TLDR: An independent journalist had his article on a surveillance tech CEO’s domestic violence arrest removed from all Google Searches. This CEO abused Google Search’s “Refresh Outdated Content” tool to take down negative articles.
This tool is supposed to allow those who are not a site’s owner to request the removal from search results of web pages that are no longer live (returning a “404 error”), or to request an update in search of web pages that display outdated or obsolete information in returned results.
However, a malicious actor could, until recently, disappear a legitimate article by submitting a removal request for a URL that resembled the target article but led to a “404 error.” By altering the capitalization of a URL slug, a malicious actor apparently could take advantage of a case-insensitivity bug in Google’s automated system of content removal.
That is exactly what happened to our article about the censorship campaign against Poulson. Someone reported an invalid variation of the article’s URL and requested its removal from Google search results. When Google’s crawler encountered the “404 error” following the report, it not only de-indexed the reported URL but also erroneously removed the live, valid article, possibly alongside every other variant of the URL, from search results.
How do you feel about this? Should transparency and public interest investigations come at the cost of someone’s right to privacy, even if what they did is already public (and frankly horrific)?
Personally, I don’t think those working in surveillance technology deserve unique protections. Good riddance.