14 DAY TRIAL // The British parliament finds that the “Right to be forgotten” ruling from the European Court of Justice leads to results that are misguided in principle and unworkable in practice.
The UK lawmakers believe that the court’s interpretation of Article 12 of the 1995 Data Protection Directive, which was created three years before Google was even founded, has led to an impossible situation where Google has to process over 70,000 data removal requests that it received in the past two months.
“The expression ‘right to be forgotten’ is misleading. Information can be made more difficult to access, but it does not just disappear. Anyone anywhere in the world now has information at the touch of a button, and that includes detailed personal information about people in all countries of the globe. Neither the 1995 Directive, nor the CJEU’s interpretation of it, reflects the incredible advance in technology that we see today,” said Baroness Prashar, the chairman of the House of Lords EU Home Sub-Committee.
Furthermore, the Brits find the judgment of the court to be completely unworkable because it does not take into account the effect the ruling will have on smaller search engines, which, unlike Google, are unlikely to have the resources to process the thousands of removal requests they are likely to receive.
“It is also wrong in principle to leave search engines themselves the task of deciding whether to delete information or not, based on vague, ambiguous and unhelpful criteria. We heard from witnesses how uncomfortable they are with the idea of a commercial company sitting in judgment on issues like that,” she added.
After having heard evidence from data protection experts and Google itself, as well as various British officials, the committee recommends to the UK government to continue fighting to ensure that the updated Regulation doesn’t include any provisions on the lines of the Commission’s “right to be forgotten” or the European Parliament’s “right to erasure.”
As this seems to be the position adopted by the UK on the matter, Google is gearing up to start touring the European Union to listen to testimonies for and against the “right to be forgotten.”
The committee Google set up includes the company’s Eric Schmidt and David Drummond, but also a large number of independent experts in several fields, such as data protection law, philosophy, ethics, media pluralism, and regulation.
The first meeting is scheduled to take place on September 9 in Madrid, Spain, only to move on to Rome, Italy, on September 10. Paris, Warsaw, Berlin, London and Brussels are also on the list.