Google braces for landmark global privacy ruling
Google
braces for landmark global privacy ruling
Aoife White, Bloomberg
News Sep 22, 2019
Sep.12 -- Google will pay $1.1 billion to end two French
fiscal cases following years of outrage over the amount of tax it pays in
Europe. Bloomberg's Tony Aarons reports on "Bloomberg Markets."
Google is bracing for another landmark privacy
decision at the European Union’s top court, five years after a
“right-to-be-forgotten” ruling forced it to delete links to personal
information on request.
The EU Court of Justice will rule Tuesday on the
U.S. giant’s follow-up fight with a French data-protection regulator over
whether the right should apply globally and where to draw the line between
privacy and freedom of speech.
The Alphabet Inc. unit is challenging the French
authority’s order to remove, on demand, links on all of its platforms across
the world if they lead to websites that contain out of date or false
information that could unfairly harm a person’s reputation. Judges may also
clarify what links can stay online in the public interest.
For Google, the fate of the internet is at
stake. The 2014 ruling already forces it to offer up different search results
in Europe than the rest of the world. France’s CNIL says Google should purge
those results globally. Google’s backers in the case, which include press
freedom groups, warn this could allow authoritarian regimes to censor the
entire internet by extending to the world their decision on what can be made
public.
‘Continuing Conflict’
"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 EU court is hard to second-guess. The
initial ruling shocked Google by rejecting its arguments that the search-engine
was merely a neutral pathway for serving up information. The decision
effectively left it to Google to decide if a link that someone asked to be
deleted contained something that was “no longer relevant.”
Since 2014, Google has had to weigh nearly
850,000 separate requests to remove links to some 3.3 million websites. Its
staff have taken on a semi-regulatory role to strike a balance between what
information should stay public and what should now be removed.
The court now will have to spell out how widely
Google should remove the links. Should it pull links viewed in one country or
across Europe? Must it strip them from local sites such as France’s google.fr
or also on the global google.com domain -- and what should it do if they’re
accessed from France, Europe or elsewhere?
Since 2016 the company has used so-called
"geoblocking" to filter all Google site results to Europeans so they
won’t see information a person in their country wants to limit.
The EU court will also have to weigh whether
Google can refuse to remove some information that might be in the public
interest. It will advise French courts over a dispute on deleting links over a
personal relationship with a public office holder and an article mentioning the
name of a Church of Scientology public relations manager.
Judges in London and Paris have been sympathetic
to efforts to suppress unflattering information. Last year a London court 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 to reduce the visibility of stories about a
former chief financial officer fined for civil insider-trading violations.
Mountain View, California-based Google and
France’s privacy authority CNIL didn’t immediately respond to requests for
comment.
Google’s importance as the leading search engine
in Europe has led to an EU declaration that it dominates the European market.
The company is separately challenging billions of euros in antitrust fines at
the same EU courts in Luxembourg.
The cases are: C-507/17, Google (Portee
territoriale du dereferencement);C-136/17, G. C. e.a. (Dereferencement de
donnees sensibles).
--With assistance from Stephanie Bodoni.
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