Dave Lee reports:
After widespread criticism, Google has begun reinstating some links it had earlier removed under the controversial “right to be forgotten” ruling.
Articles posted online by the Guardian newspaper were removed earlier this week, but have now returned fully to the search engine.
Google has defended its actions, saying that it was a “difficult” process.
“We are learning as we go,” Peter Barron, head of communications for Google in Europe, told the BBC.
Read more on BBC.
There was a lot of criticism yesterday after BBC editor Robert Preston reported that one of his pieces about former Merrill Lynch boss Stan O’Neal had been removed from Google results, and some of us were debating on Twitter how an American had seemingly used EU law to remove unflattering results. It turns out that O’Neal was not the person who made the request. BBC reports:
The identity of the person who made the request is not yet known, although Google has confirmed it is not the subject of the article, former Merrill Lynch boss Stan O’Neal. Instead, the request relates to the reader comments that appear underneath the story.
So what happened here? A commenter wanted their comments “forgotten,” so the EU lost Preston’s story in Google search results for O’Neal? And O’Neal wound up getting a lot of bad press yesterday because the assumption by the public was that he had tried to censor unflattering results about himself?
How’s RTBF working out for you so far, EU?