Google Accidentally Reveals Data On 'Right To Be Forgotten' Requests 51
Colin Castro points out an article from The Guardian, who noticed that Google's recent transparency report contained more data than intended. When perusing the source code, they found data about who was making requests for Google to take down links under the "right to be forgotten" law. The data they found covers 75% of all requests made so far.
Less than 5% of nearly 220,000 individual requests made to Google to selectively remove links to online information concern criminals, politicians and high-profile public figures, the Guardian has learned, with more than 95% of requests coming from everyday members of the public. ... Of 218,320 requests to remove links between 29 May 2014 and 23 March 2015, 101,461 (46%) have been successfully delisted on individual name searches. Of these, 99,569 involve "private or personal information."
Only 1,892 requests – less than 1% of the overall total – were successful for the four remaining issue types identified within Google’s source code: "serious crime" (728 requests), "public figure" (454), "political" (534) or "child protection" (176) – presumably because they concern victims, incidental witnesses, spent convictions, or the private lives of public persons.
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And they are supposed to be some of the smartest people around.
bah. we have a right to know who wants to hide (Score:2)
that's what "data wants to be free like beer" is all about.
used to be it took old spies and retired cops with shelves full of criss-cross phone books to do skip tracing. find the lost siblings from adoption situations.do background checks before hiring people claiming to be old spies and retired cops. that's the Internet's job now.
don't break it.
Thank goodness for Wikipedia then. (Score:1, Troll)
Old Max Mosley [wikipedia.org] won't be able to run and hide, just try and have his minions edit his past deeds away.
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There's that love of pernicious gossip and armchair vigilantism again. Nothing as much fun for the average cit as to try and hurt someone at no risk to themselves. Most are just as bad as the people they so enjoy ostracizing. A significant proportion are worse.
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Why is he fighting that, the dude got 5 women to sleep with him at once, what is wrong there?
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Actually he got 5 women to spank him while wearing Nazi attire. Godwin'd that one now too, dammit.
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True!
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Do not ... (Score:2)
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StayPuff Marshmallow man!
Oops (Score:2)
Sorry I accidentally pointed the spotlight at all those pests who were asking me to help them hide.
Right to be forgotten is a misnomer (Score:2)
What they should call it is , "little people have no right to know who they are dealing with". Lets face it anyone with the resources can find out all they want about the people they have dealings with. All this does is deny the ability to people who don't have the resources to do the digging.
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The details don't go away and your privacy is only protected from people who just use free search engines.
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So you are comparing not letting people know they are dealing with crooks and swindlers to fighting cancer ?
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According to TFA and TFSummary, 99% of the accepted requests are privacy related and are not about crooks and swindlers.
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If you read the article what the Guardian is saying isn't very informative at all. What is a "Everyday Person", and where do you draw the line. Do you Google the people you date ? Would you like to know if they have AIDS ?
what a useless law (Score:5, Interesting)
the right-to-be-forgotten law is the most moronic useless feel good band aid i have seen in a long time
it does nothing effective
if you're looking to make a hiring decision or a dating decision, search on the person using a proxy from another country. 30 seconds extra effort and well within the technical abilities of even the barely computer literate
heck, some euro should write an app for the purpose: "find out what the loser is hiding from you! search their history from another country!"
besides, most of which should be "forgotten" shouldn't be forgotten at all: your douchebag financial or criminal history for example
if you think kids shouldn't be judged for stupid kid stuff: any potential dating partner or workplace that would judge you on stupid teenage crap is no person you want to date/ place you want to work anyways
and most importantly: if you don't want it to be public, don't make it fucking public in the first place. if someone reveals a secret about you they should not have, sue that asshole. don't think you can reverse time and erase public information
maybe there once was a time this info would be harder to find (microfiche in the library basement in the 1980s)
well, sorry: technology changes society, culture, and the law. inevitably and irrevocably. you can't go back in time. the printing press destroyed the aristocracy and replaced it with democracy by making the middle class educated and informed. do the aristocracy have a right to freeze time and not lose to the march of history?
likewise, "right-to-be-forgotten" is a useless feel good band aid that has no real effect just because some old european assholes think it's great to fight the inevitability of technological change. their children will roll their eyes a their clueless feeble elders and reverse this stupid law
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what "power struggle" with corporations? i despise the power of corporations as much as the next person but this is about the persistence of information. you can't fight that. nor should you try. it's a wasted and misdirected effort
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exactly, thank you
the law is a completely useless feel good band aid for morons
You are wrong. Did you read the RTFA ? (Score:2)
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http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
http://lifehacker.com/5933248/... [lifehacker.com]
beyond easy
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it does nothing effective
How do you know? Can you show that that people who made these requests had the information revealed anyway? How do you know that happened? Can you cite any specific examples of failures?
