Google Takes Steps to Comply With ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Ruling
By MARK SCOTT
New York Times
May 30, 2014 6:30 am
Updated, with more on the implications of Google’s link removal process for its users and business in other parts of the world.
LONDON – Google announced on Friday its first attempt to comply with a landmark legal decision by Europe’s top court that allows people to request that links to information about them be removed from Google’s search engine in Europe.
The steps include an Internet form where European residents can submit suspect links to web pages that they want to be taken down — though those links would disappear only on Google’s search engines within Europe. The links would still be available outside the region.
By restricting its response to European users, Google is complying with the court’s ruling, while trying to reduce its impact on the company’s global operations.
Yet legal experts said that non-Europeans would still be able to submit requests for links to be removed, if they could prove that their online data fell under the region’s strict privacy laws.
A person in Brazil, for example, could request that an Internet posting that he objects to be removed if the source is hosted on a server in Ireland. But while links would be taken down from European domains like google.de in Germany, they still could be found on the American site google.com.
The potentially unwieldy efforts to remove links, analysts said, may ??lead to different levels of quality for search results, depending on where users were based in the world.
“Limiting the jurisdiction to European citizens could prove difficult,” said Richard Cumbley, a data protection partner at the law firm Linklaters in London. “We could see a balkanization of search results.”
As part of its response to the European Court of Justice’s recent ruling, Google also announced that it was creating an expert panel, including the likes of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who has been a vocal opponent of the legal decision, to advise on how the court’s decision would affect its search engine across the region.
Google said that it would review submissions to decide whether the information about individual was out of date, and if the links to people’s activities were of public interest if they related to financial fraud, malpratice or criminal convictions.
“The court’s ruling requires Google to make difficult judgments about an individual’s right to be forgotten and the public’s right to know,” the company said.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Google’s co-founder, Larry Page, said the European court’s ruling could help repressive governments worldwide to limit what information was available online.
And despite the company’s lengthy lobbying efforts with European officials, Mr. Page said that Google had been caught off guard by the recent ruling.
“That’s one of the things we’ve taken from this, that we’re starting the process of really going and talking to people,” Mr. Page told the Financial Times.
Google’s announcement comes two weeks after the European Court of Justice made its privacy ruling, which has led to around 1,000 Europeans to ask the company to remove links to information about themselves.
Vincent West/ReutersMario Costeja González of Spain was concerned about the prominence given by Google to a short newspaper notice from the 1990s about a house he owned being sold off to pay debts.
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While industry experts had speculated that Google would enforce the legal ruling in all of the countries where it operates, the company said on Friday that the Internet form would apply only to its search engines within the 28-nation European Union plus Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
While Google holds a roughly 90 percent market share across the region, other tech companies, including Microsoft and its Bing search engine, also will have to comply with the decision.
A spokesman for Microsoft declined to comment.
As part of Google’s new Internet form, people must submit a photo ID, along with the links to the information that they want to be taken down. That could restrict non-Europeans, including Americans, from submitting the form, unless a European citizen makes the request on their behalf, or non-Europeans can show that they fall under Europe’s privacy rules.
As part of Google’s new Internet form, people in Europe must submit a photo ID, along with the links to the information that they want to be taken down.
A Google team will first review the requests to determine whether the links should be taken down. If there are further questions, the company will work with local European data regulators to decide whether the information should be removed.
Both Google and privacy watchdogs must balance people’s so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ from the Internet with the general principle of freedom of expression. Unlike in the United States, the right to privacy is enshrined in European law.
“The court has cemented the right to be forgotten into European law,” Ulrich Kühn, ?head of the technical department at Hamburg’s data protection regulator, one of Germany’s leading data protection agencies, said earlier this month.
Google’s new privacy committee, whose members also include senior company executives like Google’s top lawyer, a former Spanish data protection regulator and a number of Internet-focused academics, is expected to produce a report within the year about how the European court’s ruling will impact Google’s search engine.
Yet in a sign that the company was still struggling to catch up with the legal ruling, the group had not met to discuss the decision, and a Google spokesman said more experts were still to be added to the committee.
European lawmakers welcomed Google’s announcement, saying it showed that large tech companies could comply with the region’s stringent data protection rules.
Google had argued since the case was first filed in Spain in 2010 that it would be difficult to administer the wave of potential requests for links to information to be taken down.
“We will now need to look into how the announced tool will work in practice,” said Viviane Reding, the European justice commissioner. “The move demonstrates that fears of practical impossibility raised before were unfounded.”
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