Google's compliance with EU's right to be forgotten law started to take shape last week. Not surprisingly, those who wished to be forgotten, met with the well known Streisand Effect.
It all started when some EU citizen requested Google to remove a BBC article from 2007 to be taken off the search results. The article was exclusively about Merill Lych's then CEO Stan O'Neal. As it turns out Stan O'Neal didn't request the article's removal from Google search results. As the storm around this news gathered pace, it became clear that the request for oblivion came from someone who left a comment about the story.
Robert Peston, who originally wrote the BBC article in question, wrote a time running commentary of this event. Keeping aside the whole debate about freedom of speech that started after Rob made Google's request public, in my opinion the only person who benefited from this saga is Mr. Peston. Rob is well known journalist in UK, covering the financial sector for BBC, but this episode gave him a global coverage. Of course, there are a lot of losers. Stan O'Neal wasn't much popular before, and this flashback from memory just jogged people's memory of the irresponsible bankers. The guy who requested the take down of the article is a big loser as well, because there weren't many commentors on the original article and now people are trying to speculate who among these handful commentors might have requested the article to be removed from Google's search results.
By now, somebody would have probably figured out who the original requester was. This person must have learned about the Streisand Effect the hard way!
It all started when some EU citizen requested Google to remove a BBC article from 2007 to be taken off the search results. The article was exclusively about Merill Lych's then CEO Stan O'Neal. As it turns out Stan O'Neal didn't request the article's removal from Google search results. As the storm around this news gathered pace, it became clear that the request for oblivion came from someone who left a comment about the story.
Robert Peston, who originally wrote the BBC article in question, wrote a time running commentary of this event. Keeping aside the whole debate about freedom of speech that started after Rob made Google's request public, in my opinion the only person who benefited from this saga is Mr. Peston. Rob is well known journalist in UK, covering the financial sector for BBC, but this episode gave him a global coverage. Of course, there are a lot of losers. Stan O'Neal wasn't much popular before, and this flashback from memory just jogged people's memory of the irresponsible bankers. The guy who requested the take down of the article is a big loser as well, because there weren't many commentors on the original article and now people are trying to speculate who among these handful commentors might have requested the article to be removed from Google's search results.
By now, somebody would have probably figured out who the original requester was. This person must have learned about the Streisand Effect the hard way!
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