Search Engines and Your Right to Privacy - Ensuring Privacy
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The CNET article linked to articles at Forbes and CNN. None of the articles cited were written with the direct intent of exposing Schmidt’s dirty laundry. The Forbes article was detailing “Tech Titans.” CNN’s article was written during the Presidential Election race of 2000, saying that Schmidt, then at Novell, held a fundraiser for candidate Al Gore. The event was probably a very public affair (Elton John performed there), so it was obvious to anyone who follows American politics and informative to those looking for news. Google News would have to completely ignore all political news outlets like CNN’s allpolitics.com (now redirecting to http://cnn.com/POLITICS/), for starters.
Forbes is not a political magazine by nature, but its article had something in it that Schmidt clearly didn’t like, given Google’s reaction to CNET.
However, if Google were to start filtering based on those two linked articles, political affiliations and income, then it would be incumbent on Google to filter out the rest of the pages in the index where similar information is given. That process is also not humanly possible.
Like the Wayback Machine, there are simply too many sites and too few human operators to ensure that a page doesn’t violate a series of restrictions. Also, if there was a mistake and a human operator did let something into the index that should not be there then Google is opening itself up to litigation in this lawsuit-happy world. All someone would have to do is prove that Google violated its own privacy policy. Considering the amount of traffic that Google gets, the potential readership of personal information is high and a large payout for damages is likely.
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