Under a crazy, ineffectual EU court ruling, people can petition Google and its rivals to de-index news articles from their European search-results.
But the BBC, not being a search engine, is not bound by the "right to be forgotten" regime, and so it's compiled a list of affected articles from its site, for your easy reference. Included are articles about a man who killed his fiancee, a family who sued their neighbours for playing father-son football in a shared garden; a man who raped a woman while she slept; and an unnamed woman who died in a car crash.
We are doing this primarily as a contribution to public policy. We think it is important that those with an interest in the "right to be forgotten" can ascertain which articles have been affected by the ruling. We hope it will contribute to the debate about this issue. We also think the integrity of the BBC's online archive is important and, although the pages concerned remain published on BBC Online, removal from Google searches makes parts of that archive harder to find.
The pages affected by delinking may disappear from Google searches, but they do still exist on BBC Online. David Jordan, the BBC's Director of Editorial Policy and Standards, has written a blog post which explains how we view that archive as "a matter of historic public record" and, thus, something we alter only in exceptional circumstances. The BBC's rules on deleting content from BBC Online are strict; in general, unless content is specifically made available only for a limited time, the assumption is that what we publish on BBC Online will become part of a permanently accessible archive. To do anything else risks reducing transparency and damaging trust.
List of BBC web pages which have been removed from Google's search results [Neil McIntosh/BBC]
(via Slashdot)
