UK Edition
Google prepares for landmark 'right to be forgotten' decision
Google is preparing for a landmark privacy decision at the European Union’s top court on the “right to be forgotten” globally.
The “right to be forgotten” was established in 2014 when the European Court of Justice said links to irrelevant and outdated material in Europe should be erased from searches on request.
Google has so far had to weigh nearly 850,000 separate requests to remove links to some 3.3 million websites, and as a result offers different search results in Europe than the rest of the world.
The European Court of Justice will decide on Tuesday if the ruling should apply globally and where to draw the line between privacy and freedom of speech.
A French data protection regulator has ordered that all links that contain false information about a person or could unfairly harm their reputation should be removed on all of Google’s platforms across the world.
The search giant has challenged the regulator on the issue, and has raised concerns about censorship.
“The case highlights the continuing conflict between national laws and the internet, which does not respect national boundaries,” said Richard Cumbley, a lawyer at Linklaters in London.
A ruling applying the right to be forgotten worldwide “would create a serious clash with U.S. concepts of freedom of speech and other states might also try and suppress search results on a global basis reducing Google’s search engine to a list of the anodyne and inoffensive.”
The case, which started one year ago, has seen judges hear from a string of stakeholders and lawyers representing Google, France’s data protection agency Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) and human rights groups.
It has bitterly divided opinions across the bloc with key players squaring up on opposite sides of the privacy debate. The likes of Wikimedia, the owner of Wikipedia and Microsoft have sided with Google.
The Silicon Valley firm has also won support from within the EU, as Maciej Szpunar, an advisor to Europe’s supreme court, said earlier this year that EU law “should limit the scope of the de-referencing that search engine operators are required to carry out, to the EU.”
Since the ruling was first made in 2014, Google has processed almost 850,000 requests from individuals asking for links to 3.3m websites to be taken down.
Last year, Google lost a first of its kind “right to be forgotten” case in the UK’s high court after a businessman requested that information about a previous conviction be removed.