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'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court decision that allows people to request that certain pages be scrubbed from Google's search results if they're outdated or irrelevant.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!"
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
I hope this makes people think twice before filing a forget-me request. It ensures they'll be remembered.
Perhaps you'll be the victim of slander and lose your career over a lie that is interesting enough to go viral where your vindication isn't and doesn't.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I hope this makes people think twice before filing a forget-me request. It ensures they'll be remembered.
Perhaps you'll be the victim of slander and lose your career over a lie that is interesting enough to go viral where your vindication isn't and doesn't.
THIS. All of the stories on this decision seem to be focusing on people who are clearly bad or did terrible things in the past.
But our modern news and social media society on the internet archives all sorts of crap that isn't actually true, and never was true. But the salacious headline will always draw attention; the minor blurb on the back page will never be remembered when the charges are dropped or the person is acquitted or everyone just admits that it was a mistake.
(Just to be clear: I don't think the EU decision will actually work, and TFA is proof of it. But we do have a real problem -- even if 95% of the claims made so far have been by people who committed horrible bad past acts, the real injustice is to the 5% who just got caught up in media attention for something that turned out not to be true, or even nowhere near as horrible as people claimed.)
I can see the headlines now: Barbara Streisand sues for trademark dilution.
Lets not forget that you don't even need charges.
http://www.cnet.com/news/pirac...
Something like that could seriously place job promotions or prospects in jeopardy. If could ruin a legitimate business just with the controversy hanging out there associated with the name even though he was vindicated in the end.
Perhaps you'll be the victim of slander...
The words are nothing. You would be a victim of those who believed them. Everybody wags the dog in this argument.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
What happens when Google visits his site? Is that another take down request? I see the possibility of infinite recursion here.
No they don't. They remove plenty of sites from their archive. It even makes /. headlines occasionally.
I think the key is that we need to find a balance between the right to privacy and the right to be forgotten.
Ludicrous story in the paper only designed to make headlines by slandering you? Sure, let's forget about
You were charged with a crime but did your time and are back in society? Sure, let's forget about it and let you get back to being a member of society. (Otherwise we might as well just brand criminals on the forehead)
You're a big company that had an oil spill but want to rewrite history? Let's not forget
You shouldn't assume that because Google has removed a record that someone has a legal right to be forgotten.
Google is intentionally fucking around with removals because it's pissed off at the court ruling, so it's trying to make as much of a mockery as it can without falling foul of the law.
That means it's removing cases where there is clear public interest defence, because it wants to make a point.
Which is one of the reasons having market monopolies is bad. Because Google has a search engine monopoly it can fuck around with results to suit it's political agenda. In a truly competitive market this would hurt it because other engines would keep the public interest stuff and only remove the legit stuff.
Given this, I would suggest that rather than going to .com instead of .co.uk you just go to a different search engine altogether - one that doesn't manipulate results to suit it's political agenda which is exactly what Google is doing here.
There is absolutely no reason someone convicted of a serious crime 5 years ago would have their conviction considered spent. Even public bankruptcy records can be used by credit rating agencies up to 7 years after the event.
Only minor crimes have shorter periods, such as speeding which I believe is about 3 years normally.
This is Google playing politics, and not a problem with European law stating that people still serving sentences can have their crimes forgotten or anything stupid like that.
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.