I ALWAYS suspected that the European Court of Justice’s "right to be forgotten" ruling might come back to haunt those who take advantage of it, and it looks like I was right.
The ruling, handed down against Google in May, allows citizens to request that certain links about them be deleted from the search results of internet search companies such as Google.
By last week, Google had received more than 70,000 such requests from individuals who want 250,000 webpages removed from its search results.
Microsoft has also begun applying "right to be forgotten" to its Bing search engine, and has created a form on which requests can be filed, allowing individuals to have Bing stop providing links to certain web pages in the search results thrown up by their names.
But people taking advantage of the ruling should not underestimate the Streisand effect, described by Wikipedia as "the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicising the information more widely, usually facilitated by the internet".
"It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California, inadvertently generated further publicity. Similar attempts have been made, for example, in cease-and-desist letters, to suppress numbers, files and websites. Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity and media extensions such as videos and spoof songs, often being widely mirrored across the internet or distributed on file-sharing networks."
The Streisand effect seems to have been in play when US-based blogger and web developer Afaq Tariq set about creating a new website called hiddenfromgoogle.com. According to Tariq on the website, its purpose "is to list all links which are being censored by search engines due to the recent ruling of ‘right to be forgotten’ in the European Union (EU)".
"This list is a way of archiving actions of censorship on the internet. This site does not take a side for or against the EU ruling. Instead, it is up to the reader to decide whether our liberties are being upheld or violated by the recent rulings by the EU," Tariq writes.
The website has a small but growing list of links to webpages that have been removed from Google’s search results, including news articles on people such as paedophiles, shoplifters and other criminals, and the results of searches for company directors on the companycheck.co.uk website.
As Time magazine reported last week, the "right to be forgotten" ruling has spawned a new industry of services offered by reputation-management companies that are intended to help people to get search engines to remove links to aspects of their unsavoury pasts. One such company, the France-based reputation management company, Reputation VIP, has a website, Forget.Me, that has 40 request templates in nine different categories that help streamline the process. Forget.Me has 17,000 registered users who have submitted more than 2,500 applications to Google.
"This is a first step into a general public market. It’s a big market," Reputation VIP founder Bertrand Girin told Time. "I think there’s a real demand here."
He may be right, unless the right to be forgotten sparks the Streisand effect — and more services such as hiddenfromgoogle that aim to ensure that being forgotten is easier said than done.
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I LOVE new technology that disrupts existing markets, especially ones that have the potential to save me money. The latest, most promising example of this is a device developed by US company Metromile, which plugs into the diagnostic port in your car and allows your insurance company to see how far you drive.
Only available in the US for now, the company says that if you are among the 70% of drivers who drive less than 15,000km a year, you will save considerably on your insurance premiums by using Metromile. This is because most of the risk of having a car is while it is on the road, not parked in your garage.
I sense that a revolution in the way we insure our motor vehicles is on the way.
Picture: REUTERS
I ALWAYS suspected that the European Court of Justice’s "right to be forgotten" ruling might come back to haunt those who take advantage of it, and it looks like I was right.
The ruling, handed down against Google in May, allows citizens to request that certain links about them be deleted from the search results of internet search companies such as Google.
By last week, Google had received more than 70,000 such requests from individuals who want 250,000 webpages removed from its search results.
Microsoft has also begun applying "right to be forgotten" to its Bing search engine, and has created a form on which requests can be filed, allowing individuals to have Bing stop providing links to certain web pages in the search results thrown up by their names.
But people taking advantage of the ruling should not underestimate the Streisand effect, described by Wikipedia as "the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicising the information more widely, usually facilitated by the internet".
"It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California, inadvertently generated further publicity. Similar attempts have been made, for example, in cease-and-desist letters, to suppress numbers, files and websites. Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity and media extensions such as videos and spoof songs, often being widely mirrored across the internet or distributed on file-sharing networks."
The Streisand effect seems to have been in play when US-based blogger and web developer Afaq Tariq set about creating a new website called hiddenfromgoogle.com. According to Tariq on the website, its purpose "is to list all links which are being censored by search engines due to the recent ruling of ‘right to be forgotten’ in the European Union (EU)".
"This list is a way of archiving actions of censorship on the internet. This site does not take a side for or against the EU ruling. Instead, it is up to the reader to decide whether our liberties are being upheld or violated by the recent rulings by the EU," Tariq writes.
The website has a small but growing list of links to webpages that have been removed from Google’s search results, including news articles on people such as paedophiles, shoplifters and other criminals, and the results of searches for company directors on the companycheck.co.uk website.
As Time magazine reported last week, the "right to be forgotten" ruling has spawned a new industry of services offered by reputation-management companies that are intended to help people to get search engines to remove links to aspects of their unsavoury pasts. One such company, the France-based reputation management company, Reputation VIP, has a website, Forget.Me, that has 40 request templates in nine different categories that help streamline the process. Forget.Me has 17,000 registered users who have submitted more than 2,500 applications to Google.
"This is a first step into a general public market. It’s a big market," Reputation VIP founder Bertrand Girin told Time. "I think there’s a real demand here."
He may be right, unless the right to be forgotten sparks the Streisand effect — and more services such as hiddenfromgoogle that aim to ensure that being forgotten is easier said than done.
...
I LOVE new technology that disrupts existing markets, especially ones that have the potential to save me money. The latest, most promising example of this is a device developed by US company Metromile, which plugs into the diagnostic port in your car and allows your insurance company to see how far you drive.
Only available in the US for now, the company says that if you are among the 70% of drivers who drive less than 15,000km a year, you will save considerably on your insurance premiums by using Metromile. This is because most of the risk of having a car is while it is on the road, not parked in your garage.
I sense that a revolution in the way we insure our motor vehicles is on the way.
