Google Has to Hit Delete as Right to Be Forgotten Turns to Crime
Google Has to Hit Delete as Right to Be Forgotten Turns
to Crime
U.K. judge says crime information was out of date, irrelevant
Court rejects bid by second man to remove links to
conviction
By Jonathan Browning and Gaspard Sebag April 13, 2018,
6:49 AM PDT Updated
Google’s effort to rein in the so-called right to be
forgotten has taken a hit after U.K. and French judges said the reputation of
businessmen tarnished by old news stories about improper conduct trumped the
public’s need to know.
Google was told by a London judge on Friday for the first
time to remove links to older stories about a businessman’s criminal conviction
from search results. The decision follows last month’s ruling by a French court
about a former chief financial officer whose job prospects were hampered by
stories about a fine for civil insider-trading violations.
The European rulings are starting to stack up, hurting
Google’s ability to fight future court cases over how far it should go to
delete links. It comes amid a storm of European criticism over U.S. technology
companies’ ability to protect user privacy. Facebook Inc. is embroiled in a
scandal over revelations that the data of tens of millions of people was
improperly shared with a political consulting firm.
"It means even more work for Google," said Jon
Baines, the data protection adviser at London law firm Mishcon de Reya.
"They will have to give even more intense scrutiny to the facts of an
application for delisting.
In the U.K. ruling, Judge Mark Warby said 11 articles
related to the businessman should be delisted by Google.
Crime and Punishment
“The crime and punishment information has become out of
date, irrelevant and of no sufficient legitimate interest to users,” Warby
said. A second businessman failed in his bid to have links to articles taken
down about a more serious crime.
The Alphabet Inc. unit must remove information about a
person on request if it’s outdated or irrelevant under a 2014 European Union
top court ruling. The original EU court ruling, however, failed to outline
clear terms for when the search engine should remove information and the U.K.
decision may be the first from a major court that effectively ruled that
criminal conduct can be erased.
“We work hard to comply with the Right to be Forgotten,
but we take great care not to remove search results that are in the public
interest and will defend the public’s right to access lawful information,”
Mountain View, California-based Google said in a statement.
No Damages
The court refused to award damages to the businessman,
saying Google took reasonable care in the case.
The two men, who can’t be identified because of a court
order, had asked that links to information on their old convictions be taken
down. Under English law designed to rehabilitate offenders, those convictions
don’t have to be disclosed to potential employers and can effectively be
ignored.
The businessman, known as NT2, was imprisoned for six
months in the early part of this century after authorizing an investigations
firm to conduct computer hacking and phone tapping to find out who was engaged
in hostile activity against his company. "His past offending is of little
if any relevance," Justice Warby wrote. "There is no real need for
anybody to be warned about that."
The judge considered the businessmen’s current conduct as
part of his ruling.
“The situation as it is now can potentially influence
whether the information is still relevant," Baines at Mishcon de Reya
said.
But courts throughout Europe are likely to interpret the
right to be forgotten in different ways.
French Ruling
In last month’s French ruling, Paris judges said that
Google had to reduce the visibility of stories about a former chief financial
officer at a French company who was fined 200,000 euros ($247,000) for civil
insider-trading violations.
The judges said the right to privacy should prevail after
laying down a series of benchmarks including impact on work and family life
that dictated whether results should be easily available. The ruling pointed
out that this father-of-four didn’t profit financially from the violations and
was at risk of losing his job again unless the articles were brought down in
search results with his name.
“Given his family situation, the loss of his job would
cause him a very serious prejudice, especially given that it took him nearly
two years to find a new job,” the judges said. In those circumstances, “the
public interest in having information with his name about this case doesn’t
prevail.”
Jonathan Coad, a media lawyer at Keystone Law in London,
said there’s an inherent problem with the degree of latitude each EU country
will have in implementing the right to be forgotten.
“We’re all supposed to be complying with” the same
privacy laws, Coad said. “But French privacy laws are much more draconian than
U.K. ones."
The two U.K. cases are: NT1 v. Google and NT2 v. Google,
High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division, Case No.’s HQ15X04128 and
HQ15X04127.
— With assistance by Nate Lanxon, and Hannah George
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