April 2017
In 2014 the European Court of Justice decided that a person has the right to have links on Internet taken away from search engines results if the information on the site was “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant or excessive”.
In 2014 the European Court of Justice decided that “personal information” on the Internet can be taken away from the search engines result. This principle is known as “the right to be forgotten”. The reason why a person has “the right to be forgotten” on Internet depends on a Spanish case. Mario Costeja Gonzáles had found information on Internet regarding his house that was auctioned so that he could recover his social security debts. Maria meant that this situation was solved long time ago and shouldn’t be linked to him when someone did a search on Google.
“INADEQUATE, IRRELEVANT OR EXCESSIVE INFORMATION”
The European Court of Justice ruled that under existing data protection laws that Google has to remove links to two pages regarding Mario Costeja Gonzáles. The judges said that the data that could appear to be “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant or excessive”.
The EU has also required that the right to be forgotten also must apply for EU-citizens outside the European Union, for example in the U.S.search result, which is against the First Amendment.
Peter Fleischer from Google says:
“If other countries that have established a right to be forgotten also push for global adoption, then Google might have to remove links everywhere to satisfy regulators. Google believe that no one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access”.
Jimmy Wales – founder of Wikipedia – agree with Google’s statement and he says:
“If we’re asking Google to comply in every version of Google worldwide, it becomes very hard to say where we want Google to draw the line. It’s a race to the bottom. Governments around the world will immediately say: “Great, we’ll ask for things to be deleted worldwide”.
Countries in Asia, Latin America have been influenced by the EU:s “right to be forgotten” and delinking have become more frequent in these areas.
Reference
Guardian: EU right to be forgotten on Internet
New York Times: EU and Internet
