“However, that interest can be adequately and properly met without a search made on the basis of the complainant’s name”.
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If Google removes these nine links in question, then it will have to remove all other stories like it in the future.
Google has been ordered to remove links referencing a story it had already removed, Blighty’s information watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, said late Thursday. Critics of the ruling consider it a win for censorship and a blow to freedom of expression; Google considers it burdensome but has had to take action; some have called for the principle’s expansion outside Europe; it has sparked issues such as this ICO order. In this case, there’s a weirdly meta situation, in which Google is leaving up news stories that discuss a person’s request to have links removed. Of course, that’s the entire controversy over the right to the forgotten.
This time Google decided against the complainant, arguing that the articles were part of a recent news story and therefore in the public interest. That will also give ammunition to both free speech advocates and privacy activists in their tussle over where to draw the line between privacy and the public’s right to know-and whether Google should be notifying websites of removals under the right to be forgotten. The links are to web pages that include details of a minor criminal offense committed by the individual nearly ten years ago.
“We understand that links being removed…is something that newspapers want to write about”.
The whole point of European Union’s “right to be forgotten” law is to make sure Google removes links to old and outdated news about a person, especially if that news can hurt a person’s business or private opportunity.
Last year, the EU created a mechanism for people to ask Google to scrub certain results from searches for their names. That story itself became the subject of a large number of articles in July 2014 after the man successfully lobbied Google to remove it from his search results in Europe.
Google does not appear to have replied to the order yet; it did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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“Convicted criminals [are] attempting to erase all trace of their deeds from the public eye and the European Court and ICO are actively aiding and abetting them”, said Simon O’Neill, group editor of the Oxford Mail and the Oxford Times.
