During the course of my practice I’m often asked to provide social media law advice, typically to organizations or individuals who want defamatory, proprietary or privacy invasive content removed from the Internet. Once content has been successfully removed from a website I often discuss with clients issues related to Internet cached webpages. So I thought it would be helpful to provide some general information on what Internet cached webpages are and how you can deal with them in situations where you don’t want to have certain content available online.
What are Internet cached webpages?
When search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing crawl a website, they take a snapshot of what the site looks like at that time. This “snapshot” is known as a cached webpage and it’s stored by the search engine. The cached webpage is what the search engine then uses to determine whether the site matches a user’s specific query.
When a user clicks on the cached webpage, they will be taken to the version of the webpage that was online when the site was last crawled and not the current version. The cached webpage can be accessed when the current version of the site is unavailable due to Internet congestion, a slow website, or the webpage has recently been removed.
How can you deal with Internet cached webpages?
It is very difficult to remove a cached webpage from a search engine if you’re not the webmaster of the website. If you’re not the webmaster and you’d like a cached page removed from Google, Yahoo or Bing, you have three options:
You can contact the site administrator and ask them to take the steps necessary to have the cached webpage removed from the search engine in question. Google typically responds to such requests from webmasters within 2-3 hours and Yahoo typically responds in 5 hours;
You can seek a court order or other legal document to have certain content removed from the website/cached webpage; or
You can just wait until the search engine crawls the site again and updates its cached webpages. This option can take the longest amount of time to see results since it might be 1-2 months before the site is crawled again.
Google offers an additional tool to have a cached webpage removed by a party who does not own the webpage in question. My understanding is that this process will only work for HTML pages and will not work for PDFs or .doc files):
The webpage must be have been updated since the cached version;
Then it will prompt you for the URL you’d like removed;
Click Continue;
Type a word that appears on the out-of-date cached version of the page but not anywhere on the live version. Its better to use single words and not phrases; and
Click Remove cache.
Given the technical nature of this topic, and fact that I’m not a techie, I’d recommend that you work with a technology professional and not rely on this post. That being said I hope this helps and at least provides you with some general information to get you started.
Tired of reading? How about a video to help you learn about Canada’s new anti-spam law?
I’m delighted to let you know about a cool feature on Pitblado’s new website called the “Whiteboard Sessions”, which are vlogs (or video blogs). We’ve just posted a 3 minute vlog of mine entitled “Are you a spammer?“, wherein I discuss:
Accountingweb has a great article here that deals with an issue that most business professionals on Facebook these days are increasingly facing… “If you have a Facebook account, you’ve probably faced the dilemma of whether to accept a friend request from a business associate. Declining the invitation can cause wrinkles in professional relationships, but accepting the invitation may mean that you may not be able share as freely as you’d like on Facebook.” The article provides a detailed way that you can configure your Facebook friends lists to help in these situations.
If you know of other similar articles that can help business professionals to better manage their social media activities, please share by posting a Comment below. Thanks! And thanks to my colleague, Mark Wallace, for the head’s up about the Accountingweb article.
CTV News has an excellent article that discusses important issue of how to monitor your reputation on social networks. While including some practical tips, the article discusses the importance of being proactive with your online reputation and privacy in what is described as “this Wild West world”.
If your answer is “no” you’re wrong. Sorry, but it was a trick question. Whether your organization admits it or not, it is in the social media world. Clients, prospective clients, employees and even competitors are almost certainly engaging in conversations about your organization on Facebook and LinkedIn. The question is whether you’re a part (or even aware) of those conversations. The second question is what are you going to do to shape those conversations, to the extent that you can?
The reality is that Canadian employees, for example, are blogging, tweeting and accessing social networking websites with increasing frequency. And the result is increased legal risks for Canadian businesses. These risks include disgruntled employees intentionally revealing trade secrets, defaming supervisors, harassing co-workers, or posting negative information about their employers’ business. There are even additional threats resulting from loyal employees who inadvertently disclose information online that runs afoul of privacy and competition laws. These threats won’t go away if your company has its head in the sand regarding social media.
One important step to dealing with and leveraging social media is to implement a social media policy within your organization. Doing so won’t address every potential headache related to social media, but it will help to manage online discussions that are occurring during and after work hours by your own employees. And since some of the greatest risks I’ve mentioned above stem from your employees, my best advice is to implement a social media policy. Key components in a social media policy should include:
defining the scope of prohibited activities;
clarifying to whom the policy applies;
addressing how infringing content should be removed from social media sites;
spelling out who, when and how monitoring of social media sites occurs; and
advising of penalties and enforcement of the policy.
Who is the biggest threat to your privacy? Government bodies? No. Businesses? Nope. How about your supposed friends, or “frenemies”? Absolutely.
