Google Tool Misused To Scrub Tech CEO's Shady Past From Search

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google is fond of saying its mission is to "organize the world's information," but who gets to decide what information is worthy of organization? A San Francisco tech CEO has spent the past several years attempting to remove unflattering information about himself from Google's search index, and the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation says he's still at it. Most recently, an unknown bad actor used a bug in one of Google's search tools to scrub the offending articles.

The saga began in 2023 when independent journalist Jack Poulson reported on Maury Blackman's 2021 domestic violence arrest. Blackman, who was then the CEO of surveillance tech firm Premise Data Corp., took offense at the publication of his legal issues. The case did not lead to charges after Blackman's 25-year-old girlfriend recanted her claims against the 53-year-old CEO, but Poulson reported on some troubling details of the public arrest report. Blackman has previously used tools like DMCA takedowns and lawsuits to stifle reporting on his indiscretion, but that campaign now appears to have co-opted part of Google's search apparatus. The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) reported on Poulson's work and Blackman's attempts to combat it late last year. In June, Poulson contacted the Freedom of the Press Foundation to report that the article had mysteriously vanished from Google search results.

The foundation began an investigation immediately, which led them to a little-known Google search feature known as Refresh Outdated Content. Google created this tool for users to report links with content that is no longer accurate or that lead to error pages. When it works correctly, Refresh Outdated Content can help make Google's search results more useful. However, Freedom of the Press Foundation now says that a bug allowed an unknown bad actor to scrub mentions of Blackman's arrest from the Internet. Upon investigating, FPF found that its article on Blackman was completely absent from Google results, even through a search with the exact title. Poulson later realized that two of his own Substack articles were similarly affected. The Foundation was led to the Refresh Outdated Content tool upon checking its search console. The bug in the tool allowed malicious actors to de-index valid URLs from search results by altering the capitalization in the URL slug. Although URLs are typically case-sensitive, Google's tool treated them as case-insensitive. As a result, when someone submitted a slightly altered version of a working URL (for example, changing "anatomy" to "AnAtomy"), Google's crawler would see it as a broken link (404 error) and mistakenly remove the actual page from search results.

Ironically, Blackman is now CEO of the online reputation management firm The Transparency Company.

On-line reputation firm

[Retired Chemist]

I would suspect that the ability to remove unfavorable items from search would be a strong recommendation for an on-line reputation firm.

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

But it's ironic! Like rain on your wedding day!

Re: On-line reputation firm

[ihavesaxwithcollies]

Every rain out of a baseball game is bad planning?

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

Whoosh!

Re:

[The-Ixian]

More like a free ride, when you've already paid!

Re:

[BranMan]

No and No. It's like "He waited his whole darn life to take that flight, and as the plane crashed down he thought - "Well, isn't this nice?""

Ironically, that may be the only irony in the whole song.

still on the front page

[Anonymous Coward]

https://search.slashdot.org/st... [slashdot.org]

slash vu

Re:still on the front page

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

There is one difference, I only skimmed through the previous iteration of this story but did not notice an explicit claim that Maury Blackman was behind the removal. Implicitly? That's a different story.

DDG / Bing

[bill_mcgonigle]

All that to avoid switching over to DDG for another search?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=maur... [duckduckgo.com]

Haven't even tried Yandex for this one.

Re:

[ndsurvivor]

I like duckduckgo.com and startpage.com. I only use google for silly things.

A small wish

[Bu11etmagnet]

I wish that tool could be used to remove duplicates [slashdot.org] from Slashdot

"Ironically" ?

[greytree]

No, that is not ironic

Re:

[allo]

Nope.

Try it yourself:
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
vs
https://tech.slashdot.org/STOR... [slashdot.org]

And think about how you would be able to serve a folder directly from the filesystem that contains files that only differ by case, if URLs would be case-insensitive.

Re:

[OrangeTide]

# for ext4, enable casefold
tune2fs -O casefold $YOUR_DEVICE
# enable case-insensitive directory lookups (directory must be empty)
chattr +F /var/wwwroot

WARNING: I don't think you can undo this if you decide you don't like it. You'll have to format a new filesystem and move everything over.

