Search Engines and Your Right to Privacy - Liability?
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On the other hand, if you changed a site from a Satanic worship forum to create a cute kitten photography community, the Wayback Machine would be aware of this change, and a lawyer could hold you responsible for the content of either version of your site. Suing the Internet Archive for illegally making a copy of your site is hard too, since as it is a member of the American Library Association, it is exempt from some sections of US copyright law. That means your Satanic worship forum is going to stay in the archive for a long time.
The problem of a site’s content’s accuracy, however, is a lot trickier. Assuming that you found a blog entry that had very nasty or very private things to say about you, there may not be a lot of recourse for that. You could get a lawyer to send a cease and desist letter to the author of the entry, hoping that it will scare them into removing the offending comment. If that does not work, then depending on the circumstances of what was written a libel or slander suit could be launched. This line of action runs out when the author of the page is not within the jurisdiction of the courts that the suit is being filed in. Since the internet is a global community, there is a mess of conflicting laws on what is legal in a particular country. But then, you also don’t need a passport to visit a Korean web site.
As a result, there is an increase in the number of calls for search engines to regulate what ends up in their indexes or archives. This comes out of the reasoning that since the search engine is the point where others are finding private information about others, the engine is the most logical point of attacking the problem. So far, Google has refused such suggestions, and it is unlikely that Google’s position will change in the near future.
Why? Let’s go back to the CNET case with Eric Schmidt.
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