We all know Google being the base of the Internet or we can say the gateway of the Internet has a record for everything that is on the Internet. Even though Google is always a blessing for users, but sometimes their security policies can be annoying for many people.
But trust Google since Cyber attacks are very common these days, hackers can hack anything from private people’s data to government high-class confidential reports or so. Which is why, Google on Thursday again adjusted their policy regarding the personal information and started removing private medical records from its search option.
This change in the policy was made to include the “confidential, personal medical records of the private people” in the list of banned material, so now this information won’t appear on the search.
Some other data that Google is to remove, includes, government issued id numbers, bank account numbers, credit cards and ATM card numbers, and the images of signatures.
It is to believe that leaking the medical records of the private people can be very damaging for the patients both emotionally and financially. Google has taken this step to not put the people in a vulnerable situation.
Health records also can be searched very easily without any hassle, Indian Pathology lab leaked the data of about 45,000 patients in December and uploaded it on the Internet that contained names of the HIV patients with the test results. According to another study, approximately 29 million records of the people in USA were affected by the data breaches and hacking. So the step taken by Google of removing the medical records of the patients from the Internet will help many people keep their records confidential and safe.
The last time Google changed their policy was to cover the “revenge porn” conflict where the policy was made that “nude or sexually explicit images that were uploaded or shared without your consent”
The Google’s new scrubbing policy marks a prominent change for search of the company’s traditional hands-off, algorithmic approach that resists the attempts at censorship. The company recently adjusted its tightly held search ranking system to filter the misleading articles or fakes news, following criticism for hosting and promoting the content in result.
As I earlier mentioned that Google is the gateway to the Internet, meaning that the removal from the Google’s search will result effectively scrubbing from the Internet, while the information will still be accessible via other search engines or directly from the websites.
Google has recently faced a problem for its search and services like YouTube being used to spread negative and extremist content and the ad network is also being used to fund sites dedicated to spread hate speech and other unethical content.
