Graeme Hamilton reports:
In 2013, people who had appeared before Canadian courts started getting a nasty surprise. When their names were plugged into search engines, sensitive personal details from their court files jumped to the top of the results.
Maybe they were HIV-positive. Maybe they had worked in the sex trade. Maybe they had gone through a custody battle a decade earlier and would have preferred sparing their children the messy details.
With the arrival of online publication, Canadian courts had been careful to publish decisions so they were not searchable by Google. But in 2013, a Romanian man saw an opportunity for profit. He downloaded decisions en masse, indexed them so they would appear in Google results and then charged people if they wanted to remove embarrassing personal information from his site, Globe24h.com.
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