You’ve Been a Naughty Search Engine (Whip Crack) ⇥ online.wsj.com

Ruth Bender and Sam Schechner, Wall Street Journal:

In a closely watched case brought by former Formula One racing chief Max Mosley, Paris’s Tribunal de Grande Instance said that Google must remove nine images from its search engine after Mr. Mosley sued in an effort to get the web giant to automatically filter the images and delete any links to them. […]

The images Google was ordered to remove are from a sex orgy that was secretly filmed in 2008. News Corp’s defunct News of the World published details and hidden-camera footage in which Mr. Mosley engages in sadomasochistic role-play with women. Courts in both the U.K. and France later ruled them a breach of privacy.

Mosley has gone through an awful lot of effort in his attempt to remove some (admittedly embarrassing and illegally-obtained) images from the web. It’s all going to be for nought, though — once something is on the internet, the chances of it being eradicated completely are almost zero.

As of right now, searching Google Images for “Max Mosley” shows references to those pictures before scrolling; the actual images are just a few rows below that (not to mention the autocomplete suggestions). Bing isn’t any better, really — it, too, suggests different categories across the top, and the first is “Max Mosley romp”.

Bing didn’t get the court order that Google did, so if you want to see pictures of a 73 year old businessman exploring his sadomasochist tendencies, you’ll have to use Bing.