Google’s right to be forgotten – industrial scale misinformation?

When the European Court ruled on the Google Spain case, the press leaped on the decision as an example of the “right to be forgotten”. The Guardian explained that Google would “have to delete links to two pages on La Vanguardia’s website” and that “[l]egal experts said the ruling could give the go-ahead to deletion requests of material”. Similarly, the BBC explained that “the European Union Court of Justice said links to ‘irrelevant’ and outdated data should be erased on request.” This shocking story spread around the world at an impressive speed, the only problem was that the story, while shocking was also not true.

In reality, as the Court explained in its press release [PDF] and no less than fifteen times in its ruling, that it was restricting itself only to instances where searches were being done on the basis of the complainant’s name. At no stage is deletion of content suggested by the Court. The Court ruled that Google should rectify situations where searching for an individual’s name produces results that are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive”. The Court pointed to Google’s assertion that removing pages from its index would be disproportionate and neither implicitly nor explicitly contradicted this view.

By Joe McNamee
read full article at EDRI http://edri.org/forgotten/