Right to be forgotten

European Union privacy regulators have reached out to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to discuss the rules of the recent court-ordered “right to be forgotten” rule. EU officials told The Wall Street Journal that they are trying to set up a meeting with the tech juggernauts for next Thursday in Brussels, however it remains unknown if the companies have accepted the invitation.

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A controversial European court ruling recently determined that people had the “right to be forgotten” and ordered search engines like Google to purge unflattering web links from their search history, but does the internet really have a delete button? A new website called “Hidden From Google” has been banking links removed since the European Union Court of Justice’s ruling.

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Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond has revealed in a Guardian comment piece some of the criteria the company is using to decide whether or not to act on ‘right to be forgotten‘ requests, and says that it is creating an independent advisory council to assist it in making these decisions.

[The criteria] include whether the information relates to a politician, celebrity or other public figure; if the material comes from a reputable news source, and how recent it is; whether it involves political speech; questions of professional conduct that might be relevant to consumers; the involvement of criminal convictions that are not yet “spent”; and if the information is being published by a government …

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Earlier today members of the press started noticing that certain news articles were being removed from Google’s search results due to the company’s recent move to allow takedown requests following a UK court’s ruling that its citizens have the “right to be forgotten.” As various news sources played off the situation by re-running stories (and putting their subjects back in the limelight), Google has responded by restoring many of the missing links.

It’s possible the removals were unintentional anyway. Regarding the criteria for removal, the company originally stated:

When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information—for example, information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials.

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Well-known figures taking advantage of Europe’s ‘right to be forgotten‘ ruling, in which Google and other search engines are required to remove links to sensitive information deemed ‘out-dated or irrelevant’, are not quite getting the results they hoped for. Google is choosing to notify the media when links to stories are removed, and the British media is responding by running stories on the censorship – putting the subjects of the removed links back in the news once more … 
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The WSJ is reporting that Google has begun removing search results following a European court decision that individuals have a right to require Google to remove links to information which is “outdated or irrelevant.”

Following the ruling – known as the ‘right to be forgotten’ – Google created a webpage application and announced that each would be evaluated by hand on a case-by-case basis, balancing the right to privacy against legitimate public interest. The company now says that it has begun acting on these requests … 
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A recent ruling by the European Union Court of Justice (ECJ) ordered Google to remove old web search results that could possibly have a negative impact on a person’s reputation. Often referred to as “the right to be forgotten,” individuals are able to request that “outdated or irrelevant” information about them be purged from the web, but what about non-living entities? Taking its cues from this controversial ruling, a Canadian court has ruled that Google must remove search results for a company’s rival — not only in Canada but around the world.

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A recent ruling by the European Union Court of Justice (ECJ) determined that people had “the right to be forgotten” and mandated that Google remove outdated, unflattering information about them from search queries if requested by an individual. In response to the court’s ruling Mountain View created an online form for people to formally file requests to have old links removed from web searches.

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Following a ruling by a European court that users have the “right to be forgotten” online, Google has launched a new web page that allows some users seeking a bit of privacy to have certain links removed from the company’s search results. The Mountain View search giant says it has already gotten thousands of takedown requests—and that’s before the form was even public (via Re/code).

The system isn’t automated, and Google says it will need to consider each request on a case-by-case basis to decide whether a certain link should be removed or left intact in the interest of public information. If that sounds a bit inefficient, that might be because it is. An introductory statement on the page calls it “an initial effort” which will undoubtedly be improved on over time:

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A ruling by Europe’s top court that individuals have a right to require Google to remove sensitive information from search results is unlikely to apply in the USA, according to a number of commentators quoted in an Associated Press piece.

But across the Atlantic, the idea that users should be able to edit Google search results in the name of privacy is being slammed as weird and difficult to enforce at best and a crackdown on free speech at worst …

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