4 ms·

It's not about expunging information from the internet, it's simply to prevent something inappropriately or incorrectly defining a person. When the Spaniar

It's not about expunging information from the internet, it's simply to prevent something inappropriately or incorrectly defining a person. When the Spaniard googled himself in 2009, two prominent results appeared: home-foreclosure notices from 1998, when he was in temporary financial trouble. That stuff will always be part of his/collective history and important for some purposes, but in the context of this man and the search results for his name it's almost never going to be important or relevant information.

ademarre 12y ago
Google and the other search engines offer a standard mechanism for websites to tag such content so it won't be indexed. That's a much better solution for the man in the article. As it is now he has to make a request to every search engine to remove these search results, including new future search engines that might arise. Such victims would be better served if they could go to the source website to have such content deindexed for all search engines at once.
- benologist 12y ago
  How can this man, and everyone else, be guaranteed the ability to change somebody else's pages to ensure they're no longer indexed by search engines that explicitly dishonor the spirit and purpose of instructions not to crawl pages? IF that was ever viable the EU wouldn't have forced a solution. https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/robots-txt-remove-url/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/robots-txt-remove-url/
  - ademarre 12y ago
    > search engines that explicitly dishonor the spirit and purpose of instructions not to crawl pages If you believe that to be true, then you should be arguing for a solution to that problem. A robots noindex meta would work perfectly well to suppress an online bankruptcy notice about an individual.
    - benologist 12y ago
      In that video you'll see Matt Cutts from Google's Web Spam team explaining how they've declared indexing a url on google, and crawling a url's content, are apparently separate things so your express wishes can be overridden by any third party linking to your content, resulting in the URL being on google search and in results with inferred content instead of spidered content. I think this is a problem, but this is not the entirety of the right to be forgotten problem, which just makes what you proposed more efficient because people only have to contact one company with an official procedure.
      - ademarre 12y ago
        Crawling and indexing truly are fundamentally different things, and search engines have mechanisms to block both. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en > You can prevent a page from appearing in Google Search by including a noindex meta tag in the page's HTML code. When Googlebot next crawls that page, Googlebot will see the noindex meta tag and will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it.
        benologist 12y ago
        For all intents and purposes "indexing" and "crawling" is "appearing in search results", and they conflate these terms themselves in their robots.txt page: > "You only need a robots.txt file if your site includes content that you don't want Google or other search engines to index." https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en They do say noindex overrides 3rd party links so that's something, but it's a moot point either way because this was the approach for the last decade. Having to contact each individual person in charge of each individual URL isn't even effective when the MPAA throws money+DMCA at the task, individuals asking nicely never had a chance.
pnathan 12y ago
Yep. Bummer for him. Consider the fact that while Google makes this public, all this law is doing is ensuring that unseen data brokers sell the data privately, while you don't know what they know. :-)

ademarre 12y ago

Google and the other search engines offer a standard mechanism for websites to tag such content so it won't be indexed. That's a much better solution for the man in the article. As it is now he has to make a request to every search engine to remove these search results, including new future search engines that might arise. Such victims would be better served if they could go to the source website to have such content deindexed for all search engines at once.

benologist 12y ago
How can this man, and everyone else, be guaranteed the ability to change somebody else's pages to ensure they're no longer indexed by search engines that explicitly dishonor the spirit and purpose of instructions not to crawl pages? IF that was ever viable the EU wouldn't have forced a solution. https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/robots-txt-remove-url/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/robots-txt-remove-url/
- ademarre 12y ago
  > search engines that explicitly dishonor the spirit and purpose of instructions not to crawl pages If you believe that to be true, then you should be arguing for a solution to that problem. A robots noindex meta would work perfectly well to suppress an online bankruptcy notice about an individual.
  - benologist 12y ago
    In that video you'll see Matt Cutts from Google's Web Spam team explaining how they've declared indexing a url on google, and crawling a url's content, are apparently separate things so your express wishes can be overridden by any third party linking to your content, resulting in the URL being on google search and in results with inferred content instead of spidered content. I think this is a problem, but this is not the entirety of the right to be forgotten problem, which just makes what you proposed more efficient because people only have to contact one company with an official procedure.
    - ademarre 12y ago
      Crawling and indexing truly are fundamentally different things, and search engines have mechanisms to block both. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en > You can prevent a page from appearing in Google Search by including a noindex meta tag in the page's HTML code. When Googlebot next crawls that page, Googlebot will see the noindex meta tag and will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it.
      - benologist 12y ago
        For all intents and purposes "indexing" and "crawling" is "appearing in search results", and they conflate these terms themselves in their robots.txt page: > "You only need a robots.txt file if your site includes content that you don't want Google or other search engines to index." https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en They do say noindex overrides 3rd party links so that's something, but it's a moot point either way because this was the approach for the last decade. Having to contact each individual person in charge of each individual URL isn't even effective when the MPAA throws money+DMCA at the task, individuals asking nicely never had a chance.

pnathan 12y ago

Yep. Bummer for him. Consider the fact that while Google makes this public, all this law is doing is ensuring that unseen data brokers sell the data privately, while you don't know what they know. :-)