A Pakistani researcher has developed a software that can erase unwanted information on the internet faster than Google.
Inspired by new European laws as the European Union granted people the right to be forgotten, Rizwan Asghar has devised a solution to tackle Google’s agonizingly slow process to remove unflattering photos or defamatory articles from their memory bank.
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right to have links to information about them deleted from searches in certain circumstances, such as if the data is outdated or inaccurate.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 cannot meet 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’ to help erase unwanted information more swiftly.
“It can process 278 take-down requests per second,” claimed Asghar, boasting it is much 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.
Oblivion can also help address the issues of cyberbullying in a more timely manner, as the information is already passed to millions by the time a take-down request is processed.
Technology commentator Paul Spain commented on the development, “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 the EU, which would significantly increase the number of take-down requests.
“It seems like a really good concept. And If Google isn’t already working on something like this, then they could benefit significantly from using a tool like this,” Spain added.
