The EU’s “right to be forgotten” was always a mess in theory. In practice, it’s even worse.
This extension of EU data privacy laws gives people the power to delist and/or remove content published by others about themselves. Anyone could immediately see how this would be abused. People wishing to remove unflattering content would send Google and others removal requests. Those not confident enough to perform these acts of forgetfulness themselves would pay entities in the “reputation management” business to do this for them. This was on top of the usual tools used to censor negative content, including bogus takedowns backed by intellectual property law.
But this is what the people wanted, apparently, at least according to the EU legislators who represented them. There was really only one way to prevent abuse of this “right.” That was publishers subjected to bogus requests calling them out when they received them — something that has happened at this very site repeatedly.
This form of accountability is no longer an option in the EU. A ruling from a Swedish court that went into effect at the end of last year means Google is no longer letting publishers know if search results have been removed due to “right to be forgotten” requests. Alex Hern has more details at The Guardian:
Google has quietly stopped telling publishers when it has removed websites from its search results under European “right to be forgotten” rules after a ruling in a Swedish court which the search engine is applying globally.
Previously, when an individual applied to have records about them expunged under EU data protection laws, Google would notify the publisher of the original articles.
Media companies, including the Guardian, are largely exempt from the regulations, but links to journalistic content can still be removed from databases including those of search engines.
Now Google only informs publishers of the fact that a URL has been removed, without elaborating on what or why.
Google’s extremely diplomatic statement on this court-enforced change of course informs affected publishers why the change has been made (the court ruling), as well as notes it disagrees with the decision but is, nonetheless, bound by it.
One of the best options for preventing abuse of this “right” has effectively been neutered by this ruling. The naming and shaming of those abusing these requests was one of the only ways to prevent the successful burial of content these abusers simply didn’t want to remain public.
The Guardian, which notes that it is exempt from the regulations (but not the delisting of content by Google), has, itself, already been the target of multiple delisting demands from people who would prefer their vanity searches to say only good things about them.
Within weeks of the original May 2014 court ruling that established that the right to be forgotten applied to Google, six Guardian articles had been removed from European versions of the search engine.
Three related to the now-retired Scottish Premier League referee Dougie McDonald, who in 2010 was found to have lied about his reasons for granting a penalty in a football match. Others included a 2002 article about a solicitor facing a fraud trial and 2011 piece on French office workers making Post-it note art.
Without being able to see why this content had been delisted, journalists may just assume the search engine screwed up. While the notifications do at least inform recipients what’s been delisted, the lack of further context forces those receiving these notices to draw their own conclusions. At worst, it may discourage publishers from digging deeper into the removals and exposing bogus attempts to bury criticism or reports of misconduct.
It can be assumed that was never the intent of the law — to allow people who’ve misbehaved to force Google, et al to participate in a cover-up. But that was always the inevitable outcome. And this ruling — and its subsequent scrubbing of “RTBF” information — only ensures the law will mainly benefit the sort of people who shouldn’t be given a chance to force the internet to forget their misdeeds.
