Rizwan Asghar. PHOTO COURTESY: 3NEWS
Inspired by new laws in Europe as the European Union granted people the right to be forgotten, Rizwan Asghar has come up with a solution to tackle Google's agonizingly slow process to remove unflattering photos or defamatory articles from their memory bank.
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Earlier, a European Court of Justice had said that individuals have the right to have links to information about them deleted from searches in certain circumstances, such as if the data is outdated or inaccurate.
However, Google has been flooded by requests and is unable to keep up with the demand. But Rizwan Asghar, an assistant professor of computer security at the University of Auckland, and his two German colleagues have developed a software called ‘Oblivion’ that can help erase unwanted information more swiftly.
“It can process 278 take down requests per second,” claimed Asghar, boasting it is a lot faster than Google’s current painstaking manual process.
The developers claim that unlike Google, Oblivion does not require additional information about you if you want to remove anything from the internet. “I will have to upload my driving license or my passport, which means Google can see my picture even if it did not appear in the [defamatory] article,” he added.
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Oblivion can also help address the issues of cyber bullying in a more timely manner as currently by the time a take-down request is processed the information is already passed to millions.
Commenting on the development, technology commentator Paul Spain said, “Potentially tens of thousands of hours could be saved by using this type of tool.” Oblivion would become more useful if the rest of the world adopted similar laws like EU, which would increase the number of take-down requests significantly.
“It seems like a really good concept. And If Google isn’t already working on something like this then they could get significant benefit from using a tool like this,” Spain added.
The article originally appeared on 3NEWS
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