Laurel Zuckerman's Paris Weblog

How many news articles have been removed under Europe's Right To Be Forgotten?

In Google's study Three years of the Right to be Forgotten,  the search engine giant reports receiving delisting requests for 2,367,380 URLS of which 20% "related to news outlets and government websites that in a majority of cases covered a requester’s legal history." 

A very small number of requestors, mostly reputation management agencies and lawfirms, accounted for a very large number of requests. Google refers to these as "high volume requestors": 0.25% (one fourth of one percent) of  requesters "generated 14.6% of requests and 20.8% of delistings."

 

source: Three Years of the Right to be Forgotten, page 2

Google accepted 43% of delisting requests. 

Today, when you perform a search in Europe, you will frequently see the message: "Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe."

It is impossible to find out who requested the removal, what (if anything) was removed or why - even when it is a search for a Nazi war criminal that produces the message. 

There is no transparency. No external audit. No Freedom of Information Requests. No way to know the identity of the person or - as is frequently the case - professional Reputation Management Company that filed the request. There is no way to know the identity of the individual who decides what to remove. 

When the Right to Be Forgotten, championed by European Commissionner Viviane Reding, was decided by the European Court  in May of 2014, Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia predicted "memory holes". This is precisely what is happening.

To find out whether your search results might be compromised, launch a search and scroll down to the bottom of the page to check.

This is clearly a story that deserves much more attention than it has received. 

 

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Bing has removed 23,895 URLs from its search engine ( out of  62,027 URLs requested for removal) in accordance with Europe's 2014 Right To Be Forgotten.

France, the UK  and Germany account for the lion's share of requests. It is not reported how many of the URLs concern news or official government sites. 

 

 

 

What is Facebook accused of?

Kudos to The Guardian's outstanding investigative journalists for pursuing the story of how Facebook did everything NOT to see how the private information of millions of its users was being harvested, sold, exploited and generally abused in ways the users could not begin to imagine.

This is a big story that is not going to go away.

In Paul Lewis' report from San Francisco, we learn more details about what was happening behind the scenes at Facebook. 

• warnings from Facebook's own employees were ignored
• covert data harvesting was routine
• failure to use enforcement mecanisms to control use of data by outside developpers 
• deliberate looking the other way and pressure not to investigate (“Do you really want to see what you’ll find?”)
• enabling the secret harvesting of information of friends' data through Facebook apps in exchange for a "30% cut of payments made through apps", ("but in return enabled their creators to have access to Facebook user data.")
• blind eye to rogue developpers

For the full Guardian article, go to "'Utterly horrifying': ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine" in Facebook
The Cambridge Analytica Files

 For more info, see:

@Slate The Cambridge Analytica mess is a reminder to check which sketchy apps you’ve linked to Facebook: http://slate.me/2GMdlqN 

 

@WSJ Facebook shares, which fell nearly 7% on Monday, are down a further 5% Tuesday 

 

@Newsweek Facebook whistle-blower says majority of users have been data-mined http://bit.ly/2FUEGpy 

@NPR Facebook: Firm Working With Trump Campaign Stole 50 Million Users' Data

@Scout: The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine This remarkable analysis was written last year. 

WIRED - which it should be mentioned did NOT break this story - is doing a good job playing catch up, with interesting insights and explanations. 

 "Facebook has burned its fingers on issues of data privacy frequently in its 14 year history. But this time it was different. The data leakage hadn’t helped Unilever sell mayonnaise. It appeared to have helped Donald Trump sell a political vision of division and antipathy. The news made it look as if Facebook’s data controls were lax and that its executives were indifferent." - WIRED

...

"The story of how Kogan ended up with data on 50 million American Facebook users sounds like it should involve secret handshakes and black hats. But Kogan actually got his Facebook data by just walking in Facebook’s front door and asking for it." - WIRED

...

"Kogan had created the most anodyne of tools for electoral manipulation: an app based on personality quizzes. Users signed up and answered a series of questions. Then the app would take those answers, mush them together with that person’s Facebook likes and declared interests, and spit out a profile that was supposed to know the test-taker better than he knew himself.  About 270,000 Americans participated. However what they didn’t know was that by agreeing to take the quiz and giving Facebook access to their data, they also granted access to many of their Facebook friends’ likes and interests as well." - WIRED