The European Union’s top court recently ordered that search engines within the EU adhere to “right to be forgotten” removal requests. The court ruled that Google and other search engines are “data controllers” and, as a result, are responsible for the content they display, meaning if an individual wishes for the removal of personal information that appears in a search of their name, the search engine will have to abide by the request and are required to pull any information the individual deems to be “inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant.”
According to an article from Forbes, though, the right to be forgotten still lacks implementation clarity. The EU is currently debating a new EU Data Protection Regulation that will be more concrete and clear as to how and where this applies to EU residents’ protection. The article points out that companies need to be prepared because this new regulation will apply to EU residents no matter where the resident’s data is collected.
At the end of June 2014, Google began pulling search results in compliance with the ruling. According to an article from The Wall Street Journal, Google received 41,000 requests in the first four days. Google has updated its technical infrastructure to meet this demand and has hired a “removals team” to assess each individual request. Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing have said that they will soon begin implementing a removal process in response to the European court’s decision as well.
Controversy over this removal process is sure to arise, as some see this as censorship left to Google and other search engines’ discretion. However, those in favor of protecting the public’s privacy point out that search-result removal only occurs if the search results are from a search of the individual’s name and are not removed from all search results.
WSJ’s article also pointed to signs that this option for removal of personal information in name searches may transpire in other countries soon. Allen Chiang Yam-wang, Hong Kong’s top privacy regulator, recently wrote about predictions for Canada and Japan to soon follow in the footsteps of Europe. Yam-wang suggested that Google apply its removal processes globally, as cases are soon to follow in more and more countries.
It will be interesting to see how the right to be forgotten ruling evolves in the EU and where else implementation of similar processes might occur. I am further curious to see how this affects search engine processes in the U.S., because of censorship claims. What’s your take? Is allowing search engines to remove personal search results protecting the public’s privacy or is it censorship?