> where they do not have control over information about themselves on the internet
The biggest gripe for me about this thing is that removing a link from google doesn't remove it from the website itself.
But people think they're safe once the can't find it via Google because Google is all they know. Especially in the age of removing URLs from the browsers input field and all.
Hey, here's a surprise: the law also applies to the website itself.
Just because the person who brought the suit targeted Google first (which is not strange, given that Google collects and re-publishes that information in a way that makes it immeasurably more accessible and "public" than the original publication) doesn't make the everybody else exempt.
The only valid debate her is if Google significantly adds to the damage, or if Google's search engine is just a neutral utility. I would say the answer to that is pretty f-ing obvious. That ship has sailed a long time ago.
Today, Google's search results and interface are so thoroughly manipulated (not just for profit but also for political/ideological reasons) that it counts as a curated publication.
The fact that Google uses algorithms instead of humans for most of that curation doesn't absolve them from responsibility for the result.
> But people think they're safe once the can't find it via Google because Google is all they know.
But the same is probably true for the average person looking for it. A small Employer might look trough a few results to see if can find something about a applicant, but he is not going to do some big reasearch.
I don't get entirley what he did to validate his idea for AppSumo. He got 200 new customers for imgur which pay 25$/year (to imgur) and he payed imgur 3$/user for this? Didn't he loose money then?
The sales pitch is probably what threw you off. "I'll pay you to bring you new customers" is the pitch, but the detail is likely more along the lines of Groupon's deals: "I'll charge $12 for selling your $25 product, and keep $3 for myself. So I'll pay you $9 for every new customer I bring."
Assuming it's the kind of business that typically sees recurring revenue and the expenses of servicing each new customer consists of little more than pushing electrons around, $9 for a new customer isn't too bad compared to whatever their current cost per acquisition is.
I'm using Chrome 39.0.2171.71 on Linux x64.