Businessman takes Google to High Court to block online abuse from search results The case of former Morgan Stanley banker Daniel Hegglin, who is attempting to compel Google to block anonymous abusive posts against him, opened in the High Court today. The defamatory postings amount to a campaign of anonymous abuse against Hegglin, and include allegations that he is "a murderer, a Nazi, a Ku Klux Klan …
"anonymous abusive posts against him."
Posted to what? A website? Then he should go after the web sit. Twitter? Then go after them.... Facebook? Well, you get the picture. Surely going after Google, will just have a severe Streisand effect?
Also, one only has too look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines to find an alternative search engine.
Unfortunately reg seems to have little more info than an RSS feed on this one.
For once the BBC has a more informative article. To get the general idea:
"Posted to what? A website? Then he should go after the web sit. Twitter? Then go after them."
"The businessman claimed there were more than 3,600 websites containing abusive and untrue material about him"...."He was seeking a legal order to force Google to take steps to prevent the abusive posts being processed in search"
This is different to the right to be forgotten, he is after a block on incorrect information, not out of date information.
In the case of Babs, she was trying to suppress factual information and this drew attention to the information she wanted hidden. In this case, it's presumably to Mr Hegglin's advantage for it to be widely known that the information he complains about is not true - it can hardly make things worse for him, by the sound of it.
Secondly, it sounds that these untruths are becoming a meme as a result of self-reinforcement: if you search for his name, you are presented with information that tends to confirm any pre-existing conspiracy theory you might have.
By republishing the information, even as excerpts - and that, in essence is what search engines do - and then directing readers to the full text, they undoubtedly play a role, albeit unwittingly, in propagating these falsehoods.
Were I Mr. Hegglin, I'd want Google to do as much as they reasonably could to dampen the positive feedback loop, because I'd otherwise have to spend a lifetime playing whack-a-troll.
The argument that "it's the internet" and therefore not bound by laws, taxes, or anything that might make life difficult for freewheeling multinational corporations is wearing a bit thin.
Well unfortunately it does sometimes, when nobody cares enough to create a backup or archive of it somehow and the website owner loses interest in the site so stops paying for hosting.
Two sites that I may want to gain information from in the future but have disappeared 'into the ether' and don't appear to have copies on archive.org are the forums on misticriver.net which dealt with iRiver products in their heyday (I still regularly use my H140 with 80gb HD) and forum.eeeuser.com which used to contain an absolute goldmine of information for the Asus Eee devices.
"a murderer, a Nazi, a Ku Klux Klan sympathiser, a paedophile, a corrupt businessman who has accepted bribes from state officials, an insider trader, and that he has laundered money on behalf of the Italian mafia"
Wait, I thought Google wasn't indexing comments on blogs. I mean, that's just your standard round of comments on Politico, the Huffington Post, and (I'm told) Anonymous.
The defamatory postings amount to a campaign of anonymous abuse against Hegglin, and include allegations that he is "a murderer, a Nazi, a Ku Klux Klan sympathiser, a paedophile, a corrupt businessman who has accepted bribes from state officials..."
I'd imagine that lot on balance probably results in a net improvement in his reputation if only for distracting people from the fact he's a banker.
Someone in the Co$, this is pretty much the standard modus operandi when they want to discredit someone.
Cover all bases, incite moral outrage and hope one of the "charges" results in court time or worse.
There is an interesting discussion going on at the moment regarding whether Google can be forced to take down links to certain "confidential" material that normally requires spending a lot of time and money to get, however IMHO this borders on stupidity because everyone knows the whole thing is a huge money mill designed to extract it from the unwary.
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