With links removed from Google to content that isn't illegal it is still allowed to exist and be visible it just requires people to be searching for it directly.
Taking as an example someone who has a spent conviction, who doesn't want it to appear in the listings when someone searches for their name, it wouldn't be visible only for that search. If someone searches for '$name $conviction' it will still appear as they must already know about it to be searching for it.
If there is a legal reason why the spent conviction shouldn't be show then it is nolonger an issue for Google but for the original publisher.
Again, if someone tries to search the project that you mentioned they will get the information but only if they know what they are looking for - which is quite legal. The project are archiving the sites themselves and not the Google indexes that would allow you to search them as if you were using Google.
]]>Interesting thing about that, I just discovered this afternoon that my county library system had redone the way its computer system handled book reservations. (Because the old way was easy to use and worked, apparently.) Now patrons are required to have user names, over and above the card numbers that have previously been used and which have been just fine for the twenty years I've been using this library system. For some reason these must also be unique; obviously you won't have two or more guys named Mike Smith or John Anderson in a metropolitan area...
The smallest population where I personally found a name collision was at a tiny specialist SF convention. I was running registration, and in about fifty people we had two David Andersons.
]]>http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/05/17/no_charges_no_trial_but_presumed_guilty.html
Apparently, simply having contact with police in Canada is enough to get you a record, and many of the people who ask for a police record check assume that any record means you must have been in trouble.
At 46, after decades of getting by on contracts in the animation industry and then working long hours as a chef, he decided to pursue a career that matched his abilities to his passion. He enrolled in George Brown College to become a nurse.
“I was excited,” says Sinclair, now 50. “I wanted to go to Africa and work with Doctors Without Borders. Those plans have all been ruined.”
In 2011, with thousands of dollars spend on tuition and two semesters on the Dean’s Honour List, Sinclair was forced out of the program when charges from 20 years before showed up on a mandatory police check.
The charges — he had been rounded up in a raid on the comic book store where he worked — were never proven and were dismissed by a judge. By any measure, Gordon Sinclair was and is innocent.
Hundreds of thousands of Canadians — perhaps millions — are vulnerable to seeing their ambitions crushed, reputations ruined and livelihoods shattered because of a lack of legislation across Canada to dictate what information police can or cannot release, a Star investigation has found.
The situation has become critical, as more and more employers, volunteer groups, licensing bodies, governments and universities are requiring police checks that frequently disclose so-called non-conviction records — everything from simple contacts with police and 911 mental health calls to charges that were dropped, withdrawn or led to not-guilty verdicts due to lack of evidence.
Detailed interviews with nearly a dozen Canadians with such records include an Ottawa man who lost a career with Air Canada — even though he was never charged or convicted of any crime — because police years earlier took note of him with a suspected drug dealer in the low income neighbourhood where he grew up.
I find the last particularly ironic given the Toronto mayor's famous dealings with drug dealers.
In August, 1991, when Sinclair was working as a part-time clerk in the now-defunct Dragon Lady Comics store, then on Queen Street in Toronto, police arrived one August afternoon and gathered comics they deemed to be obscene.
They seized dozens of copies of Melody, a comic book about an exotic dancer.
Produced in Quebec with financial support from the provincial government, the comic, tame by contemporary standards, raised eyebrows at the time and triggered police action. Sinclair, then 27, was charged with 33 counts of possession of obscene material for the purpose of selling. The charges — one for each copy of the comic seized — were laid against every staff member at the store, he says.
“We didn’t think much of it because we knew there was nothing to the allegations,” says Sinclair. “It was nothing nearly as bad as Hustler (magazine).”
The charges were soon withdrawn and Sinclair thought no more of it — until he applied for a police background check that would allow him to take training placements at a nursing home or hospital, a required part of his George Brown course requirements.
The check came back with the long-since-tossed charges listed.
“I was a bit shocked,” he says. “I went to the dean of nursing and explained the situation. She said I couldn’t do any clinical work and said, ‘We have to remain neutral.’ ”
What I find interesting is that the organizations getting the data are essentially assuming that having any mention means that they should avoid you, just to be safe. Which they can get away with, as long as there are plenty of other people who want the position. The simple solution would be for a police records check to only include convictions, and possible charges still before the courts, but that would be undermined by newspaper reports that frequently list charges (but don't have follow-up links that report the acquittal).
]]>Surprised this isn't already casebook law. Considering that the activity (online searches) is both widespread and has already been shown to produce serious measurable consequences, this has 'Supreme Court of Canada' written all over it.
Any Canadian lawyers reading here?
]]>http://www.scc-csc.gc.ca/factums-memoires/33412/FM020_Respondent_Jon-Newton.pdf
The SCOC site has all sorts of up-front info on 'visitor privacy', how/when visitor info gets turfed, etc. A really interesting read.
]]>Search worked better 15 years ago, as I recall it.
Ad-funded search depends on a balance between 1) showing ads, which provide revenue, 2) returning useful information, which supplies viewers for all the ads, and 3) search engine optimization, which brings commercial links to the top of the search without funding the search engine. We'd like to think #2 would win out, but Google makes more money if #2 is just enough to avoid mass defections (to Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, etc.).
]]>Number of folk on the net in 1999: 248 million
Number of folk on the net March, 2014 (Estimate): 2,937 million
(source http://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm)
Number of pages first indexed by Google in 1998, 26 million.
(source http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html)
Number of pages indexed last year, over 30 trillion!
(source http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/thestory/)
TL;DR: Search was a lot, lot easier 15 years ago ;-)
]]>"UK prize lets public decide on world's biggest science problem. Winning challenge will be focus of £10-million Longitude Prize fund... more than 100 leading scientists have identified six major scientific problems, and the public are being invited to vote on which one should be made the focus of the challenge. The six problems include food, water scarcity, climate change, antimicrobial resistance, paralysis and dementia. The public voting will start on 22 May and will go on until 25 June. Inventors around the world will then have five years to work on the problem. The team that comes up with the best solution will receive the £10-million prize. Votes will be collected on the webpage of the BBC2 television show Horizon."
Personally, I'd vote for whichever isn't getting adequate funding at present because all of these topics are important, and if all bases aren't adequately covered, we've a problem. (Dislike running science funding as a popularity contest. Yeah ... like the best science minds just happen to be in this year's 'cool field/group'.)
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