Taylor Wessing GDPR Data Breach (Part 3): The GDPR “Right to be Forgotten” Trap and Why Academic Papers Are Forever
Why does Dr. Patrick Zurheide believe it is legal to use the name Taylor Wessing to cover up his failure?
Why does Dr. Patrick Zurheide believe it is legal to use the name Taylor Wessing to cover up his failure?
Alright, everyone, you can exhale. There will be no “Hydra.” I was joking about flooding the internet. But I do want to extend a massive, sincere “thank you” to Dr. Patrick Zurheide for exercising his GDPR “Right to be Forgotten.”
You see, invoking that right leaves a very specific, highly visible digital footprint. And let’s call it what it is: Dr. Patrick Zurheide has just permanently attached a Dark Pattern to his own name.
Did you really think we were crazy enough to blindly multiply articles and attack a corporation that is actively breaking the law just to bait us? No. We came here to expose Valve Corporation, and we are exactly on the right path.
The Google Warning: A Massive Red Flag for High-Paying Clients — Dr. Patrick Zurheide and Dr. Tobias Schelinski
Let’s look at Dr. Patrick Zurheide’s GDPR case from a logical standpoint. The “Right to be Forgotten” was designed to protect private, vulnerable citizens. But in this case, Dr. Patrick Zurheide used his big name and legal weight to apply pressure — once again “proving” his elite professionalism and understanding of the law.
But here is where the elite lawyer made a critical error in understanding how search engines actually work.
Dr. Patrick Zurheide isn’t just Googled by random people on the internet. He is Googled by clients. Wealthy, corporate clients looking to hire a highly expensive, top-tier lawyer at Taylor Wessing. When a reasonable client is about to spend massive amounts of money, they do their due diligence. And when they scroll down his Google search results, they will now see a glaring, unremovable warning: Information has been hidden.
Einige Ergebnisse wurden möglicherweise aufgrund der Bestimmungen des europäischen Datenschutzrechts entfernt. Weitere Informationen
For any intelligent client, this is an instant trigger. It screams that something is being concealed. If they care about where their money is going, they will dig deeper. And they will find what was hidden.
The Dog Metaphor: Smearing the Evidence
We might be a little crazy, and we could have easily trashed the internet with garbage to prove a point. But why? We aren’t web terrorists; we are the truth. If the truth is so unpleasant for Dr. Patrick Zurheide, we are truly sorry — he could have just written to us. Instead, he and Valve Corporation continued to cover up a data breach (which exposed children’s data!) and failed to report it.
Their calculation was obvious: provoke us, wait for us to act unhinged, and then accuse us of defamation. But there is a flaw in their plan. We don’t care about their accusations, and we don’t care about Dr. Patrick’s degrees. The article is true. Are we giving up? No.
Here is a simple truth: When a dog poops on the floor, it doesn’t try to hide the crime by smearing it all over the walls. It just makes the mess bigger, smellier, and impossible to ignore. Dr. Patrick, your GDPR takedown request was you smearing it on the wall.
The Academic Strike: Good Luck Deleting This
They expected the “Hydra” — a blind, aggressive multiplication of blog posts. Instead, we have documented a top-tier lawyer using a Dark Pattern. For any major corporation (like Google’s Security Team), this is a trigger for a deep audit. They will look into web archives, find the logs, and see exactly what Taylor Wessing lawyers were trying to bury.
Since Dr. Patrick Zurheide likes to play games with the law — acting as a private citizen when he wants to hide, but representing Valve Corporation when it suits him — we decided to change the battlefield.
This year, we will be releasing two full academic papers regarding corporate security competence and the (in)ability to handle PDF vulnerabilities.
You can DMCA a blog post. You can use GDPR to hide a Medium article. But you cannot delete academic materials. Once published in academic repositories, they are forever. And out of pure courtesy, we will make sure these papers are sent directly to Dr. Patrick’s university. Perhaps the academic community can help him and his colleagues regain their grip on reality.
A Message, Not a Threat
You calculated that we would be cruel and reckless. We calculated that an elite lawyer would vanity-search his own name and misuse the law to clean it up.
Dr. Patrick, stop playing games with the law. We are fully in control and we know exactly what we are doing. Do you?
We can escalate the discussion about your Dark Patterns to a completely different level, if you catch our drift. And no, these are not threats. Study our previous cases against other corporations. We never threaten. We just write exactly what we are going to do, and then we do it. Consider it our style of investigative journalism.
The game is still on. But we are the ones writing the rules now.
An Open Letter to Taylor Wessing and Dr. Patrick Zurheide
Dr. Tobias Schelinski, Dr. Patrick Zurheide, and Taylor Wessing, we know exactly what you are waiting for. You are waiting for us to make a mistake, to cross a line, or to lash out blindly. But whatever you are hoping for, it will never justify what you are actively doing.
You are covering up a data breach involving children. You are putting kids at direct risk. A breach that you are responsible for. And now you are upset because someone is actually daring to talk about it?
Did you even study the law?
Dr. Patrick officially states that he represents the interests of his client, Valve. Since when does representing a multi-billion-dollar corporation make you a “private citizen” who needs the protection of the GDPR? Let’s stop playing games. You are not a victim. You are using your name and exploiting a privacy loophole to continue hiding your own legal violations, your staggering incompetence, and what essentially amounts to a corporate crime.
By handing over the data of the affected parties (the whistleblowers and victims), you effectively threw them under the bus and put them in direct danger. And after doing all of that, you genuinely believe your smartest, most reasonable move is to try and scrub the truth from the internet using the “Right to be Forgotten”?
You think you can just delete reality? We’ll see about that.
I don’t know what you’ve come up with over there — but you’d better not mess with us. No one’s going to pay you — and you won’t be able to take it down either. You’re breaking the law. We’re not playing games here, and this isn’t Valve trying to shield itself from the truth, which has already been partially revealed thanks to your leak. All the best, elite lawyer.
As documented in our primary investigation into Valve's data practices, here is the original document evidence:
Exhibit A: 830 pages of “elite” redaction. A giant black rectangle manually placed over thousands of SteamIDs, emails, and personal data points. Too bad they forgot to delete the text underneath.
If you don’t like it — and it’s true that you made a mistake — just stop Googling yourself. I can see which region Dr. Patrick was searching for Dr. Patrick from.
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