- From: Webb, KerryA <KerryA.Webb@act.gov.au>
- Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 13:35:05 +1000
- To: "eGov IG" <public-egov-ig@w3.org>
Hugh asked: > > Hi all > > New thread for a change: what does everyone think about government > departments adding "noarchive" robots directives (and their variations) > [1,2] to their websites and pages? > > I suspect most of you know what I am talking about. In case not, it has at > least these effects: > > * requests non-retention of the revision history in sites like the Wayback > Machine [3] > * requests that search engines do not make cached copies of resources > available to searchers > > It's probably worth highlighting that these are not technically > enforceable preventions, but are requests honoured voluntarily by the big > players. > > For my personal opinion, it's against openness and does nothing to > encourage good governance in publishing processes. I'd like to know what > you think. > It may be against openness, but then some things we need to do are against openness. A recent case involved our requirement to publish details of contracts that we let. So far so good. Then a vendor discovered that the details of his consulting rates (from five years ago, no less) could be found by a Google search. He objected strongly and we had to get in tough with the Big G to arranged for the data to be removed from the index and the cache. Kerry ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This email, and any attachments, may be confidential and also privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender and delete all copies of this transmission along with any attachments immediately. You should not copy or use it for any purpose, nor disclose its contents to any other person. -----------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Friday, 5 June 2009 03:35:46 UTC