Re:

[allo]

The point is, that most servers do not have this enabled, and that the webserver implements case-sensitive URLs that allow to access case-sensitive filenames.

Or the other way round: The HTTP standard defines that paths in URLs are case-sensitive and that's it.

Innocent until proven guilty etc?

[eggstasy]

In my country court proceedings are secret, as their disclosure can harm ongoing investigations, or simply violate someone's constitutional right to privacy.
Accusations are not convictions. And even if you were convicted of something that's no one else's business. You pay your debt to society, you have the right to a clean slate. Never hear of the Right to be Forgotten laws?
If the US does not protect its I'm sure that one day it will get finally get rid of the media circus bullshit and let people have their dignity.
You're the record holders for bible-thumping, how about "Judge not lest ye be judged" etc.

Re: Innocent until proven guilty etc?

[ThurstonMoore]

If you're convicted of a violent crime the public deserves to know. Fuck violent criminals.

Re:

[notsouseful]

You're the record holders for bible-thumping, how about "Judge not lest ye be judged" etc.

Christians are the only ones allowed to sin, because they believe that they are the only ones who will be forgiven. It does not matter if you sin, if you will be forgiven.

Re:

[wyHunter]

I don't think you know Christians as a whole. Catholics, perhaps, with the idea of confession and absolution but a huge number of protestant sects don't believe it - or rather, believe that forgiveness is divine and you have no idea if you will be forgiven, so don't do it in the first place.

Re:

[notsouseful]

What I said certainly doesn't apply to all Christians - but I fully believe it does apply to quite too many of the self-professed ones.

We know someone is an idiot because they act like an idiot. We know someone is an asshole because they act like an asshole. However, it is far too often that we know someone is a Christian simply because they said so, regardless of their actions.

Re:

[wyHunter]

Oh, I agree completely. I'd expand this to most the population, as well. Sigh.

Re:

[necro81]

The standards in different countries vary. In the US, an individual's free speech rights, and those of a free press, are generally looser than, say, in western Europe. (At least, they *have* been until recently.) It has long been established practice in the US that arrests are a matter of public record. Most local newspapers have (or had, before going under) a Police Blotter section listing who has recently been arrested for what (locally). There're even amusing corners of the internet dedicated to cel [google.com]

Re:

[wyHunter]

In this day and age, most police and sheriff's departments have arrest details on their websites, or other social media feeds such as facebook. So even in the absence of a local police blotter, the info is still a public record. Jails have public records, usually accessed via their web pages, of who is incarcerated.

Re:

[wyHunter]

Ah but we also have "One is innocent until proven guilty." So what's worse, knowing about a court case going on because someone was arrested based on probable cause for something, versus an allegation made of inappropriate behavior on twitter that causes loss of job or whatever but you're totally innocent of - but have no way of proving this?

Recanted claims

[will4]

"The case did not lead to charges after Blackman's 25-year-old girlfriend recanted her claims"

Google is not without blame

[martin-boundary]

It is well known that Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt had no problem at all with scrubbing and hiding personal information of himself and his buddies, while telling everyone else that Google couldn't remove the information that they initially scraped without permission

The classic example is when CNET wrote a story including some personal information about Eric way back in 2005. Throwing a Trumpian hissy fit, he blackballed all of CNET's journalists for a year on top of burying the information from his index.

Note that we're talking about Eric aka "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place [eff.org]" Schmidt.

Classic Google switcheroo, one rule for thee, another rule for me, what's yours is mine, and what's mine is not yours.

So yeah, I'm not surprised there are obscure software tricks for those in the know. There's something rotten in that company, and it smells from the top.

How very European of him

[timeOday]

The GDPR includes the "right to be forgotten" which is part of the GDPR. It grants individuals the right to have their personal data deleted by providers.

Granted it feels different when only rich people can do it and they use skeevy means to accomplish it...

The Transparency Company?

[chas.williams]

Sounds like the Ministry of Truth from 1984. You wonder if these people have ever read a book.

Re:

[wyHunter]

He has a bright future in politics, though.

DUPLICATE

[0xG]

We had this story only yesterday
https://search.slashdot.org/st... [slashdot.org]