In Europe, the court has decided that people who don’t like search engines like Google turning up embarrassing details about them now have the right to get the offending pages removed from the index. A Spanish lawyer by the name of Mario Costeja Gonzálezping hated people typing his in his name and finding an article in his local rag alluding to his past financial difficulties, and when they refused to pull the historical record he took all and sundry to court until Google (in particular) was forced to stop indexing the page. If you want to read the page from La Vanguardi, click here. Whilst I have some sympathy for the guy, taking Google to the European Court over the matter is not the best way to keep out of the public eye.
This isn’t without controversy – it’s censorship by the back door, handed down by a bunch of un-elected judges and everyone in Europe now has to comply. However, our colonial cousins, with their First Amendment, have e completely different problem – too much free speech.
Someone is exploiting the system, and the fact that publicly generated records in the USA are public, by requesting all police body camera images in order to provide content for a new YouTube channel, as reported by Komo News. Basically they’re slurping all the footage shot by Poulsbo Police in Washington and posting the “best bits”. The privacy issues are mind-boggling! Forget getting drunk and posting an unfortunately selfie on your Facebook page – if you get a visit from the cops in Poulsbo, it could end up on YouTube forever.
What is Google (owner of Facebook) doing about THIS? Absolutely nothing (thus far); it’s free speech, isn’t it?