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Europe's right to be forgotten ruling, which states that everyone has the right to wipe their digital slate clean, is simply "wrong", a House of Lords report has concluded. As a result, it argues, Google has been faced with an "unworkable and unreasonable situation".

The Lords EU Sub-Committee -- which deals with topics as disparate as immigration, health, sport and education -- delivered this bold statement after consulting with the Information Commissioner's Office, Minister for Justice and Civil Liberties Simon Hughes and Google, amongst others. In a lengthy statement, Chairman of the Sub-Committee Baroness Prashar said the reality was "crystal clear" -- "neither the 1995 Directive, nor the Court of Justice of the European Unions's (CJEU) interpretation of it, reflects the incredible advancement in technology that we see today, over 20 years since the Directive was drafted".


We do not believe that individuals should have a right to have links to accurate and lawfully available information about them removed, simply because they do not like what is said Baroness Prashar

The report supports the UK government's own stance that new regulation needs to invalidate the CJEU ruling.

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The right to be forgotten is an interpretation of Article 12 of the Data Protection Directive, laid down by European Parliament in 1995 and relating to the protection and processing of personal data. For close to two decades, the law was not interpreted as having a "right to be forgotten" clause. But when one Mario Costeja González found that the first Google search result of his name related to a 1998 story about his property being repossessed, he demanded Google remove the link. Since the report was no longer representative of his financial situation, González declared it an invasion of privacy -- Google was highlighting a thing of the past, not allowing him to live it down.

After years of legal battles, the CJEU agreed with González. And since the ruling Google, much perturbed by the turn of affairs and claiming to be totally unprepared to deal with it, said it has been faced with more than 90,000 takedown requests and argues the law is totally impractical and unjust.


The Lords' committee appears to totally agree.

It believes that, at its very heart, the CJEU ruling is flawed.

It should not make search engines judge and jury of the web -- it is not their job, and is not stipulated in the law. On top of this, people do not have an inherent right to have factual information about them scrubbed from digital history. "We do not believe that individuals should have a right to have links to accurate and lawfully available information about them removed, simply because they do not like what is said," Baroness Prashar said.

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This has been a major concern ever since the right to be forgotten was first floated. In the days following the European ruling, Google highlighted how these fears were coming to fruition when it told the FT 31 percent of takedown requests from the UK and Ireland related to frauds or scams; 20 percent to arrests or convictions for violent or serious crimes and 12 percent to child pornography arrests. Others came from police and government, or celebrities.


Further justifying these fears, when links began to be removed and their publishers' notified, it became clear anyone and everyone would be taking a punt and asking for embarrassing or disparaging information to be removed. BBC's Robert Peston highlighted the problem when he lambasted the takedown of a link to his 2007 blogpost on the career problems of a former Merrill Lynch boss -- the suggestion being someone in a position of power was attempting to scrub their record clean.

The Lords report concluded that the right to be forgotten is unworkable for main two reasons.

First off, it totally ignores the fact that pretty much every other search engine (bar Yahoo and of course Bing, which rather embarrassingly had to volunteer to be included in the whole affair) doesn't have the spending power and infrastructure to implement the ruling.

Since the ruling went into effect, Google says it has received more than 90,000 removal requests. The search giant has repeatedly emphasised that it is not equipped to deal with the response itself, recently stating: "This is a new process for us. Each request has to be assessed individually and we're working as quickly as possible to get through the queue." In spite of this, European regulators are apparently irked by Google's ineptitude. Google appears to have been painfully implementing the ruling down to the tee, which has meant it okayed more than half the requests received (outrage ensued, naturally, as many of those links removed went through to factual, solid journalism relating to public figures). That diligence also meant Google only removed the search results from its European search engines, in line with the law, meaning anyone could switch to .com or other portals to access them. Europe has apparently taken issue with this, and the fact Google alerted websites to the removals. It also complained Google was not passing on enough information to national regulators, who are left to deal with all the complaints Google rejects.

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For all these reasons, it's clear both Google and individual countries are grappling with the enormous problem the new application of the law has created.

The Committee's second point, is a legal one -- it says the interpretation of the Directive was in itself, totally wrong. It was "wrong in principle" to force search engines to be judge and jury of the web. Particularly when "based on vague, ambiguous and unhelpful criteria". People should not have the right to pick and choose what is recorded in history about them, said Baroness Prashar, and search engines should not legally be considered "data controllers" -- an argument Google has used for years.

Rather damningly, Prashar concludes that yes, law should try and keep up with technology. But when we do so it must be "sensible" and should take into account the data logistics of what is asking.

It should, she said, also "decide not to try and enforce the impossible".

The report somewhat echoes the many concerns Google has voiced leading up to and following the CJEU ruling. And many members of the public agree with those concerns. When Wired.co.uk published a blog suggesting Google, in its rather slow and seemingly arbitrary implentation of the law, was attempting to highlight its inadequacies in order to get it quashed, a number of readers wrote in to say: good. Many see the impracticalities and dangers of the law, and the Lords report validates those fears and concerns.

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There is an argument, however, that the report emphasises the rights of businesses over the societal and legal issues that brought it to the fore in the first place. Laurence Eastham, editor of The Society for Computers and Law's online publication, comments that it lays "too heavy an emphasis on the inconvenience that arises for business -- e.g. seeming to suggest that start-ups cannot cope with 'privacy by design'".

Politically, the UK is fast becoming Europe's pariah when it comes to digital rights Julia Powles, Law researcher

He continues: "It is worth emphasising that the Committee publishing this report does not complain of a lack of balance in the CJEU judgment -- as so many of us have. It does not want any such right to exist at all."

Law researcher at the University of Cambridge, Julia Powles, is one such academic that has been pushing for a careful, considered and balanced reaction to the law. "The essence of my concern with the Lords is misdirected fire," she tells Wired.co.uk. "I agree that data protection as a system has major flaws. Fixing perceived problems with the perceived right to be forgotten is only a partial fix." The Lords report, and conclusions like it, could leave Google with an "escape route", she says, "and everyone else with onerous obligations, routinely ignored". "We need to look at the whole edifice and debate why we have it and how we can make it workable."


Much as with DRIP, the surveillance law rushed through Parliament earlier this month, the UK appears to be dealing with a Euoprean ruling it does not like, by deciding to totally ignore and defy it.

Of this, Powles notes: "Politically, the UK is fast becoming Europe's pariah when it comes to digital rights. With this and with DRIP, we see knee-jerk responses that go against the broader sentiment of the continent and, importantly, go against individual interests. It is really quite remarkable to have a public statement on behalf of the UK so strongly decrying Europe's superior court."

The debate, however, is far from over. Google's own Advisory Council -- launched to deal with the law's fallout and including human rights lawyers, editors and Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales -- is seeking applications for public comment, and will hold meetings where selected experts can testify across Europe. September dates have already been set for public meetings in Madrid, Rome, Paris, Warsaw, Berlin and London.