Forum Moderators: goodroi
The Guardian has no form of appeal against parts of its journalism being made all but impossible for most of Europe's 368 million to find. The strange aspect of the ruling is all the content is still there: if you click the links in this article, you can read all the "disappeared" stories on this site. No one has suggested the stories weren't true, fair or accurate. But still they are made hard for anyone to find.
It is now almost certain that the request for oblivion has come from someone who left a comment about the story.
Google has been accused of misinterpreting a European court’s “right to be forgotten” ruling by deleting links to apparently harmless news articles in a bid to whip up anger against “censorship”.
We've all got used to a huge erosion of privacy on the Internet. It's good to see the trend reversed.
Google is struggling to deal with the sheer volume of demands for it to erase aspects of people’s pasts. Around 70,000 requests for links to be removed have been made in the past month – more than 8,000 [8,497] of which were from Britain – it emerged today. If all demands were met, more than a quarter of a million [267,550] web pages would be deleted – around 34,000 [34,597] as a result of complaints made by people in Britain.
Google de-listing of BBC article 'broke UK and Euro public interest laws' - So WHY do it?
Google's publicity stunt this week, in which it de-linked selected mass media articles and posts from its search results and informed the journalists in question it had done so, appears to have been illegal.
The gigantic advertising company now faces the prospect of having to re-link to articles it has de-linked in the UK in recent weeks.
Newswires suggest that Google has performed a U-turn on the de-linking. Yesterday we predicted the high-risk strategy might backfire.
"When Google receives a request to de-link, it must consider whether any damage to the person making the request is outweighed by a relevant public interest in keeping the link."
What constitutes an invasion of privacy is the snippets of the search results that Google displays - but with a blog post or newspaper article, these only ever show the headline and first paragraph.
And the story keeps on going...
After widespread criticism, Google has begun reinstating some links it had earlier removed under the controversial "right to be forgotten" ruling.
Articles posted online by the Guardian newspaper were removed earlier this week, but have now returned fully to the search engine.
Google has defended its actions, saying that it was a "difficult" process.
"We are learning as we go," Peter Barron, head of communications for Google in Europe, told the BBC.
Speaking to Radio 4's Today programme, he dismissed claims made on Thursday that the company was simply letting all requests through in an attempt to show its disapproval at the ruling.
"Absolutely not," he said. "We are aiming to deal with it as responsibly as possible.Google reinstates 'forgotten' links after pressure [bbc.co.uk]
