Right to be forgotten: Google accused of deliberately misinterpreting court decision to stoke public anger
Right to be forgotten: Google accused of deliberately
misinterpreting court decision to stoke public anger
By Jonathan Owen
Thursday 03 July 2014
Google has been accused of misinterpreting a European
court’s “right to be forgotten” ruling by deleting links to apparently harmless
news articles in a bid to whip up anger against “censorship”.
Articles about a former Merrill Lynch banker, singer
Kelly Osborne, a football referee who lied about a controversial penalty, and a
“foul-mouthed” former president of the Law Society were among the first tranche
of web stories to removed from search results, it emerged today.
The move by Google comes just weeks after a landmark
ruling by the European Court of Justice which upheld the “right to be
forgotten” and sparked a controversy over how to balance freedom of expression
and public interest with rights to privacy.
Details of the first articles to be “hidden” by the
search engine sparked a backlash against the original court ruling this
morning, but there are now growing questions about how Google was handling the
takedown requests.
Ryan Heath, spokesman for the European Commission’s
vice-president Neelie Kroes, said that Google’s decision to remove a BBC
article by economics editor Robert Peston about ex-Merrill Lynch boss Stan
O’Neal – one of those blamed for helping cause the global financial crisis –
was “not a good judgement”.
He said he could not see a “reasonable public interest”
for the action, adding that the court ruling should not allow people to
“Photoshop their lives”.
Describing Google’s actions as “tactical”, he added: “It
may be that they’ve decided that it’s simply cheaper to just say yes to all of
these requests.”
Google sources strenuously denied any suggestion that
they were misinterpreting the ruling. But privacy campaigners accused the
internet giant of playing “silly political games” in an attempt to undermine
it.
Jim Killock, executive director of Open Rights Group
said: “The ruling was clear that results that relate to articles that are in
the public interest shouldn’t be removed.”
He added: “Google may dislike the ruling and want to
discredit it, but that doesn’t mean that they should apply it incorrectly in
order to provoke a reaction.”
Alexander Hanff, chief executive of the Think Privacy
group, accused Google of removing links unnecessarily “in order to apply
political pressure into having the ruling challenged”.
He added: “They are hoping to use ‘freedom of the press’
as a means of attacking the decision and are effectively creating moral panic
by making people believe that they are being forced to censor.”
The European court ruling only applies to websites in
Europe, meaning that people can still find stories by simply switching to a
global website.
Even in cases where Google is deleting links, the same
content can still be found by searching using details of the subject rather
than the actual names of individuals involved.
Among other stories erased are links to articles about a
couple having sex on a train, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, new trends in sofa
design, and an airline accused of racism by a Muslim job applicant.
The stories have not been removed by the media
organisations concerned, which include The Independent, and who have not been
given any reason for the deletions.
Secrecy surrounds the identities of those demanding that
links to stories be removed, with Google refusing to divulge details.
Google is struggling to deal with the sheer volume of
demands for it to erase aspects of people’s pasts. Around 70,000 requests for
links to be removed have been made in the past month – more than 8,000 [8,497]
of which were from Britain – it emerged today. If all demands were met, more
than a quarter of a million [267,550] web pages would be deleted – around
34,000 [34,597] as a result of complaints made by people in Britain.
Reacting to the deletion of links to his 2007 blog post
about the financial crisis, Mr Petson cited the fact that the content can still
be found by simply using Google’s global website as making “a whole nonsense of
the ruling”.
Emma Carr, acting director of Big Brother Watch, cited
Google’s the decision to remove a link to the blog, which featured “wholly
accurate and legal content”, as highlighting “exactly why the ECJ ruling was
ridiculous and detrimental to freedom of the press in Europe.”
And Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, a member of an
expert panel set up by Google to help it deal with the controversy, slammed the
European ruling as “an utter and complete disaster” and branded it “a major
human rights violation”. The decision to uphold the right to be forgotten is
“clear and direct censorship of the worst kind,” he said.
Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of Index on Censorship,
argued that companies like Google should not be “the final arbiters of what
should and should not be available for people to find on the internet. She
added: “If search engines really believe this is a poor ruling then they should
make a clear stand against it by kicking all right to be forgotten requests to
data protection authorities to make decisions.”
In a statement, a Google spokesperson said: “We have
recently started taking action on the removals requests we’ve received after
the European Court of Justice decision. This is a new and evolving process for
us. We’ll continue to listen to feedback and will also work with data
protection authorities and others as we comply with the ruling.”
It is not just Google which is being swamped with demands
for links to be removed. The sheer rate at which the BBC is receiving requests
for stories to be deleted from its website has prompted the broadcaster to
issue new guidance on “unpublishing” content.
David Jordan, BBC director of editorial policy and
standards, said: “Sometimes the people we feature in our news reports want the
news about themselves to be erased so they can obscure the events they were
involved in, or the comments they made to us and stop others finding them.”
Outlining the new guidance last month, he added: “The BBC
is getting an increasing number of appeals to take down – to effectively
“unpublish” our content.”
The new guidance states that material on the BBC website
is part of a “permanently accessible archive” and will not be removed or
changed unless there are “exceptional circumstances.” It adds: “Removing online
content, particularly news items, risks the accusation that we are erasing the
past or altering history.”
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