Wikipedia Reports 50 Links From Google 'Forgotten', Issues Transparency Report 81
netbuzz (955038) writes The Wikimedia Foundation this morning reports that 50 links to Wikipedia from Google have been removed under Europe's "right to be forgotten" regulations, including a page about a notorious Irish bank robber and another about an Italian criminal gang. "We only know about these removals because the involved search engine company chose to send notices to the Wikimedia Foundation. Search engines have no legal obligation to send such notices. Indeed, their ability to continue to do so may be in jeopardy. Since search engines are not required to provide affected sites with notice, other search engines may have removed additional links from their results without our knowledge. This lack of transparent policies and procedures is only one of the many flaws in the European decision."
Wikimedia now has a page listing all notifications that search listing were removed. itwbennett also wrote in with Wikimedia news this morning: the Wikimedia foundation published its first ever transparency report, detailing requests to remove or alter content (zero granted, ever) and content removed for copyright violations.
As a European... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a European (Greek) i must beg our American (USA) brothers and sisters to defend their/our "right to remember"...
Kudos (Score:5, Insightful)
Bravo to Google and Wikipedia for trying to be transparent about this. The law used seems absurd, and is open for much abuse (think politics, for one).
Re:As a European... (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? Because pretty much as soon as it happened this is what most of us expected.
The people who want to do this probably started the process the next day.
Re:As a European... (Score:1, Insightful)
Or the people who don't want this to happen started the practice the next day to eventually lead to this story to make the situation more visible?
Re:As a European... (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember this? (Score:1, Insightful)
Wikipedia's founder censors plenty of content [slashdot.org] himself. Then he says stuff like this [telegraph.co.uk]. Right.
See Europe, I told you this would happen (Score:4, Insightful)
Right to be forgotten is horrible misguided and will only be a tool to create memory holes.
Noticing an unsurprising trend (Score:5, Insightful)
Two of the three articles Wikimedia received notices about are for convicted criminals (Gerry Hutch and Renato Vallanzasca) who thrive on publicity for money. Both of them have proved litigious in the past, so it's not surprising they'd want the Wiki pages delisted. However, I can't help but think that running a notoriously violent branch of the Mafia in Milan or robbing banks aren't exactly the kind of things the law hoped would be forgotten.
Re:Noticing an unsurprising trend (Score:3, Insightful)
Given that the results still show up when you search for these names in the EU, it was likely someone else that was at some point in time mentioned on this page (correctly or not, it is Wikipedia after all). So now when you search for this other person, this specific Wikipedia page will not show up.