Google Clash Over Global Right to Be Forgotten Returns to Court
Google Clash Over Global
Right to Be Forgotten Returns to Court
By Stephanie Bodoni January
09 2019, 12:38 PM
(Bloomberg) -- Google’s
battle against French proponents of a worldwide “right to be forgotten” enters
a decisive phase at the European Union’s top court on Thursday, in a case that
highlights the growing tensions between privacy, freedom of speech and state
censorship.
Ahead of a ruling later
this year, an adviser at the EU Court of Justice will on Jan. 10 deliver an
opinion on whether the world’s most-used search engine can limit the
geographical scope of the privacy right to EU-based searches.
Google has been fighting
efforts led by France’s privacy watchdog to globalize the right to be forgotten
after the EU court’s landmark ruling in 2014 forcing the search engine to
remove links to information about a person on request if it’s outdated or
irrelevant. The Alphabet Inc. unit currently removes such links EU-wide and
since 2016 it also restricts access to such information on non-EU Google sites
when accessed from the EU country where the person concerned by the information
is located.
The worldwide solution
would put global search engine providers “slap bang in the middle of a conflict
of law problem, where on the one hand they might be subject to an obligation to
enable freedom of speech, and in the EU they’d be invited to suppress it,”
Richard Cumbley, global head of technology at law firm Linklaters, said by
phone.
Sexual Orientation
France’s Conseil d’Etat,
the nation’s highest administrative court, sought the EU tribunal’s guidance in
2017 about whether the right to be forgotten could be extended beyond the EU.
In a second case, it asked questions about the obligations of search engine
operators when faced with delisting requests of links to sensitive data, such
as sexual orientation, political, religious or philosophical opinions and
criminal offenses, that “is embedded in a press article or when the content
that relates to it is false or incomplete.”
“The decision will have
significant implications for businesses that rely on referral traffic from
search engines, particularly in the media,” said Peter Church, a technology and
privacy lawyer at Linklaters. “The decision could also have implications for
other businesses, particularly data brokers or those that handle sensitive
personal data, if the principles in the decision have broader application.”
The U.S. company has been
asked to delete links to 2.9 million websites, after the EU court effectively
put the search engine in charge of deciding what requests to accept. It has
agreed to less than half of them. People unhappy with Google’s refusal to
remove a link can turn to privacy regulators.
Global Websites
France’s data protection
regulator, CNIL, started a probe into Google’s actions based on complaints and
ended up slapping the search giant with a fine of 100,000 euros ($114,000) for
failing to remove links from its global websites as well. The case ended up in
France’s top administrative court, which in 2017 referred its questions to the
Luxembourg-based EU judges.
Google has raised the
alarm about the cases more than once. It’s Chief Legal Officer, Kent Walker, in
a 2017 blog post said the cases “represent a serious assault on the public’s
right to access lawful information.” A few months earlier, Peter Fleischer,
Google’s senior privacy counsel said the right created by the EU court remained
just that, an EU right, not a global right.
Walker warned that the
obligation to enforce the right to be forgotten in every country around the
world “would encourage other countries, including less democratic regimes, to
try to impose their values on citizens in the rest of the world.”
Google declined to comment
ahead of Thursday’s court opinions.
Criminal Convictions
The EU court’s 2014 ruling
never defined how, when and where Google should remove links -- and this has
triggered a wave of new legal challenges. A London court last year told Google to
remove news reports about businessmen’s criminal convictions, in line with an
English law that aims to aid people to put past crimes behind them. Paris
judges also told Google last year to reduce the visibility of stories about a
former chief financial officer fined for civil insider-trading violations.
While the right to be
forgotten concerns all search engines, Google’s dominance in Europe means the
company has taken center stage.
The EU court follows the
advice of its advocates general in a majority of its final rulings, which
normally come a few months after the opinions.
The cases are: C-507/17,
Google (Portee territoriale du dereferencement);C-136/17, G. C. e.a.
(Dereferencement de donnees sensibles).
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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