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How much control should you have over your Web profile?
By ChrisCobler in Your Advocate: an editor's blog
January 11, 2010

A professor from another state recently visited our newspaper ethics board meeting to plead his case for Internet privacy and justice.

The professor was alarmed to find a two-decade-old Victoria Advocate article suddenly appeared in a Google search of his name. The article, written by the Associated Press, was about an incident that occurred elsewhere in Texas. The professor, then a school teacher, was accused of a crime. (I am omitting other details about the case to protect the identity of the professor.)

The charges were later dropped, and the teacher's court record expunged. If you search the courts for his name, he told us, you won't find any trace of the case.

In the time before Google, anyone searching for information about the incident would have to plow through microfilm copies of newspapers. Now, it's all there at your fingertips.

Increasingly, the subjects of stories are asking newspapers to remove published content from their Web sites. Kathy English, public editor at the Toronto Sun, recently researched this issue and wrote a report called "The Longtail of News."

In most cases, editors surveyed by English said they wouldn't unring the bell of history. However, many also said they could envision exceptions such as if a story turned out to be inaccurate or unfair.

I'll write more in my next post about our discussion with the professor.

Comments


  • ChrisCobler ChrisCobler Report a ViolationReport a Violation
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    Ex,
    Is it that an individual can request to have the information removed or that a Web site can do that?
    Thanks.

    January 14, 2010 at 7:21 p.m.

  • Observer Observer Report a ViolationReport a Violation
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    In this case, I gather that the professor was falsely accused of a crime of which subsequent investigation found him to be innocent. Not purging the false accusation continues to reward the false accuser. The professor makes a very good point.

    January 12, 2010 at 12:46 p.m.

  • Rebecca Rebecca Report a ViolationReport a Violation
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    Should you be able to remove mentions of your name from the internet archives as well? The article could be removed from Google search but might be archived. I can even find sites that no longer exist using The Way Back Machine.

    January 12, 2010 at 7:56 a.m.

  • ChrisCobler ChrisCobler Report a ViolationReport a Violation
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    I'll elaborate more in my next post about our conversation. Essentially, the professor is not asking that the Advocate remove the article from our archives. Rather, he wants to somehow control the search results of his name. That's the twist here. Companies spend millions of dollars on search engine optimization in an effort to exercise control over Google rankings. I'll try more with my next post to outline the question posed by the professor.

    January 12, 2010 at 6:47 a.m.