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    1. [COTIPPERARY] Google searches within the EU or washing away history
    2. Janet Crawford via
    3. This will be a kind of longish message but bear with me as it has to do with Irish history. There was a Spaniard and he had taken out a mortgage and then he defaulted on it but eventually paid it off and no one was hurt financially. This happened many years ago and the Spaniard got sick and tired of having this financial information pop up every time someone Googled his name on the internet. So he petitioned the European courts for "the Right To Be Forgotten On The Internet". The EU courts agreed with him and instructed the major search engines to delete/withhold such information when requested by the person. Now this ruling is meant to apply to someone living and to relatively recent events where no one was harmed, but Google is applying it incorrectly across the EU. Seems if, for example, your great-grandfather was a nasty landlord in Ireland, one can ask that information to be removed and Google will do so, thereby totally changing history on the internet. Instead you now got a message at the bottom of a very short page "Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe. Learn more" - call it "The Message". This is terrible. I have contacted the EU court and they recognize there are problems, but apparently will not change the ruling. Google knows there are problems with how they are applying the new law. There is a sort of work-around should you be searching the internet in the EU which is the only place this law is being applied, say using Google.ie [Google in Ireland]. One needs to go to a Google site outside of the EU, say Australia, and do the same search there and the withheld information may/should come up. Here are alternate domains to use: google.com/ncr, google.ca, google.com.au , google.com.br If you use any other Google domains not overseen by the EU, please share the addys with us. If you are outside the EU and used to use Google.ie for searching Irish material, please start using another domain when you get "The Message". Janet

    08/31/2014 02:35:34