14 DAY TRIAL // Google’s efforts to give birth to serious debate about the balance between people’s privacy and the freedom of information are about to get kicked up a notch as a panel appointed by the company will hold its first meeting this week.
On Tuesday, the panel will meet in Madrid, Spain, the country where the whole “Right to be forgotten” originates from. More specifically, the European Court of Justice decision regarding people’s right to ask search engines to remove links that are now irrelevant came after a Spanish court referred the case to it.
The Internet giant has been struggling to deal with tens of thousands of requests in the past several months, trying to come up with a proper way to deal with them all since making a decision about whether or not to remove links is highly subjective.
Google has received a lot of requests since the ruling was given. By mid-July, Google had received over 90,000 requests in Europe, where it handles close to 90 percent of the search market.
Data protection regulators within the European Union are planning to meet on September 15 to work on guidelines for search engines in regards to handling the demands sent under the Right to be forgotten ruling. This means that Microsoft and Yahoo, and all other search engines that are being used in the European Union are going to be affected.
Google has been quite clear about its position on the ruling, saying that it is quite useless as long as the content doesn’t actually disappear from the Internet, but only from search results. To top things off, people can always use Google.com instead of their localized versions, while the European decision only covers countries within the Union and the browser versions dedicated to them.
The fact that Google adds a notification at the bottom of the page when a link has been removed due to the Right to be forgotten and that it lets publishers know about some of their links being removed has upset quite a few people.
Regulators are unpleased with Google's attitude
French privacy watchdog chief, Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin has accused Google of trying to set the terms of the debate through the meetings it has scheduled across Europe, Re/Code reports.
“They want to be seen as being open and virtuous, but they handpicked the members of the council, will control who is in the audience, and what comes out of the meetings,” she said.
She has already refused to join Google’s French debate on the topic, saying it wouldn’t be appropriate, given her status, while the Spanish regulator has taken a similar stance.
The company’s advisory council which will attend these meetings includes David Drummond, Google’s General Counsel, Eric Schmidt, Chairman, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, as well as a former German justice minister, two academics, UN human rights official Frank La Rue and Spanish data protection regulator chief between 2002 and 2007, Jose-Luis Pinar.
Following the September 9 meeting in Madrid, Google will go to Rome on Wednesday, Paris on September 25, Warsaw on September 30, Berlin on October 14, and London on October 16. The last meeting will be held in Brussels on November 4. All sessions would be streamed online.