【英语语言学习】个人用户要求谷歌删掉与自己有关的网页

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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Fifty-two.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Four-hundred-and-fifty-three.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Twenty-five.

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Time for some number crunching¹ from our data expert Mona Chalabi from fivethirtyeight.com. She has given us this number of the week.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: Two-hundred-and-eighty-thousand.

MARTIN: That is the total number of requests people have made to Google asking the search engine to remove Web pages about them from its searches. The company gets to decide whether to approve or deny each individual request. That decision-making process has come under scrutiny² this past week. Here to explain is Mona Chalabi. Hey, Mona.

MONA CHALABI, BYLINE³: Hi, Rachel.

MARTIN: Let's start with a very basic question first, Mona. What exactly is it that people are asking Google to do, remove Web pages in which they're mentioned?

CHALABI: Kind of. So what they want to do is remove evidence of themselves online because, a reminded here, everything you do online stays online. And some people basically don't like that. So they want to erase⁴ their digital footprint. In Europe, people have the right to make that kind of request because back in May, 2014, the European Court of Justice - that's the highest court in the European Union - they ruled that an Internet search engine has to consider requests from individuals to remove links resulting from a search on their name. The ruling basically supported what's known as the right to be forgotten. So since that ruling back in May, over 280,000 requests have been made to Google.

MARTIN: And are all those requests - 280,000 - those are all coming from Europe because we can't do that here in the states, right?

CHALABI: So basically, if you're not happy about what you see when you Google Rachel Martin, for now there's not much you can do about it besides speaking to the people that produced that original content.

MARTIN: All right. So this original European Court ruling came down in 2014. So why is this issue coming up now?

CHALABI: Because it was this week that the British newspaper The Guardian⁵ found data that Google never intended to publish. And that data, according to a Guardian analysis, shows that some requests are coming from celebrities⁶ and politicians, as you probably might expect...

MARTIN: Because they're really famous, and a lot of their biography is online. And maybe they don't like that.

CHALABI: Exactly - sort of high-profile individuals who want to kind of manage their public image, if you like. But according to The Guardian, 95 percent of the requests that are being made to Google have come from regular members of the public.

MARTIN: All right, so can you give me an example of what a request might look like?

CHALABI: Sure. Google actually published several anecdotes⁷ on their site to illustrate⁸ the decisions that they're making. So in Sweden, for example, there was a woman who wanted to remove pages from search results that showed her home address. And Google accepted that one. In Hungary, by contrast, a high-ranking public official requested the articles that had been written about a really old criminal conviction be removed by Google. And Google actually turned down that request. Just to be clear, these aren't requests about removing the pages themselves from the Internet. They're requests to stop them from showing up in a Google search. And I guess the hope is that by them not appearing in Google, they're a lot harder to find. And they're kind of invisible.

MARTIN: OK. So is there any data that shows how often Google grants these requests?

CHALABI: Yeah. This information was also in the Google data that The Guardian retrieved⁹ and published this week. So as of March, 46 percent of all requests had been granted. Thirty-eight percent had been rejected. And the others were still pending¹⁰ a decision. But success also seems to kind of depend on the type of request made. So you can see the categories that Google have used. And removal requests that were marked with the label political, public figure, serious crime or child protection all had much higher rejection¹¹ rates.

MARTIN: So we've been talking about all these requests that are coming from Europeans. What about privacy rights here in the U.S.? Is there any movement afoot to allow American users of Google the same right?

CHALABI: There's absolutely a debate about this in the United States. But for the moment, citizens can't make the same request to Google that their European counterparts can. For U.S. companies, thought, it's a different story altogether. So so far, we can see that Google has received requests relating to copyright issues for about 41 million URLs. Now, the data isn't actually split up by country, but some of those are obviously American companies. Just by scanning the first two pages of requests, I can see Microsoft. I can also see Universal Music being listed there. And it's not just the private sector¹² either. Google have received about 16,000 requests from courts and government agencies around the world to remove information from Google products since December, 2009. Two-thousand-two-hundred of those 16,000 requests came from the USA. That's the third-highest number of requests of any country in the world after Turkey and Brazil. Now, unfortunately, the really, really juicy stuff - I can't actually tell you what exactly governments are requesting to be removed. In fact, I can't tell you anything really beyond those numbers because that's all that gets published in Google's transparency report. And it also wasn't part of what The Guardian managed to kind of access earlier on this week.

MARTIN: Mona Chalabi of fivethirtyeight.com. Thanks so much, Mona.

CHALABI: Thanks, Rachel.

1 crunching   

v.嘎吱嘎吱地咬嚼( crunch的现在分词 )；嘎吱作响；（快速大量地）处理信息；数字捣弄

参考例句：

• The horses were crunching their straw at their manger. 这些马在嘎吱嘎吱地吃槽里的草。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The dog was crunching a bone. 狗正嘎吱嘎吱地嚼骨头。 来自《简明英汉词典》

2 scrutiny   

n.详细检查，仔细观察

参考例句：

• His work looks all right,but it will not bear scrutiny.他的工作似乎很好，但是经不起仔细检查。
• Few wives in their forties can weather such a scrutiny.很少年过四十的妻子经得起这么仔细的观察。

3 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

4 erase   

v.擦掉；消除某事物的痕迹

参考例句：

• He tried to erase the idea from his mind.他试图从头脑中抹掉这个想法。
• Please erase my name from the list.请把我的名字从名单上擦去。

5 guardian   

n.监护人；守卫者，保护者

参考例句：

• The form must be signed by the child's parents or guardian. 这张表格须由孩子的家长或监护人签字。
• The press is a guardian of the public weal. 报刊是公共福利的卫护者。

6 celebrities   

n.（尤指娱乐界的）名人( celebrity的名词复数 )；名流；名声；名誉

参考例句：

• He only invited A-list celebrities to his parties. 他只邀请头等名流参加他的聚会。
• a TV chat show full of B-list celebrities 由众多二流人物参加的电视访谈节目

7 anecdotes   

n.掌故，趣闻，轶事( anecdote的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• amusing anecdotes about his brief career as an actor 关于他短暂演员生涯的趣闻逸事
• He related several anecdotes about his first years as a congressman. 他讲述自己初任议员那几年的几则轶事。 来自《简明英汉词典》

8 illustrate   

v.举例说明，阐明；图解，加插图

参考例句：

• The company's bank statements illustrate its success.这家公司的银行报表说明了它的成功。
• This diagram will illustrate what I mean.这个图表可说明我的意思。

9 retrieved   

v.取回( retrieve的过去式和过去分词 )；恢复；寻回；检索（储存的信息）

参考例句：

• Yesterday I retrieved the bag I left in the train. 昨天我取回了遗留在火车上的包。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• He reached over and retrieved his jacket from the back seat. 他伸手从后座上取回了自己的夹克。 来自辞典例句

10 pending   

prep.直到，等待…期间；adj.待定的；迫近的

参考例句：

• The lawsuit is still pending in the state court.这案子仍在州法庭等待定夺。
• He knew my examination was pending.他知道我就要考试了。

11 rejection   

n.拒绝，被拒，抛弃，被弃

参考例句：

• He decided not to approach her for fear of rejection.他因怕遭拒绝决定不再去找她。
• The rejection plunged her into the dark depths of despair.遭到拒绝使她陷入了绝望的深渊。

12 sector   

n.部门，部分；防御地段，防区；扇形

参考例句：

• The export sector will aid the economic recovery. 出口产业将促进经济复苏。
• The enemy have attacked the British sector.敌人已进攻英国防区。