Excellent! It looks like after years of looking for nothing more than money Google is doing something fun now and uses its PR power to hit back useless regulators.
So here it is – we have Merrill Lynch’s Stan O’Neal responsible for a lot of mess in the past. His organisation had to be rescued by Bank of America to avoid total collapse.
In general one of these guys, you want to make sure you do not want to deal with and broadly believed to be responsible for …irresponsible bank management.
Couple of mainstream media including BBC published not very favorable articles about Mr O’Neal back in 2007. One of these journalists involved was Robert Peston.
But how many people commented on these articles – thousands!
Robert Peston BBC Economics editor decided to post information about removal earlier this month and track what is happening understanding there are possible comments to blame (02/07/2014)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-28130581
In effect, the number of documents about Merrill Lynch’s Stan O’Neal is going to easily triple by the end of this month thanks to the vibrant reaction from the online community. However if this is not about Mr O’Neal but one of his employees who commented under article what the whole fuss about? Maybe this person is a banker now? A chairmen of some financial institution? Certainly several names from this list of commentators like Peter Dragomer or Robert Marshall become one hour celebrities and few articles about them also popped up where online marketing professionals try to investigate who’s name was responsible for Google message.
This is good warning for blog commentators. If you want to stay anonymus stay this way. Mention your first name Bob or Peter and post what you think. Self-censor your appearance. Just do not create censorship rules and make sure if you become in the future public interest person no matter if EU law works or not you won’t be forgotten.
This way or another censorship the EU way does not work. All gentlemens will be still featured in searches unless they remove all these pages that people created about them during last 24h. Reverse effect warning for any future attempts (so maybe as Robert Peston says this was not a removal filed by mr O’Neal – maybe this is part of some bigger game). This is how Google looks like today:
I just wonder how many visits this webpage from 2007 received over last few days – not forgotten at all?
We can understand this EU law can work for private cases, tragic and difficult life situations for people who are not involved in public life where some searches show things that can hurt or upset them & their families. However in respect of public figures responsible for our lives and money this law is a ridiculous censorship law. You can clearly see Lawmakers are still in the dark ages not knowing how internet works.
On the other side if Google would be able to react to these private cases earlier there would be no stupid law in place after all self-regulation is the best way to keep censors away from the Internet. Regulation on porn advertising from yesterday is a good sample of this type of self-regulation.
Say no to censorship if this is about public life and post your notifications of removal online with comments exactly this same way as Robert Peston did. Let others to know and share with #righttoberemembered
