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Sunday, October 12, 2014

GOOGLE AGREES TO DELETE ONLINE INFORMATION ON THOUSANDS OF CRIMINALS IN THE EU - Your new boyfriend, babysitter, or doctor could be one of them, and you'll never know

In total, members of EU countries have sent nearly 500,000 requests for links to be removed from GoogleThe more profound question is whether Google even has the right to censor legitimate information.  
 
Google has been manipulating content for a long time, as you may have noticed during your searches.   But with enough patience, Europeans still had the hope of finding what they were looking for.  Not anymore.
 
Daily Mail - Google deletes 18,000 UK links under 'right to be forgotten' laws in just a month: 60% of Europe-wide requests come from fraudsters, criminals and sex offenders.

  • Law allows EU citizens to ask for links to be removed from Google searches
  • The ruling was widely criticised for allowing murderers, rapists and paedophiles to erase information about their past 
  • UK has third highest number of requests, behind France and Germany 
  • In total, Google has received nearly 500,000 requests to remove links
  • Within a month of the ruling ten per cent of requests came from paedophiles
  • It includes the online removal of newspaper articles.
  • Daily Mail likens it to the burning of library books.

  • Requests from Britain included a former clergyman who wanted to remove links to articles about a sex abuse investigation and a doctor who botched a medical procedure.
     
     
    Google has received more than 146,000 requests from across Europe since May and reviewed almost half a million web links, of which 171,183 were deleted.
     
    A total of 18,304 requests – which usually involve multiple web links – were made by people in Britain, the third highest number per country after France and Germany.

    Google said it deleted 35 per cent, or 18,459, of the unwanted links Britons requested be removed. Critics have likened the ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling to restrictions in China, where the state imposes limits on what content is available through search engines.
     
    Newspaper websites have received notifications from Google that it has deleted links to their articles. MailOnline publisher Martin Clarke said: ‘It is the equivalent of going into libraries and burning books you don’t like.’
     
    The European Court of Justice ruled people had a right to ask for ‘inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive’ information about them to be dropped from internet searches.
     
    The decision – which cannot be appealed against and is binding for all EU states – affects only search results and not lawfully published and true information.
     
    But once search engines like Google drop links to such material, it becomes almost impossible to find on the internet. Facebook was the site which had the most links removed, followed by the social network search site Profile Engine and video sharing site YouTube.
     
    Google gave anonymised examples of requests it had received. In Britain, they included the former clergyman who asked for two links to articles about a sex abuse investigation while he was still a religious leader to be removed.
     
    The search engine refused his request, and said it considered ‘the rights of the individual as well as public interest in the content’ when assessing each request.
     
    Google also refused an application from a doctor who wanted more than 50 links to articles about a botched procedure removed.
     
    Three pages that contained personal information about the doctor but not about the procedure were removed from search results for his name, but links to reports about the incident were not deleted.
     
     
    Photo - Alamy, Daily Mail
     
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