Two major changes potentially coming to EUs Right to Be Forgotten with global implications5/16/2017 There are some potentially major changes coming to Europe’s Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF). Two pending issues to soon be decided are discussed by Google’s Senior Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer in a blog post earlier today:
Fleischer provides the procedural background on the first question:
Examples of “sensitive, personal data” could be political affiliations or a criminal record. To date, RTBF has involved a case-by-case assessment of the right to individual privacy vs. the public’s interest in having access to information via search engines. The underlying data sources (e.g., newspapers) are not required to purge the information. Explanatory FAQs (.pdf) provided by the EU say the following about how search engines must assess each request:
A set of appeals happened in the pending case, and now the CJEU has to decide whether there are certain categories of personal data that require automatic removal from search indexes. Because of the CJEU’s high court status — this was the court that announced RTBF in the first place — any decision favoring the litigants could fundamentally alter the implementation of RTBF, as opposed to simply vindicating the rights of these particular individuals. Google’s Fleischer argues a ruling in favor of the litigants would elevate the rights of individuals over the broader public interest:
It would be a serious mistake for the CJEU to rule that some categories of information require automatic removal, without any sort of test involving considerations of the public interest. That could allow unscrupulous or controversial figures to erase their histories of bad, even criminal behavior. The second issue before the French Conseil d’Etat (a top legal-administrative body) is perhaps even more troubling. For at least three years, France has been arguing that RTBF must apply to Google’s global index and not just Europe. Accordingly, its courts and privacy authority have argued that such a move is necessary to prevent people from simply accessing the same information via Google.com — however, the company has made it harder to get to Google.com in Europe. Fleischer argues that allowing global removal would set a “grave precedent.” It could empower authoritarian political figures and governments, such as China, Russia, Pakistan, and now Turkey, to try to censor the internet globally. Chinese state authorities could adopt the French position and argue, under some pretext, that all references to Tiananmen Square or the Dalai Lama must be removed from Google’s index. While that may sound unlikely, the leap is not that great. Numerous countries would love to be able to control the content of Google’s search index. Imagine de facto Philippine dictator Rodrigo Duterte, for example, arguing that content about his policy of state drug killings was “sensitive” and must be removed globally from Google’s index. Again, it’s not that far-fetched a scenario. In addition, the combination of these two rules would be a kind of one-two punch for censorship and could have serious global consequences for the free flow of information and the public’s right to know. The post Two major changes potentially coming to EU’s Right to Be Forgotten with global implications appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2qMMOoe
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