TECHNO FILE: Exercising ‘right to be forgotten’ could spark ‘Streisand effect’
I ALWAYS suspected that the European Court of Justice’s "right to be forgotten" ruling might come back to haunt those who take advantage of it, and it looks like I was right.The ruling, handed down against Google in May, allows citizens to request that certain links about them be deleted from the search results of internet search companies such as Google.By last week, Google had received more than 70,000 such requests from individuals who want 250,000 webpages removed from its search results.Microsoft has also begun applying "right to be forgotten" to its Bing search engine, and has created a form on which requests can be filed, allowing individuals to have Bing stop providing links to certain web pages in the search results thrown up by their names.But people taking advantage of the ruling should not underestimate the Streisand effect, described by Wikipedia as "the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of pub...
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