How the EU’s “Right to be forgotten” ruling will boost popularity of consumer complaint websites
The decision by the European courts forcing Google to heed search results removal requests, had just the effect everyone prognosticated: it turned Google into a freely-accessible censorship tool, an instrument readily available to every person with a dirty past... or a dirty conscience, as long as they are European citizens.
In the words of a July 4th article posted by Search Engine Land, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions”.
By the same token, the logic behind the EU ruling is obvious: bad things happen to good people, and there should be a way for them to stop paying for old mistakes, in the future.
The problem is the few (hundreds of thousands of) rotten apples out there, set out to ruin this beautiful and heartwarming premise, for everyone else.
According to Search Engine Land, Google is now faced with an outstanding waste of company resources and time, forced to remove over one-thousand search results a day.
The fact that the European courts failed to take into consideration is that Google is not the only place where people and businesses can be looked up.
As a matter of fact, there is a multitude of consumer complaint outlets across the web, spearheaded by RipOffReport.org, currently the most popular go-to place for people with an axe to grind.
In the terrifying scenario that the US might follow the European trend, users are likely to seek other avenues, besides search engines, to look up businesses or people, as the world wide web turns into a very dark place, controlled by a growing number of consumer complaints websites that apply their own rules on what to show to their users.
Let’s speculate for a moment about a World Wide Web where user-submitted complaint websites replace search engines as the new fact-checkers. In this exercise, it’s easy to see how information once free, becomes a highly valued product that can be re-sold. Case in point: background check websites.
For a fee, any user will be granted access to a complete, or near-complete, criminal history of any individual they wish to look up.
If we apply the same principle to search results, we can see how such applications could be implemented by unscrupulous websites looking to make a solid buck selling what search engines are not legally allowed to show. It would be a perfectly legal enterprise, and one that could be incredibly profitable to many websites who are not bound by the same rules as search engines.