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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.
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.
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!
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.
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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.
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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.