a 256k ISDN and that domain name "approvals" would take years. My government being typically bad it is great that the internet is fundamentally structured so as to make it difficult for governments to truly harm it. They can harm some companies within their reach, but they can't really grasp the slippery concept of the internet itself.
pretty sure the pulled listings are only removed from google.eu
Most people commenting on this (particularly in the US) are confused. No sites are being taken down because of this ruling. No pages are even being removed from Google's index -- they can all still be found through Google.
What Google is being forced to do is to remove them from the search results when the search is for a particular person's name. The reason is nothing to do with a "right to be forgotten" (that is a separate issue altogether). The reason is because a search based on someone's name is regarded as the equivalent of researching and publishing a dossier on that person (like a credit report, or an employment history would be). Credit reference agencies have strict rules on what data they can keep, and for how long (at least in Europe), and so does any other entity who handles personal data. The reasoning is "why should Google be allowed to publish dossiers at virtually no cost to them, which flout the laws about such things, when everyone else who is in the personal data business has to spend a lot of money to do careful research and follow legal restrictions?"
You can argue about how close a search result is to a dossier, and whether Google should have to follow the personal data rules in these cases, but do not confuse this with the "right to be forgotten", which is about deleting information.
Nothing says Google couldn't publish the list of takedown requests. As long as they don't appear in search results, they would probably be complying with the court order..
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
Must people seem to be in support of this idea/site - I'm not.
A large portion of you hate Google Glass often citing privacy reasons. Well, here we have a court decision to try and support individual privacy and now most of you seem to be against it.