26 June 2014

Google's "Right to be Forgotten" Disclaimer



If you are in a EU country, you may have seen this message when searching for a name: "Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe". It's displayed below the list of search results, but it's worth pointing out that the message only expresses a possibility:



"When you search for a name, you may see a notice that says that results may have been modified in accordance with data protection law in Europe. We're showing this notice in Europe when a user searches for most names, not just pages that have been affected by a removal," informs Google.






"The recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union has profound consequences for search engines in Europe. The court found that certain users have the right to ask search engines like Google to remove results for queries that include the person's name. To qualify, the results shown would need to be inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant, or excessive."



There's a form you can fill out and request that Google removes certain search results associated with your name. You also need to attach a legible copy of a document that verifies your identity.






Here's how the whole thing started:



On 5 March 2010, Mr Costeja González, a Spanish national resident in Spain, lodged with the AEPD (Spanish Data Protection Agency) a complaint against La Vanguardia Ediciones SL, which publishes a daily newspaper with a large circulation, in particular in Catalonia (Spain) ('La Vanguardia'), and against Google Spain and Google Inc. The complaint was based on the fact that, when an internet user entered Mr Costeja González's name in the search engine of the Google group ('Google Search'), he would obtain links to two pages of La Vanguardia's newspaper, of 19 January and 9 March 1998 respectively, on which an announcement mentioning Mr Costeja González's name appeared for a real-estate auction connected with attachment proceedings for the recovery of social security debts.



By that complaint, Mr Costeja González requested, first, that La Vanguardia be required either to remove or alter those pages so that the personal data relating to him no longer appeared or to use certain tools made available by search engines in order to protect the data. Second, he requested that Google Spain or Google Inc. be required to remove or conceal the personal data relating to him so that they ceased to be included in the search results and no longer appeared in the links to La Vanguardia.



AEPD rejected the complaint against La Vanguardia, but decided that the complaint Google was justified because "search engines are subject to data protection legislation". Google Spain disagreed: "search engines process all the information available on the internet without effecting a selection between personal data and other information". Data processing has multiple meanings: there are companies that process personal data and other companies that process publicly available data from the Web. Google also suggested that complaints should be directed to the sites that include personal information, not to search engines. Google sued in Spain and the lawsuit was transferred to the European Court of Justice. The Court of Justice decided that search engines process personal data.



"Google received 12,000 requests on the first day of its 'to be forgotten' campaign, in which Europeans have been given court backing to have certain links removed."

How to Sell Digital Products Online with Google Drive and PayPal



The web has made it incredibly easy for anyone to sell digital products directly from their website, Twitter, Facebook or even through email newsletters. The world is your marketplace and you can sell PDF books, MP3 music, photos, software programs, video courses, website themes, and everything else that can be downloaded.


While there are quite a few web services that let you sell digital content online for a commission (around 5% per transaction), I want to share a do-it-yourself solution that I have been using on my services website. You can see another example here on labnol.org.


The workflow uses Google Drive for storing files, PayPal for payments and Gmail for delivering content to the buyer. There’re no limitation on the size of files or the number of products that you can sell. There’re no bandwidth restrictions. There’s no middleman fees except for the usual PayPal charges. And people can purchase your stuff through PayPal or using their debit or credit cards.


Sell Digital Downloads with PayPal and Google Drive


paypal button


First, create a “Buy Now” button in your PayPal account for the product that you wish to sell online and assign a unique Item ID to the item (see screenshot above).


PayPal will now offer you the HTML code for the purchase button that you can embed in your website. Alternatively, you can copy the direct link – see example – to share your product over email or for selling on social media websites.


PayPal Buy Button


The next thing you need to do is upload the corresponding file to your Google Drive. When someone makes a purchase, the Google script will pull this file from Drive and send it to the buyer via Gmail as an email attachment. If the file is big, say the size >20 MB, the script will automatically share the file with the buyer and sends the shared link instead of the actual file.


The final step is to run the Google Script that will monitor your Gmail mailbox for any PayPal related transactions and sends the digital files to the buyer.


This is easy. Click here to make a copy of the PayPal script in your Google Drive and include the Item IDs and file names of all products that you are selling through PayPal. Next choose Run -> PayPal and authorize the script.


PayPal Items with Google Drive


That’s it. The script will read your Gmail mailbox every 5 minutes and will process all PayPal related emails. Once the files have been delivered to the buyer, the PayPal emails will moved to the archive. You can check out the Programmer’s Library for the annotated source code.


Later, if you release an updated version of your digital files, you can use Mail Merge with Gmail to let all your previous buyers know about the new version. You can put all the PayPal emails under a new Gmail label, extract the email addresses and use this list for your merge.




This story, How to Sell Digital Products Online with Google Drive and PayPal, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 26/06/2014 under Google Drive, Paypal, Internet