Someone told Google to nuke links to mean reviews of disgraced telco True Telecom Links to pages slating a telco slapped with multiple fines from UK regulators have been wiped from Google's search results after a claimant asked the search giant to chuck them down a sinkhole. Dartford-based phone and broadband provider True Telecom was this month fined £300,000 by Ofcom. And earlier this year the ICO, the …
How does this story stack up against Andrew O's analysis at the time?
Andrew O reports a ruling as it affects individual privacy. Companies are not individuals and so do not enjoy the benefits of human right legislation. Therefore, as I understand it, the ECJ ruling has no effect in this case. Other commenters have speculated on the reasons for Google's decision to remove the links.
What are you saying? Corporations aren't people? That's crazy talk. All our poor little MagaCorps need all of the protections that are provided people and the protections that are provided the extremely wealthy (no those aren't people, they are a very special class of highly protected Fascists). I say let the Oligarchy reign! Trumpistan for ALL!
I just realized that I needed to use a lot more caps for full effect ;)
Funny thing is, if they've gone into administration, then they must have been a Ltd company. As a Ltd company they do not have any kind of right to privacy. So google seem to have deleted links for no reason in this case, contradicting previous cases where they have strenuously denied being able to censor their indexing of articles available on the internet.
"From the article I get the impression that only 3 pages were taken down"
There are other lumendatabase results depending how you word your search on True Telecom.
The interesting part is the excessively verbose wording of the takedown demands. They were clearly NOT written by someone with training in how to do it and provide an insight into the mindset of the author.
True Telecom went into Administration on the 3rd of November, so I guess it doesn't really matter anymore.
Although, if you do a quick Google for True Telecom, I still get an article from ISPReview ("Ofcom UK Accuses Broadband ISP True Telecom of Slamming.." and "True Telecom in Dartford fined £85,000 for making nuisance calls over.." published on Kent Online so I'm not entirely sure the takedown requests were either actioned, or made any difference given the other numerous bad reviews available.
The ISPR story is still there, but the comments section about the story has been wiped clean.
I was one of the people who commented, so I know what was there and what wasnt, and the claims made by the owner of "fake news" are bollocks; as (I suspect) are all the glowing reviews on their website.
The company has gone bust and changed names and office address multiple times in the last 10 years, been struck off and threatened with being struck off twice before - all this is available via companies house.
They may have got away with it this time, but it isn't a completely sure-fire method of erasing bad publicity. Had they been the subject of a court case rather than an Ofcom complaint, their statement to Google that the reports of the findings in that case were "not true" might be regarded as contemptuous.
"Had they been the subject of a court case rather than an Ofcom complaint"
In March 2017, True Telecom was found guilty in Magistrates' court of the criminal offence of handling personal information whilst being an unregistered data controller.
That, plus Ofcom fines and the fact that the ICO warned them to stop illegal activities in 2015, but they kept doing it (hence the 80k fine), plus the passing off(*) as Openreach all scream "dodgy as fuck"
(*) That's an actionable tort under civil law, should BT like to take action(**) - liability passes to the directors for actions of employees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_off
(**) Not that I imagine they will, but they really should.
I'm wondering how this affects Google's search engine.
I was under the impression that Big G's search results were based on the number of sites that referenced something. In this case for example, say 100 other sites pointed to DodgyTelecom. Google then ranks the result based on 100 connections.
So, if today Google delete that information (100 connections), what happens tomorrow? Does Google trawl the web again (or whatever it is they do) and then delete the references to DodgyTelecom or are they allowed to start serving up those results?
What about other search engines? Are they allowed to serve pages based on DodgyTelecom searches?
And of course the actual pages where the damning evidence is published still exist don't they? And that Way Back machine probably has it all archived away.
"claimed to be pensioners yet the emails were sent at 4am in the morning."
Am I missing something here - personally I would consider one of the advantages of being a pensioner would be that if I wanted to sit up until 4 am (probably 4 am in the morning, 4 am in the afternoon is just too much trouble) pissing around on my computer I could do so without having to worry about trudging off to work three hours later.
Why would being (presumably) old mean that you can't stay up all night if wanted to?
UK libel law, where the victim has to prove their allegations in court, means that there are no stories about any UK sexual harassment.
So the solution would be to post an anonymous scurilous comment that Jimmy Savile isn't an optimal babysitter or you shouldn't have Bob Maxwell run your pension fund. Then loudly and publicly demand the story is taken down.
And so, ploughing on, we reach the denouement, as the claimant revealed a crucial piece of evidence to prove these commentators are fake news: "The laughable fact is that in several occasions they have used the same name and claimed to be pensioners yet the emails were sent at 4am in the morning." Iron-clad.
Hmm, I’ve been up since 4am (it's now 4:32 my time, 3:42 UK time). and I'm nearly at pension age.
Does something weird like needing a lie in until 8 am happen once you are officially retired?
A little digging shows that True Telecom rose from the ashes of "Select Calls Ltd" and that there is an interesting relationship in both the directors and the sales/bully techniques of "Chess Telecom" and "Daisy Telecom", who both "inherited" customers from Select Calls.
It's a nice incestuous pit of vipers. The amazing thing is that there appear to be no Ofcom or ICO actions against Select, Chess or Daisy (yet!), despite similar numbers of complaints.
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