Finextra succumbs to the EU's right to be forgotten directive

It finally happened! Finextra has received it's first notification from Google that one of our articles will no longer be listed on its Euoprean-based search results. This is due to a European data protection directive.

In a message to our Web Team, Google stated that, "Due to a request under data protection law in Europe, we are no longer able to show one or more pages from your site in our search results in response to some search queries for names or other personal identifiers. Only results on European versions of Google are affected. No action is required from you."

This stems from a European ruling that search engines need to remove links where, "the data appear[s] to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant".

The link in question relates to an article that we published in 2003 in which a London-based gang were convicted and imprisoned for conspiracy to defraud Lloyds TSB.

To conduct their nefarious activities, the gang trawled the internet to collate information to create false identities so we find it amusing that one of these ne-er-do-wells may be using an EU directive to hide their online identity from search results.

Read original article here: "London gang gaoled for ID fraud".