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Wikipedia Reports 50 Links From Google 'Forgotten', Issues Transparency Report
netbuzz (955038) writes The Wikimedia Foundation this morning reports that 50 links to Wikipedia from Google have been removed under Europe's "right to be forgotten" regulations, including a page about a notorious Irish bank robber and another about an Italian criminal gang. "We only know about these removals because the involved search engine company chose to send notices to the Wikimedia Foundation. Search engines have no legal obligation to send such notices. Indeed, their ability to continue to do so may be in jeopardy. Since search engines are not required to provide affected sites with notice, other search engines may have removed additional links from their results without our knowledge. This lack of transparent policies and procedures is only one of the many flaws in the European decision."
Wikimedia now has a page listing all notifications that search listing were removed. itwbennett also wrote in with Wikimedia news this morning: the Wikimedia foundation published its first ever transparency report, detailing requests to remove or alter content (zero granted, ever) and content removed for copyright violations.
Time to get beta forgotten!
As a European (Greek) i must beg our American (USA) brothers and sisters to defend their/our "right to remember"...
Bravo to Google and Wikipedia for trying to be transparent about this. The law used seems absurd, and is open for much abuse (think politics, for one).
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
The funny thing is, both en pages were about to be deleted for lack of notoriety. Now will the all the media coverage, they have suddenly become notable, and my bet is both articles will be retained. Streisand effect at it's finest.
Dear humanity, welcome to the Information Age. Why do we call it Information age? Because we developed technologies that allow us to retain significant portion of all information and knowledge produced, from mundane to crucial. As such, your right to forget should not, cannot trump our right to remember.
It would be nice if someone enhanced their page to be more than images of the removal notices. Having an easily clickable list would be a nice addition.
if wiki is being sent alerts to the fact that they are having links removed, all they need to do is create a static page with all the links no longer listed on google. and boom, Streisand effect in action.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Wikipedia's founder censors plenty of content himself. Then he says stuff like this. Right.
Right to be forgotten is horrible misguided and will only be a tool to create memory holes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Two of the three articles Wikimedia received notices about are for convicted criminals (Gerry Hutch and Renato Vallanzasca) who thrive on publicity for money. Both of them have proved litigious in the past, so it's not surprising they'd want the Wiki pages delisted. However, I can't help but think that running a notoriously violent branch of the Mafia in Milan or robbing banks aren't exactly the kind of things the law hoped would be forgotten.
If I make a page now writing that you are a pedophile, with your name and address on top of it, and I am outside of your jurisdiction, there is absolutely nothing you can do. If you are a European, you can at least get this page disassociated from your name in search engines.
Lets leave it to the justice system to do justice, please, we've seen what vigilante justice brings us.
Zero granted, ever???
I can't imagine that absolutely none of the requests where verifiable facts. {like a mis-typed date}
If the person dies, can Google re-enable the search result?
Or have these pages gone into a permanent black hole as far as search engines are concerned?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Google also recently axed its very useful Discussion search function: Where has the discussion search filter gone? - Google Product Forums No reason given - ostensibly to combat piracy in bootlegging forums? And to kill grandmothers who are trying to figure out why they have these shooting pains racing up their left arm. Oh yeah, etc. Nice one, Google. Just another instance of them being useless pains in the ass for whatever reason.
Let's let technology improve our culture by showing us which things everyone does, and which things almost nobody does but which we need to know about.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What everybody seems to forget is that google only told wikipedia that "certain searches" will no longer return the link mentioned. Not what those searched are.
If I google (in .eu) for "gerry hutch", the first result is the wikipedia page for gerry hutch. Exactly the link that was removed for "certain searches". So the "certain search" wasn't "gerry hutch". It could have been your mother. And unless your from a familly of Irish bankrobbers, it is highly unlikely that the wikipedia page of gerry hutch is a relevant result for your mother....
But only if we know what the search was, we can have any trust in Google actually doing what the court ordered them.
We're about to see the world's single biggest application of the Streisand Effect, ever.
