Wikipedia Link Hidden from Google under New “Right to Be Forgotten” Law

Under the new controversial “right to be forgotten” law, Google has now removed a Wikipedia article from their search results. this is the first time that a link to Wikipedia has been hidden and the Wiki founder Jimmy Wales has expressed his opposition to it.

Jimmy wales said,

“I would say the biggest problem we have is that the law seems to indicate Google needs to censor links to information that is clearly public – links to articles in legally published, truthful news stories.

“That is a very dangerous path to go down, and certainly if we want to go down a path where we are going to be censoring history, there is no way we should leave a private company like Google in charge of making those decisions.”

The Lords Home Affairs EU Sub-Committee agrees that it is wrong to give search engines such as Google the job of deciding what should be removed and have called the law unreasonable.

Since the law has been imposed Google has had over 90,000 removal requests and now other search engines, such as Bing, have also started to add features to accept public requests for the removal of searches. Many groups have said it contravenes the right to free speech and some actually saying its censorship.

Thanks to BBC for supplying us with this information.

Image courtesy of Spectrum IEEE.