Since the European Court of Justice decided that EU citizens had the right to remove search engine entries to articles deemed "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant", the British press has been bracing itself for the censorship to start.
Now the ruling has been implemented Google has started to redact offending articles on its website, starting with a blog by BBC economics editor Robert Peston on Stan O’Neal, the former boss of investment bank Merrill Lynch forced out after it "suffered colossal losses on reckless investments it had made".
The implication for anyone interested in finding controversial information is that it will be harder if you are googling from the EU. And so we’re going to teach you how to bypass it.
Step One: Download a proxy extension for your web browser
A proxy allows you to bypass regional restrictions on the internet by rerouting your connection through another IP address. This not only allows you to get around European censorship, but blocked videos on YouTube, Vimeo and BBC iPlayer. Not that you’d do that, clearly.
Proxies can be used via dedicated websites, but in the long term it’s better to set up a regular proxy through an extension and whitelist the sites you want filtered. There are a few of these available, but for demonstration we will be using FoxyProxy, available for Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer. Go and download it, and join us on the next page.
Once you have installed the plugin and restarted your browser, you will be left with a little logo at the top right of your screen. Clicking the logo will bring up a setup box, where you can add however many proxies you want. FoxyProxy offer premium proxies, but you can find many for free on the internet.
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Having found our proxy we need to copy the details over to the setup menu. Click "Add New Proxy" and stick in the details. Once you have done that you can click enable the proxy without a whitelist, but this means all our browsing will go through the proxy, which can be a bit slow and also means our saved credentials won’t work. So now we need to put together our whitelist.
Click on to the "URL Patterns" tab and you will see a menu by which you can blacklist or whitelist various websites. We’re going to add https://www.google.com/* and https://www.google.co.uk/* to the dialogue box, with the asterisk used as a wildcard so that variations on the URL will still send us through the proxy.
All that done, we accept the settings and enable the proxy on our whitelist by clicking the menu that drops down from the icon.
Now we can go to Google.com without fear of being redirected back inside the EU, and search for all those people who wish to be forgotten.
