GigaOm’s Jeff John Roberts posts on a site that documents the execution of the “Right to be Forgotten."
“Hidden from Google” shows sites censored under EU’s right-to-be-forgotten law
by22 HOURS AGO3 Comments
SUMMARY:A controversial law lets EU citizens remove search results from Google. A web developer who feels this is censorship has made a site to keep track of some of the sites that are disappearing.
the Hidden from Google website has an about page.
The purpose of this site is to list all links which are being censored by search engines due to the recent ruling of "Right to be forgotten" in the EU.
This list is a way of archiving the actions of censorship on the Internet. It is up to the reader to decide whether our liberties are being upheld or violated by the recent rulings by the EU.
This Right to Be Forgotten seems like it is the Streisand effect at scale.
The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing 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.[1][2]
Mike Masnick of Techdirt coined the term after Streisand unsuccessfully sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for violation of privacy. The US$50 million lawsuit endeavored to remove an aerial photograph of Streisand's mansion from the publicly available collection of 12,000 Californiacoastline photographs.