No one knows more detailed personal information about you than your Facebook friends. So do we need new privacy laws to protect you from violations perpetrated by other individuals? Read more>>
An Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench has issued a precedent setting ruling that relates to Facebook comments and, specifically, whether the Charter of Rights and Freedoms can apply to universities. In the case of Pridgen v. University of Calgary, the court ruled that the post-secondary institution violated two students’ Charter rights when it sanctioned them for posting critical comments about a professor on Facebook. The students were found by the University to have committed non-academic misconduct and were placed on probation as a result of their Facebook comments. They applied for judicial review to set aside that decision on various grounds, including that their right to free expression under the Charter. The University argued before the court that the students had committed acts of defamation on Facebook.
One of the big issues in the case related to whether or not the Charter applies to universities. The University argued that the Charter only applies to government institutions and did not apply in this particular case because the University is not part of the government and was engaged in regulating its own internal affairs when disciplining the students. Earlier court decisions have left open the possibility that the Charter might apply to subordinate bodies created and supported by the government, including “many forms of delegated legislation, regulations, orders in council, possibly municipal by-laws, and by-laws and regulations of other creatures of Parliament and the legislatures”. In this particular case, the court declared that “the University is not a Charter free zone”. As a result, and considering the particular facts of this case, the court ruled that the students’ Charter rights were infringed by the manner in which they were sanctioned for their online behavior. A University spokesman has indicated that its legal staff will review the decision to determine whether there will be an appeal.
Can the act of connecting with other professionals on social networking websites such as LinkedIn constitute a violation of a non-compete or non-solicitation contractual undertaking? Are departing employees that are subject to such restricted covenants required to disconnect and “de-friend” colleagues and customers of their former employer until the contractual undertaking have expired?
ComputerWorld is reporting today that an IT staffing firm has accused one of its former employees of violating her non-compete undertaking through her conduct on LinkedIn. I’m not aware of any similar lawsuit to date in Canada so it’ll be interesting to see how this particular case evolves in the U.S. This case and others that I’ve previously noted highlight the blurring line between online and offline worlds. Businesses should consider whether or not, and to what extent, they should try to enforce such restrictive covenants in the social networking world. Stay tuned…
Canadian Business Online is asking if you “ever wonder who’s checking your Facebook profile? Sure, there are probably the old standbys, like your high-school crush and your nosy co-worker, but you should be aware that there might be someone else checking you out: your banker. Financial institutions of all stripes have been scouring social-networking sites since the days when MySpace was all the rage; now they troll Facebook, Twitter and blogs to find out more about their customers. Don’t be surprised if soon they take the information they’ve found about you and use it to determine your creditworthiness.”
Yours truly was interviewed by Canadian Business Online for this article and, as you’ll see, I comment that I’m not aware of whether, or to what extent, the big banks and credit card companies are using personal information that’s publicly available on social networking websites to determine credit worthiness. That being said, in the insurance industry “using information from social-networking sites has already become commonplace”. The message that I’d take from this article is that Canadians’ understanding of privacy, and the ground rules for managing publicly available personal information that we willingly post online, is rapidly evolving.
Are website operators presumed to have “published” defamatory materials that they deliberately link to from their websites? If not, what are the circumstances where it can be inferred that a website operator has “published” hyperlinked defamatory materials? We may be about to find out. The Supreme Court of Canada has just granted leave to appeal of Crookes v. Newton, the B.C. decision that I summarized in a previous post last October.
There’s still plenty of “grey areas” in Internet law. Hopefully, the Supreme Court of Canada will provide more definitive guidance for legal practitioners and website operators in the growing area of online reputation management. In the meantime, website operators should seek legal advice prior to hyperlinking to any potentially defamatory materials on the Internet.
This blog provides practical assistance to Canadian businesses so they can better deal with issues related to privacy, access to information and social media law. I hope you subscribe to this blog via RSS (below) or via e-mail (below) so that you can receive timely updates to new posts. Thanks, Brian
This blog is presented for informational purposes only. Content does not constitute legal advice or solicitation and does not create solicitor-client relationship. Views expressed are solely the author's and should not be attributed to any other party, including Pitblado LLP or its clients. The author makes no guarantees regarding the accuracy or adequacy of the information contained herein or linked to via this blog. The author is not able to provide free legal advice. If you are seeking advice on specific matters, please contact Brian Bowman at (204) 956.3520 or bowman@pitblado.com, but please be aware that any unsolicited information sent to the author cannot be considered to be solicitor-client privileged. Comments published on this blog do not reflect the views of Brian Bowman, Pitblado LLP or its clients.
During the course of my practice I’m often asked to provide social media law advice, typically to organizations or individuals who want defamatory, proprietary or privacy invasive content removed from the Internet. Once content has been successfully removed from a website I often discuss with clients issues related to Internet cached webpages. So I thought it would be helpful to provide some general information on what Internet cached webpages are and how you can deal with them in situations where you don’t want to have certain content available online.
Posted by Brian Bowman 
