When someone complains to Google about your content

Google are pretty clear about what they consider as abuse in their Terms of Service. They also provide a mechanism for you to report such abuse.

I am pretty sure that this has happened to me.

Google must get hundreds of these types of claims a day and you can clearly see that they comply with legitimate claims of abuse. The majority are probably in response to copyright infraction and they will take-down results from the SERPs:

In other areas of complaint Google have no way of checking the validity of claims made by individuals that involve defamation. They are very clear in their TOS about making false claims. In the case of copyright material the remedial action that they take is to take-down the reference to that material, it is the responsibility of the website owner to make sure that the offending material is taken down. This secondary take-down will be made by copyright owners with the website owners or hosts directly. In the case of Google they make a notice of the action that they have taken with The ChillingEffects Clearing house.  They do this to be covered under the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA. The other effect of this is for transparency and to let web users know why certain material cannot be found in their search results and what are the offending sources of that material.

In the case of defamatory information that is claimed to be posted I am sure that they will check to see if, in their opinion, that a complaint is warranted. If they see that the complaint appears to be that an opinion had been made and their are no factual untruths, they will probably ignore the complaint. If the material is not hosted by them there is not a lot that they can do and the complainant would have to take the issue up with the website owner or its host. It doesn't matter if copies or screen-shots are made of pages that are no longer available on the Internet as the normal remedial remedy is to remove that information. If it is already gone they cannot remove it anyway!

When it comes to personal information the situation works both ways. I would hope that they would respect the rights of individuals to make anonymous comment and refuse to relinquish the personal details of their bloggers. This is also based on the fact that they know this information, in truth all that they really know is the email address of the Google account holder. They do not necessarily know the Google Account holders real name and their contact (street) address. If a complaint were taken seriously they could contact the account holder by email.

I have not been contacted by Google regarding any of my content. Similarly, I not received any communication from my ISP, Website Host or my Domain Registration authority. It is suspected that they all have been contacted with regard to my alleged slanderous statements.

The other side of personal information is that if names and addresses can be found in other places on the Internet I think that it is safe to say that they are in the Public Domain and therefore cannot be considered private. If this information was posted in relation to a business then it matters little if the address is also a residential address.

Privacy regulations generally apply to businesses and government departments. They are designed to protect citizens from those entities and NOT the other way round.

With respect to defamation I consider the criticism of a companies business concept and practices to be "fair game". Compared to some of the nonsense that I have seen, even on Google Groups, my statements pail in their impact. Accusations of pornographer and pedophile seem to be common from those that wish to discredit others. I have never made such claims.

Why do I suspect that a complaint has been made

I closely monitor the visits to this blog. I also did the same for my website when it was in operating. When multiple visits from a single geographical location were observed, accessing specific posts or pages,  these coincided with visits from Santa Clara, the headquarters of Google in Mountainview.

The visits from a single geographical location were taking place on a daily basis. Using Google Analytics this fact stuck out like a sore thumb. When I had access to my webserver logs I could see that the visits were coming from the same IP address and host, sometimes multiple times a day. This goes to show the obsession that the particular individual had about me. I guess that he thinks that I have one about him, well, I do but it is more to do with why he is so "bent out of shape" with some of the things that I have said about him.

I get the impression that he is accustomed to getting his own way. When he doesn't he resorts to threats and intimidation. For this reason I have labeled him a "bully". I have documented these intimidation threats in other posts on this blog. The information that I have posted about him is pretty much back on this blog. It is not going away. It is factual and has been arrived at by extensive research.

I may have posted things in the past only to remove then. This was done for a couple of reasons. The first was to "wind-up" the person making the complaint and the second was that I had second thoughts on whether the information was appropriate and that I had sufficiently covered my tracks. Quotes from other people, informants so to speak, had been posted but these are largely still absent from this blog. However, the nature of the comments has been re-worded and re-posted. The same thing goes for photographs, but I have not bothered in re-posting some of them as they have already had the desired effect.

All other information was in the Public Domain as I obtained it from other posts on the Internet. Communications addressed to me have been posted on this blog. As they were addressed to me, I effectively own them and can do with them as I see fit.

When associations have been drawn this had been done from information that I have found during my research. If they are said to be untrue then my research is invalid. If this can be proven I will remove it. The observation (comment or opinion) that a business was dubious is NOT slanderous.

My question in all this is what is so important to this individual that all information that doesn't like be removed from the Internet? What is he trying to hide? I can understand that he does not like being challenged and seems to have problems with being reasonable in the past. I recognize that I am also being unreasonable but that is because I have been provoked.

I get visits from all around the world and it is only this individual that seems to be interested in information on himself. This is not to say that there have not been others that have found this information, they have. From this I can conclude that there is something that the individual does not want known, I further believe that this information should be found and it is (or was) in the public record. You should not be able to get information that you don't like removed just because you don't like it. You should not be able to get information removed by claiming that it is incorrect or untrue, this is often a fact of life, especially when it is true. You should not be able to get information removed by threats of legal action when the facts are true.