One of 10 executives, academics and regulators on Google’s advisory council for ethics, Luciano Floridi explains the outcome of the third public meeting in Paris on 25 September.

During the first two consultations the council mostly discussed the legal and ethical framework needed to address the consequences of the ruling by the European court of justice (ECJ) against Google regarding the removal of links to personal information that remains legally available online.

In Paris, some of the most valuable contributions concerned procedural matters. I welcomed this more pragmatic turn - it is what the current debate needs most.

Forget for a moment academic ruminations on fundamental human rights and their balance or complementarity. Google has already received more than 135,000 requests to remove links to approximately 475,000 urls, and behind these numbers lie actual lives and real people. Pressing decisions concerning them need to be taken. What is the best way of proceeding?

During the meeting at least one point emerged quite clearly: publishers would like to be involved in the decisional process, and as early as possible.

Before Google decides to de-link some information published by Le Monde, for example, it should consult the newspaper to check whether the removal of the link clashes against the freedom of the press or other rights. To put it more technically: notification should be ex ante. It seems a sensible idea, and most people agreed upon it. However, having crossed this particular bridge, we stumbled upon a new problem.

Suppose that the notification has been discussed and the link has been removed, should the public be informed about such removal? It may seem a mere technicality, but unpack it and a significant difficulty surfaces.

Currently, if you search for “Mario Costeja”, you are informed that “Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe.”

The public notification seems similar to the process search engines use when asked to remove content that infringes copyright laws. Yet publicising the fact that some information about someone has been de-linked is problematic. After all, being told that an individual has gone through the effort of asking Google to remove a link to some personal information may raise some serious suspicions, which may damage that individual as much as, and perhaps even more than, the original information itself.

And there is an ironic twist: if information about a removed link is made public, it can be exploited to create services that can re-link the de-linked material. Above all, it becomes a tempting invitation to look for the same personal information using a search engine that is not based in Europe, such as google.com.

Those who dislike the previous solution do not enjoy a more palatable alternative. Suppose you are not told that a search page you are viewing has had some links removed. This appears to be more in line with the spirit of the ECJ’s ruling and the protection of privacy, but the problem is that now you are truly kept in the dark.

Not only you do not get the link to the information you were looking for, you are not even been told that you are not getting it. In mathematical logic this is called negation by failure: if you do not obtain some information, you assume that the information in question is not there to be obtained in the first place. A bit like a fisherman assuming that if he fails to catch any fish then there is no fish in the lake.

This starts smelling very badly, in terms of freedom of information. If you are paranoid, you will be chronically suspicious about what links you are obtaining any time you run a search about someone. So you may end up using google.com anyway.

There is no easy solution because the ECJ’s decision currently applies only to search engines operating in Europe. No coordination among search engines is envisaged at the moment, either within Europe or internationally. Despite a very recent ruling in France, it still seems that what happens in Europe stays in Europe. This is known as the territoriality issue and we only began to discuss it in Paris. I suspect it will part of the next debate when we meet again in Warsaw.

• Luciano Floridi is director of research, and professor of philosophy and ethics of information, at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He is a member of Google Advisory Council on the Right to be Forgotten. His last book is The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality (Oxford University Press, 2014)