Posted: Friday, 4 January 2019 @ 13:43
It is now two months now since the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that Google should heed those seeking the “right to be forgotten” and hide embarrassing stories from search engine results.
The rationale was to help ordinary people escape their past, especially if caught in compromising situations.
This began with Mario Costeja González, a Spaniard who was rather embarrassed that anyone searching his name online could find that he had been forced to sell his house in order to settle debts some years ago. He asked Google to remove the story and they declined. His case went all the way to the ECJ and he won.
Google has now quite a bit of work to do and remove some things from the web.
As ever this is a balancing act between the potency of the search engine which can remember many details about us and the right to some privacy.
Now we are facing the fact that a number of people are trying to hide their past and some of it looks pretty unpleasant.
Some recently reported example of trying to remove web links include....
A politician who had been caught fiddling his expenses has applied to Google, asking for links to the story to vanish.
An actor has been in touch, keen to cover up his affair with a teenager.
Google has also heard from a company anxious to cover up any online discussion pertaining to its ripping off customers.
In theory, anyone can request the removal of stories from search engines if these are deemed “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”.
These are conditions vague enough to have encouraged 70,000 requests so far.
We will have to see what actually happens but there is bound to be more litigation on this.
Those of us uncomfortable about this and who would wish us to have leave the EU have more ammunition by looking at the decision from the EU judges.
That said, this decision could have been made in the Uk anyway by a UK Judge.
Irrespective of where you stand on the issue, perhaps the ideal is to follow our US cousins and have a bill of rights embedded in our constitution.
At least we would get some clarity on this issue.
In the US, no judges are telling search engines what to do, as the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, and protection from all such interference.
That is clarity.
Of course with the primacy of EU law this right of freedom of speech may turn out to be a pipe dream as long as we remain in the EU.