Correct!v | Online Journalism Blog

The story found that most requests were made by private individuals, not politicians or criminals. Image: The Guardian

Sylvia Tippmann wasn’t looking for a story. In fact, she was working on a way that Google could improve the way that it handled ‘right to be forgotten‘ processes, when she stumbled across some information that she suspected the search giant hadn’t intended to make public.

Two weeks ago The Guardian in the UK and Correct!v in Germany published the story of the leaked data, which was then widely picked up by the business and technology press: Google had accidentally revealed details on hundreds of thousands of ‘right to be forgotten’ requests, providing a rare insight into the controversial law and raising concerns over the corporation’s role in judging requests.

But it was the way that Tippmann stumbled across the story that fascinated me: a combination of tech savvy, a desire to speed up work processes, and a strong nose for news that often characterise data journalists’ reporting. So I wanted to tell it here. Continue reading →

investigative journalist Boris Kartheuser won a right-to-information case against the German government. In a guest post for OJB, explains how he came to use a new crowdfunding site to raise money to pursue the case after the government appealed.

We all remember the pictures of uprisings in Libya, Egypt, Bahrain or Tunisia a few years ago. Hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets to protest against oppressive and corrupt governments.

Many of these protestors paid a high price for their courageous uprising: shot in the streets; arrested, tortured and killed in prison.

Some were caught because authorities were able to monitor every step they took, every email they wrote and listen to every conversation they held over the phone – using surveillance technology developed in countries such as Great Britain, Italy and my own country: Germany. Continue reading →