Well at para 5 of the document something very wrong, false and misleading is said in that: "Once information is lawfully in the public domain it is impossible to compel its removal, and very little can be done to prevent it spreading." 

This is not true at all.  If the House of Lords wanted to implement a better indexing policy for Hansard - for instance - or the Government wanted to look into the indexing policy of Gov.uk I will be very glad to provide a free quote for a couple of days of humble indexing policy and maintenance writing and show some examples in a familiar context of how things can be managed differently. 

That  statement is very negative in that it contributes to spread ignorance on the subject. It says to me that very little is understood on how the internet and the world wide web actually work from an infrastructural, technical and business point of view. Did they understand what are the fundamental reasons why and how so much inaccurate, misleading and damaging data are literally thrown against our attention every second?  
Cyber criminals are able to set up an close down entire worlds of domains, websites, e-commerce utilities and related identities in hours - without leaving almost any trace at all for forensic purposes.  The same do politicians, celebrities, large consumer brands and their advertising agencies - for instance.  And also the opposite is true, with faked identities and faked brands staying alive for ages, not removed from the internet and from the search engine results simply because there is somebody behind those fakes that has commercial, political or criminal interests to keep them alive (from counterfeit products to advertising frauds and many other type of frauds and defamation strategies). 

Secondly, even in such disgraceful scenario, anybody can set up and implement in whatever type of website  an indexing policy and have care of  a de-indexing policy over time - it may be irrelevant if you are in a park full of rubbish, but surely the fact that you put your own waste bag into a bin … it counts!  
For instance, Jiscmail (as well as other mailing list services and forums) does not have in place an indexing policy,  as far as I can see, whereas that would be very appropriate to prevent outdated personal information (old job roles, old addresses and old contact numbers) to be displayed (and abused) within search engines results pages.  The same is true for old accounts that are not used anymore - in any type of system subject to public crawling and indexing: if the publishers / social media / providers were committed to eliminate old accounts not in use anymore periodically, that would contribute enormously to less polluted search engines pages. There is no evidence that such pollution has any sort of  positive economic return as far as I can say - but some "myths" persist among internet professionals, researchers and users  (like crowdsourcing, the long tail, social media monitoring, how to optimise the adv funnel and so on and so forth) in believing the opposite.

So, I stop here. But much more could be said about that statement. 


Brunella Longo
Information Management Adviser
Open Data Assurance
http://www.brunellalongo.co.uk
Telephone +44(0)7549921488
email: [log in to unmask]
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