14 DAY TRIAL // Google’s roadshow that seeks to bring attention to the issues that accompany the Right to be Forgotten ruling in Europe is being boycotted by the European digital rights group EDRi. The group believes that Google is misrepresenting the whole issue.
The Register points the finger at the Transparency Report Google published, in which it refers to URL removal requests rather than the requests for the removal of links from search results. Of course, this particular issue is more of a wording problem, since the notion is pretty clear either way it is expressed.
“Google is in the perfect position to drive much needed change in this area, but the truth is that Google doesn’t want to restrict its own freedom to manoeuvre. It doesn’t want more regulation and misrepresenting this whole 'right to be forgotten' ruling is a way to distract from that,” said Joe McNamee, EDRi executive director.
The Advisory Council of Google is to hold its last public meeting in Brussels today, asking for people’s opinion about the ruling handed out by the European Court of Justice earlier this year, while also looking for ways on how the search giant should apply it.
As you may remember, the Court of Justice said that Google was a data processor so it should respect some rules. One of these was related to privacy and it had Google open to receiving demands to remove content that people found irrelevant.
The whole thing started after a Spanish man asked Google to remove several links from the search results since they lead to articles about a mortgage foreclosure more than ten years ago. Since he believed these tarnished his image, he didn’t want them to show up anymore.
The case ended up in court and the court sent the case further up the ladder, to the European Court of Justice. The decision led to Google receiving more than 150,000 requests for information to be removed from search results, and it has so far complied to about 42 percent of cases.
The many problems of the Right to be Forgotten
The issue with such a decision is the subjectivity of it all, since there is no clear algorithm to help put the rule in place. Of course, Google also argues that just removing links from search results doesn’t actually make the information disappear from the Internet.
The company also marks the search results pages just like it does when links are removed following DMCA notices, which makes it obvious that someone is trying to hide information from there. They’re also sending notifications to publishers about their removed links, which has pushed many of them to start making things public and rehashing history.
Critics are also pointing the finger at Google because the links are only removed for domains within Europe, but they’re still very much visible on domains such as Google.com, which makes the whole removal request senseless.
Google has defended its position, saying that the European ruling cannot force it to apply the measure to all of its domains.