EU court says Google must honour ‘right to be forgotten’

[Harpa Timsah 13,258]

http://www.euronews.com/2014/05/13/eu-court-says-google-must-honour-right-to-be-forgotten/

It has been dubbed the ‘right to be forgotten’.

In a case pitting privacy campaigners against Google, a top EU court says Internet firms can be made to remove irrelevant or excessive personal data from search engine results.

The European Court of Justice upheld a complaint by a Spanish man that Google searches on his name threw up links to a newspaper article in 1998 about his home being repossessed.

Google says it is disappointed at the landmark ruling from the Luxembourg-based court.

But it has been welcomed in Brussels, where back in 2012 the European Commission proposed a law giving people the ‘right to be forgotten’ on the Internet.

“It is good news because it confirms the position of the European Commission,” said EC spokeswoman Mina Andreeva.

She said the court’s decision shows “that European law can apply to a search engine and that Google is a controller of data, can be regarded as a controller.

“It is above all not good only for the Commission but for citizens who will see their data are better protected,” she added.

Not only does this case highlight the struggle in cyberspace between free speech advocates and supporters of privacy rights.

It also creates both technical challenges and potential extra costs for companies like Google.

[GandD 5,966]

Google has a statute of limitations now

[Harpa Timsah 13,258]

I think this is awesome, actually, at first glance.

But this "right," it can't extend to all things. Say, if a person wants to read newspaper archives or go check out the microfilm, the story about me being a girl scout selling lots of cookies for camp could be found. So is this right applicable only to lazy clickable research, and not real research?

[GandD 5,966]

Realistically, filtering on that broad of a spectrum may be an undertaking.

Edited May 13, 2014 by GandD

[Hotter Otter 1,211]

I approve of it but there are real issues. A paedophile who was jailed in 2005 and just released should not be getting the search results about him deleted but in general I think it's a good idea.

[SMR 368]

It sounds like an okay idea until you consider all of the difficulties of implementation. Automation would be a nightmare, so it would probably come down to people requesting that certain results be removed. But then, a whole number of difficult questions come up.

--What results do you own and have a right to request removal of?

--What if someone else has the same name as you?

--What is the period after which you can request that something be forgotten?

--Are there some things that shouldn't be forgotten? Here I'm not just thinking crimes but maybe bad reviews, past disputes, deaths, accidents, etc. While there are good reasons that someone may want these things to be forgotten, there are also reasons that society and other individuals may want them to be remembered. Who ultimately gets to make the decision as to what we remember and what we forget?

--What about all of the other people who are involved in the event that you want to have forgotten? What if they want it to be remembered?

--What if a certain event that you want to be forgotten can be found at lots of different sources, maybe with slight modifications?

The broader issue here, though, is a question of who and what falls under the mandate to forget things? If a court can require Google to stop showing something in the search results, it's not such a leap to where a court can require someone to stop posting something.

[luckytxn 2,265]

Screw Google. The more Facebook is made to suffer the better.

[Póg mo 1,749]

I approve of it but there are real issues. A paedophile who was jailed in 2005 and just released should not be getting the search results about him deleted but in general I think it's a good idea.

This ruling only seems to effect internet search results i.e. the information is still there, and people continue to be free to look up information just like they did before the internet was created.

[OnMyWayID 1,489]

I agree it seems like it is just a start.. Look at something like the wayback machine at archive.org that lets you see a timeline of a web page and see it as it was any at any time in the past..

Edited May 14, 2014 by OnMyWayID

[SMR 368]

I agree it seems like it is just a start.. Look at something like the wayback machine at archive.org that lets you see a timeline of a web page and see it as it was any at any time in the past..

And this is the whole problem. Allowing somebody to petition Google to remove a link that appears when their name is Googled is relatively benign. But the justification for doing this can easily be expanded to censor the internet.