Last week marked an important milestone: It has been one year since the European Court of Justice ruled that people could petition Google to remove links from search engine results.
The case began when a 58-year-old Spanish citizen, Mario Costeja Gonzalez, sued Google for a link to an old newspaper article containing some information about back taxes he had long since paid off. Pressing his case all the way to Europe’s highest court, Gonzalez managed to win — and the court forced Google to begin considering user requests to take down information deemed “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed.” To date, Google has removed 41 percent of the URLs its been asked to remove, a total of 324,402 URLs.
This so-called “right to be forgotten” has received a mixed response. For its proponents, it’s a way of ensuring that people are able to deal with sometimes outdated or inaccurate information that appears high in search results for their name. For its detractors, it’s a dangerous effort to rewrite the past, or even worse: giving individuals the chance to censor material currently available to the public.
For Google, the case was yet another challenge on the European front. The search engine faces a volley of lawsuits, including antitrust litigation that could cost the company billions. Even with its outright dominance of search results in Europe — it commands 92 percent of the European market as of March of 2015 — the pressure from European governments and citizens has forced Google to change some of its practices. As a result of the “right to be forgotten” case, for instance, Google had to build a process by which the claims would be adjudicated. Once a week, a senior group meets to decide the most difficult cases. Google has released some information about what it has chosen to remove, as well as published a report that gives high-level data about the kinds of requests it receives and what percentage of links it has chosen to remove.
But apparently this is not enough. At least not according to a group of 80 academics who published an open letter to Google demanding more information about their “right to be forgotten” process:
Beyond anecdote, we know very little about what kind and quantity of information is being delisted from search results, what sources are being delisted and on what scale, what kinds of requests fail and in what proportion, and what are Google’s guidelines in striking the balance between individual privacy and freedom of expression interests.
Their letter, timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the ruling, calls on Google to release “aggregate data about how Google is responding to the >250,000 requests to delist links,” including “What sort of information typically gets delisted (e.g., personal health) and what sort typically does not (e.g., about a public figure), in what proportions and in what countries.”
For the academics, Google and other search engines are in a position to balance competing claims between the right to privacy and the public’s right to information — but with no public view into their decisions, who’s to say that they’ve struck the right balance? As is often the case with Google, it is a victim of its own success: because Google has the most searches, and thus the most requests to remove links, it also has the “the best data on the kinds of requests being made, the most developed guidelines for handling them, and the most say in balancing informational privacy with access in search” — which is why the request is directed at them, though the academics encourage other search engines to follow suit.
You can imagine the private exasperation from senior Google executives. In public, they have taken the recommendations under advisement, but in the past, Google has found itself in hot water when it releases too much information about which links it removes and which links it allows.
“The public should be able to find out how digital platforms exercise their tremendous power over readily accessible information,” write the academics, which includes Ellen Goodman, co-director of the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law, and Julia Powles, a researcher at the University of Cambridge’s faculty of law, along with nearly 80 others.
Google could be forgiven for wondering what matters more: the right to be forgotten, or the right to know what’s being forgotten? This case, however, represents an important legal precedent in Europe — and one year out, these kinds of requests and how Google responds to them are worth paying attention to, if only because where Google goes, others will follow.
