Google has acknowledged it needs to “try and see things from a more European perspective” as it acknowledges criticism over its handling of the “right to be forgotten” case.



Now known as ”the right to delist”, the case saw Google lose to a Spanish lawyer who objected to out-of-date and potentially harmful information about him appearing high up on Google’s search results for his name. The European Court of Justice found in favour of the lawyer, Mario Costeja Gonzalez, in May 2014.

Google now acknowledges that the reaction to the ruling – Google has received 220,000 requests to remove information – showed significant, pent-up demand from citizens requesting the removal of outdated, inaccurate or irrelevant search results on their name.

“Google has been working hard to strike the right balance,” said Peter Barron, Google’s European communications director, speaking at a debate in London on 17 February where he said Google would not speak against the right to be delisted. “We certainly accept that there is an issue to be addressed. For us, the whole process has been an exercise in learning and listening and, as Larry Page has said, to try to see things from a more European perspective.”

“Many of the requests we’ve had so far are straightforward – a clear cut accept or reject – while others raise complex legal and ethical questions,” he added. In the more complex cases, Google is now expected to exercise “judgment calls” that it “never expected or wanted to make,” he said, describing “complicated decisions that would in the past have been extensively examined in the courts, now being made by scores of lawyers and paralegal assistants”.

Using examples of straightforward decisions in Google’s Transparency Report, Barron said the search engine had removed a link to an old newspaper article about a rape which was prominent in results for the victim’s name, but refused a request to remove a link to a story about a financial crime for a professional. Some are harder to judge, such as spent convictions, comments the author later wanted to retract, or “an interview freely given about sexual proclivities, that the interviewee now wishes he hadn’t taken part in. (The interview, that is, not the proclivities.)”

“Many predicted at the outset that Google would simply agree to most requests for removal to save time and money,” said Barron. “That hasn’t happened – 60% of removal requests have been rejected. Every single request is considered by our teams and there is no automation. If their judgment is challenged by the publisher we will reconsider and, if a mistake has been made, we will reinstate.”

Barron said that Google internal procedures were close to the guidance issued by European regulators in November. Google is considering the recent report compiled by members of its independent advisory council who, Barron said, “were free to reach a consensus or to dissent from the consensus view – and they did.”

Geoffrey Robertson QC, speaking alongside Barron, highlighted concerns about the “dramatic new challenges to privacy posed by the megamoguls of the worldwide web”.

“The internet is our main vehicle for self-expression and friendship formation. Unless it is regulated by the accepted data protection principles, its users will suffer outrageous invasion of their privacy or will have to censor themselves – and both these outcomes are undesirable in a society committed to human flourishing.”

Legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg, also debating, described the ECJ ruling as striking a fair balance. “The right to be forgotten is not a super-right that trumps freedom of expression. The case doesn’t mean that news organisations can’t write about people. It doesn’t mean they have to delete stories they have written already,” he said.

“That’s the spirit of the revised EU data protection regulation: empowering individuals to manage their personal data while explicitly protecting freedom of expression and the media.”

During the debate former GCHQ director Sir David Omand disagreed with Robertson arguing that the right to delist was “law by slogan” and a nonsense. In the Internet of Everything, he said, data from the mobile devices we carry, the apps we use, and the sensors we wear, is all accessible. “Our very presence in the world has changed this digital totality and we cannot have the right to rewrite history to erase those traces.”

