TonyGosling
Editor
Joined: 25 Jul 2005
Posts: 18335
Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
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 Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2014 5:50 pm Post subject: Google 'Right To Forget' is Orwell's Ministry of Truth |
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Wow, @Peston piece on Merrill Lynch boss sacking removed under dreadful EU "right to be forgotten" law
http://twitter.com/WillardFoxton/status/484380839430848513
Why has Google cast me into oblivion?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-28130581
This morning the BBC received the following notification from Google:
Notice of removal from Google Search: we regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/thereporters/robertpeston/2007/10/me rrills_mess.html
What it means is that a blog I wrote in 2007 will no longer be findable when searching on Google in Europe.
Which means that to all intents and purposes the article has been removed from the public record, given that Google is the route to information and stories for most people.
So why has Google killed this example of my journalism?
Well it has responded to someone exercising his or her new "right to be forgotten", following a ruling in May by the European Court of Justice that Google must delete "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" data from its results when a member of the public requests it.
Track record
The ruling stemmed from a case brought by Mario Costeja González after he failed to secure the deletion of a 1998 auction notice of his repossessed home that was reported in a Spanish newspaper.
Now in my blog, only one individual is named. He is Stan O'Neal, the former boss of the investment bank Merrill Lynch.
My column describes how O'Neal was forced out of Merrill after the investment bank suffered colossal losses on reckless investments it had made.
Is the data in it "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant"?
Hmmm.
Most people would argue that it is highly relevant for the track record, good or bad, of a business leader to remain on the public record - especially someone widely seen as having played an important role in the worst financial crisis in living memory (Merrill went to the brink of collapse the following year, and was rescued by Bank of America).
Public interest
So there is an argument that in removing the blog, Google is confirming the fears of many in the industry that the "right to be forgotten" will be abused to curb freedom of expression and to suppress legitimate journalism that is in the public interest.
To be fair to Google, it opposed the European court ruling.
But its implementation of it looks odd, perhaps clumsy.
Maybe I am a victim of teething problems. It is only a few days since the ruling has been implemented - and Google tells me that since then it has received a staggering 50,000 requests for articles to be removed from European searches.
It has hired what it calls "an army of para legals" to process these requests.
I asked Google if I can appeal against the casting of my article into the oblivion of unsearchable internet data.
Google is getting back to me.
PS Although the BBC has had the notice from Google that my article will not show up in some searches, it doesn't appear to have implemented this yet.
Here's the forbidden story
| Quote: |
Merrill's mess
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/thereporters/robertpeston/2007/10/me rrills_mess.html
Robert Peston | 09:19 UK time, Monday, 29 October 2007
All weekend, wave after wave of schadenfreude has been crashing on the head of Stan O’Neal, the chairman of Merrill Lynch. After Merrill announced those colossal losses on inventories of sub-prime loans reprocessed into noxious collateralised debt obligations, O’Neal could not survive.
The point is that Merrill’s historic strengths have been as an agent, a broker, not a risk-taker. So its veterans launched into the “I-told-you-so” dance when “new Merrill” came a cropper from putting its capital at risk in the manufacture of securities out of loans to US homeowners with poor credit histories.
But it’s the ghost of Christmas yet-to-come that really did for O’Neal. I can be confident of that from the tedious moaning of old mates who work at Merrill. They’re whinging that they are being short-changed on this year’s bonuses because of the humungous losses chalked up on sub-prime. If they’re making a sacrifice for the good of the firm, someone has to pay.
The real power in any investment bank rests with its fee-generators and top traders, rather than with its shareholders or even its board, because it’s curtains for the firm if they’re alienated.
Merrill’s board, in negotiating O’Neal’s departure, has simply been trying to preserve the integrity of a giant, money-making collective.
For the rest of us, the Merrill mess is an occasion to breathe a sigh of relief about what might have been – and cross our fingers about what might yet be to come.
Just imagine the carnage if the credit losses of a Merrill Lynch had been married to the intrinsic funding weakness of a Northern Rock.
A great deal has been made – rightly – about the flaws in the global financial system, in which trillions of dollars of loans have been packaged up into a dizzying number and variety of securities that have then been sold and then resold. What we learned from the panic that ensued in markets this summer is the potential harm that flows when major financial institutions have no idea what has happened to the risks associated with all that lending.
But the differing debacles at Merrill Lynch and Northern Rock point to at least one saving grace, which is that the worst loan losses have not occurred in a major institution with inadequate access to liquid funds,
However that may be due to luck more than anything else. And we cannot assume it won’t run out.
As the Bank of England implied last week, we may be about to enter a second horrible phase of the credit crunch. A general tightening of credit conditions could cause serious difficulties for weaker borrowers, if they’re unable to refinance their debts, and also wider discomfort if there is a slowdown in economic growth.
Which is why all the bankers I meet are still battening down the hatches and are desperately trying to ensure they have access to sufficient cash or liquidity to weather any storm. |
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"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
Last edited by TonyGosling on Wed Jul 02, 2014 6:12 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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