Watchdog quizzes Google,Yahoo on suicide (3)

(ANSA) - Caserta, February 23 - Italy's privacy watchdog on Thursday asked Google and Yahoo to explain why links are still active to sex pictures and videos of a woman who killed herself last September after failing to get them removed. Tiziana Cantone, from Mugnano di Napoli near Naples, took her own life on September 13. The watchdog said it had opened a probe into the case. The watchdog said it was acting after a complaint made on December 16 by Teresa Giglio, Cantone's mother. Watchdog chief Antonello Soro has asked Microsoft Corporation Inc., which owns Yahoo, and Google Inc. not only to look into Giglio's requests but also to indicate what systems they have used and intend to use in the future to remove links to pages that illicitly publish images and videos of a sexual nature featuring Tizana Cantone. Giglio's lawyer Andrea Orefice said "our objective is to obtain the elimination from the Web or all the obscene images and all pornographic videos showing poor Tiziana". He said "we know that this objective will be very difficult to reach, also because the sites that still publish the videos and images are often located in countries outside the European Union, outside the competence of the privacy watchdog and in any case in countries in which privacy norms do not assure individuals the same guarantees as European ones."