Following EU Ruling, BBC Article Excluded From Google Searches 239
Albanach writes: In 2007, the BBC's economics editor, Robert Peston, penned an article on the massive losses at Merrill Lynch and the resulting resignation of their CEO Stan O'Neal. Today, the BBC has been notified that the 2007 article will no longer appear in some Google searches made within the European Union, apparently as a result of someone exercising their new-found "right to be forgotten." O'Neal was the only individual named in the 2007 article. While O'Neal has left Merrill Lynch, he has not left the world of business, and now holds a directorship at Alcoa, the world's third largest aluminum producer with $23 billion in revenues in 2013.
As well as this SlashDot article (Score:4, Interesting)
Soon you won't be finding this Slashdot article in EU Google searches either.
Indirect References (Score:5, Interesting)
Chilling Effects clone for search removals? (Score:4, Interesting)
How long until a clone of Chilling Effects comes around and indexes all of the removals under the "right to be forgotten" law? Google could even link to them the same way they do Chilling Effects for sites that have been de-listed due to DMCA notices.
The right to be forgotten is stupid. (Score:2, Interesting)
This law is just a workaround for the fact that humans don't think critically about the possible inaccuracy of information found on the Internet. Censorship (which is exactly what this is) is a greater crime against society, and should not be used here.
Instead, we should require that employers, load evaluators, etc., be limited to what sources of information they can use when making a life-impacting decision. Such a law is hard to enforce, of course, but is better than this misguided censorship.
Re:Blaming Google (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, although the article is quite opinionated, it seems to reference events of the time, so it shouldn't be considered inaccurate unless the author was lying.
O'Neal (the article spells it with an 'a', despite the summary substituting an 'i') is a director in a new company, so his activities as a CEO of a previous company are still relevant.
And the events of the article are less than a decade old, so the article is definitely not outdated.
So, by all counts Google is dropping the search results voluntarily without even trying to filter for any EU requirements. Thus this is squarely Google's bad.
Re: Not Voluntarily (Score:5, Interesting)
In general I applaud the EU ruling *if* it really gets implemented fairly. But there's all sorts of wiggles to mess around with.
We've been focusing on "that one guy" but look at this note way at the bottom of the article:
"It is only a few days since the ruling has been implemented - and Google tells me that since then it has received a staggering 50,000 requests for articles to be removed from European searches."
And that's 50K requests in a few days.
Google can afford to hire "the army of paralegals", but does the ruling extend to smaller services? You can delist-bomb a small site out of existence when someone manages a "DDOS Distributed De-List of Service" attack on every article in their entire catalog. Then you get games where people try to de-list each other's materials.
Not that I am a fan of Google, but I can bet a senior lawyer at Google is saying "well hell, besides the cost, if we have taken down seventeen million articles on all kinds of topics, there goes our ten year competitive advantage of useful searches."
Re:Blame Google. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you submit a resume, people check your references, but apparently keeping people from finding out an *executive's* history just requires bigger lawyers.
Re:wait (Score:4, Interesting)
They didn't remove the article entirely.
we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google:
They don't say which searches, but the wording implies that searches for Stan O'Neal [bbc.co.uk] will be affected. But searches for the former CEO of Merril Lynch [bbc.co.uk] should work just fine.