Google Inc’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) steps to comply with a recent law in Europe for data protection was discussed by Danny O’Brien in a recent interview on Bloomberg Television.
Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has recently started to remove entries in search results for people in the territory to comply with a recent European Court of Justice ruling that the company, as well as other search engines, need to process requests made by people to remove search results about them.
According to O’Brien who is international director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, this is a very complicated law to implement. He said that though the Court of Justice thought it would be easy, what is being removed is public information. The director pointed out that the original information in the case that ignited the issue is from a newspaper. He said that the newspaper keeps that information online but now Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) isn’t allowed to tell people that this information is out there.
Asked whether Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) is just removing links to these information that users request to be removed, O’Brien said that the search giant is removing the results and not just the links. However, he pointed out that results will just be deleted for a search for the name of a specific person. For example, he said that if someone searched for his name and he wanted a search result about him setting fire to a shed when he was seven to be removed, that result will be removed only if people search for his name. If people search for his name plus the keyword “shed,” that result may still appear.
Watch the interview below where a lot more issues, such as how the company notifies people that certain results are removed, were discussed.
Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) shareholders includes Daniel Benton’s Andor Capital Management which had 200,000 shares in the company by the end of March. Another shareholders is Sandy Nairn’s Edinburgh Partners which reported 149,183 also in the same period.
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