So far the evidence appears to be that it is working as intended. The EU seems mostly satisfied with the way Google has implemented it. Not just the EU of course, a Japanese court recently made a similar judgement.
if you're looking to make a hiring decision or a dating decision, search on the person using a proxy from another country. 30 seconds extra effort and well within the technical abilities of even the barely computer literate
You vastly overestimate the ability of the average person.
besides, most of which should be "forgotten" shouldn't be forgotten at all: your douchebag financial or criminal history for example
What right do you have to dictate European law? The EU
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http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
http://lifehacker.com/5933248/... [lifehacker.com]
so easy
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One of the issues that the EU raised is to make sure that even the NCR and non-EU versions of the site remove those results when responding to EU IP addresses.
Hardly anyone even knows that the NCR thing exists though, and everyone I know uses the default EU version of the site that is presented to them.
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so you know morons who like being lied to and have information hidden from them
what happy citizens of censorship paradise
anyone actually interested in knowing somebody will make the slightly more marginal effort to search from outside the eu. it's easy. it's motivated by simple curiousity, and no one likes being lied to and kept in the dark
why do you defend a paper thin joke of a law that only serves as a pleasantry for airheads and does nothing effective? why do you support censorship? why does a douchebag
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so you know morons who like being lied to and have information hidden from them
Actually, yes, in Europe we do like having some information hidden from the public view. America does as well actually, e.g. it is illegal to publish a person's medical records without their consent.
In Europe we like having a society where everyone can participate. We punish people who need punishing, but we rehabilitate them too so that they can become productive members of society again and stop being a burden on us. Part of that rehabilitation is forgetting certain things form their past that in the US w
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we're not talking about medical records you stupid fuck. we're talking about already publicly available information. changing the topic is a sign of losing an argument, that you're conceding a point but you don't have the intellectual honesty to admit it
if you want to continue the charade that people who are curious about you don't know what a proxy is, be my guest. but it makes you look stupid and weakly insecure
are you east german? do you think the stasi are still around? what a paranoid loser
learn your o
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i don't have an aggressive stance. i have an understanding of the reality of the nature of information. which you lack. you have a fervent quasireligious hopeful belief in an impossible goal
good luck to you and your windmills don quixote
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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that's as far as i read
go ahead
"if i were an asshole, which i'm not but watch me act like one with a pathetic threat in the same sentence..." yeah, ok, i see what kind of shitbag i'm dealing with
you can't exactly maintain the moral high ground when you reveal you would happily defy what you purport to stand for
example:
"we
Solution to Legislative Stupidity (Score:3)
Google does seem to have the knack for finding the perfect solutions to legislative stupidity. I hope they open source.
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Do you oppose those US websites that take publicly available arrest records and put them online, and then charge people to remove themselves? If not, can you explain why that isn't okay, but it's fine for Google to do basically the same thing except without the payment demand.
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Yep. Whatever opinion you hold, that payment demand does change everything.
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Google is a search engine, an index, not the web site. You, and Europe, seem to miss this key point. Banning Google from showing something in their index does not remove that data from the internet nor does it even remove it from search engines. Other search engines still show the data, the data is still on the original web site and linked to by other web sites.
We're also not talking about false information.
Your argument is a red hearing and false. Your question is not worth answering because it is moot and
Only 5% (Score:1)
That's one way to spin it. The other is given that "politicians and high-profile public figures" are a very small minority of the population. 1%? 0.1%? they are massively overusing it relative the the general population.
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someone rate this coward insightful.
damn, that's like... all the politicians doing it it's it?
The Internet (Score:2)
... never forgets.
Good Luck!