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BBC Curates The "Right To Be Forgotten" Links That Google Can't

Posted by timothy on from the good-on-them dept.

An anonymous reader writes, quoting the BBC's Internet Blog: "Since a European Court of Justice ruling last year, individuals have the right to request that search engines remove certain web pages from their search results. Those pages usually contain personal information about individuals." The BBC, however, is not obligated to completely censor the results, and so has taken an approach that other media outlets would do well to emulate: they're keeping a list of those pages delisted by the search engines, and making them easy to find through the BBC itself. Why? The BBC has decided to make clear to licence fee payers which pages have been removed from Google's search results by publishing this list of links. Each month, we'll republish this list with new removals added at the top. We are doing this primarily as a contribution to public policy. We think it is important that those with an interest in the “right to be forgotten” can ascertain which articles have been affected by the ruling. We hope it will contribute to the debate about this issue. We also think the integrity of the BBC's online archive is important and, although the pages concerned remain published on BBC Online, removal from Google searches makes parts of that archive harder to find.

2 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. can someone from Europe please explain by circletimessquare · · Score: 4, Interesting

    why anyone thought forced delinking will ever work?

    it just draws more attention to what you are trying to delink

    it seems so absurd. i can't imagine a group of adults believing in or supporting such a ridiculous concept

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  2. Re:That's good by BradleyUffner · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Is it reasonable to have reports of this incident immediately served up when any potential employer googles his name?

    Yes. Google's job is to index the context of web pages. Google is NOT responsible for the content or truthfulness of those pages. If web pages out there have his name on them Google should return those pages when someone searches for that string. If this man has a problem with the content of a page he should take it up with the people who published the page.

    At least in a sane world, this is how things would operate.