Fuck the EU All of it.
*Eurasia
Crimey
Soon, we may need to rely on paper Encyclopedia's again as Big Brother revises history.
People apparently forget, that before google we all enjoyed a right to be forgotten. The *original* article were and are still available. They are simply not made conveniently extremly easy to get. And this was as it was before google. This is not censorship, as the original article are still available. Now with google you cannot ever be forgotten. A society which cannot forget , is a society which cannot forgive, is one where freedom are reduced. Understand this : freddom is not at what society willingly accept. Freedom is to be found at the edges what society may not like, like gay mariage, like smoking pot, or whatever legal or borderline legal variety of things. If you get caught and society never forget you have a much harder time, and people will simply forgoe their freedom rather than get fucked for life.
paradoxically if you remove the right to be forgotten you reduce the freedom of people because they know if they get caught in the gray zone, then society will never forget and they get fucked
Google is an asshat for reporting intentionally and I hope the european regulator whoop their ass for that. And most people do not understand that with their cry of censorship they are actually removing freedom to us all.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I see the linked "Notices received from search engines" page has several low quality screen shot images showing the Google "notice of removal from Google Search". The links can barely be made out from these images. How about actually copying and pasting the list of URLs as text? Let's crank the Streisand effect up to 11!
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
Yea the subject says it all.
That wouldn't come under "right to be forgotten" though, a simple edit or correction request would address that.
The whole notion of a "right" to prohibit someone else from making a factually accurate statement on one website about the content of another site seems utterly absurd to me. Removing the destination page itself could perhaps be excused in some cases ... but to accept that the owner of a page making a statement about somebody has a right to keep it, even if it's out of date, then turn round and gag the likes of Google from making current factual statements about that page? Every "judge" supporting that nonsense needs to be unemployed ASAP.
Google
Yandex
ixquick Gerry Hutch
Anyone who thinks this law is terrible should read this article about how rich people are already able to bury bad press about themselves.
Scrubbed
I watched online as a college classmate went from disgrace to redemption in months. That’s when I found myself deep in the world of black-ops reputation management.
so search engines can index them!
(and so we can easily click and see what the fuss is or isnt about).
"The Wikimedia Foundation this morning reports that 50 links to Wikipedia from Google have been removed under Europe's "right to be forgotten" regulations,..."
Looking at the Wikipedia page listing the notifications they've received of pages removed from the european search engine https://wikimediafoundation.or... , two were english wikipedia, two wre italian, and the remainder are all nl.wikipedia-- Netherlands.
So, apparently the Dutch have much more desire to be forgotten than the rest of Europe. (Or else, possibly, they're just more efficient at getting the right-to-be-forgotten notices out)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
A person which was arrested (even if it does not appear in their judicial case) or involved in a local scandal would in the past still find a job since no firm for a normal job would go as far as to send somebody to search their private life (your average job). But now a days , if you smoked pot and it is noted somewhere even if you have no judicial file, you get double whammy punished because people at job interview will avoid you. And that count for all sort of controversial shit. You get gay marrier ? published the ban ? Google do not forget. A job interviewer or neighbors googling could find out, even after you moved to anotehr town. In the past not so.
In all case, because now at job itnerview people can google your name, any transgression against the "middle way" can and will be reacted negatively by part of the society. But before google and search engine, it was relatively easy to correct (moving to the otther side of the country). Nowasayd not so much. This is the aprt about not forgiving. Because your transgression can be found out once documented *EVEN* much later , and still punished by society. And since society as an average middle way is nearly always either much more liberal to some of the "edge" (imagine finding out you are in a neo nazi party) or more conservative than the other edge (imagine people finding out your borderline sexual behavior) then you get fucked for your "trangression". Or even if you did something idiotic like that PR wioman and her twitter idiotic action ? You think anybody will hire her in a PR job now ? She is radioactive material because google *never* forget. But without google, she could maybe wait it out a year or two, then try somewhere else. With google ? not so much.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org