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Google Removes ‘Pirate’ URLs from Users’ Privately Saved Links
(torrentfreak.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This feels like a corporation complying with their obligations under the DMCA.
To maintain their safe harbor status, companies have to remove allegedly infringing content in response to a properly filed takedown notice. This does include links stored in google's search results. This is what a company like google has to do when storing user data on servers in any country that signed the WIPO Copyright Treaty.
They don't seem to be doing this in a malicious way. They have done their duty and removed the offending links from their service. But they quite kindly chose to notify the user by email, including the exact URL that was removed. The user can store that link elsewhere.
It would have been far easier to remove the link silently.
They shouldnt be reading and playing with things privately stored. Are they going to go through all my documents to replace any swear words? It's completely inexcusable. Private doesn't mean private until some big company asks about it wtf.
It's not on bookmarks. Is on collections(a different thing) that are public, shareable and technically hosted by Google. This whole thing has been overblown by not fact checking.
It deleted them from public and private collections.
If google was taking out mentions of Tiananmen Square at China's request, would you be okay with it?
That's a giant leap and massively different.
Both are blatant forms of censorship, one is extreme but the principal is the exact same.