Surprisingly, the EU Court ruled in favour of the man and forced the California-based search giant to honour such requests in the future. Naturally this has caused an explosion of opinion and has rekindled the fires of mistrust over who collects our data. The ruling is unprecedented, with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales calling it one of the most "...wide-sweeping Internet censorship rulings I've ever seen..." He doesn't believe that it will stand for very long and already there have been protests against the EU Court's decision over the implications that such a ruling will have.
Against the Ruling:
The concern over this ruling by freedom-supporters is that "outdated and irrelevant results" is far too broad a ruling. The obvious implications over this is that near-enough anyone could go to Google and claim a critical article of them -however factual or valid- is "irrelevant" and "outdated." For example, last year I wrote a critical article about Secretary of State for Work & Pensions Iain Duncan Smith, accusing him of wasting money on politically-motivated projects based on bigoted opinions. Using this ruling, he could claim that my article is irrelevant and outdated and -by going to Google- could request that the article be removed from search indexes. You can see how this is ultimately insidious, because it is not active censorship in the sense of articles being taken off the web completely, but rather only gatekeepers of the web i.e. search engines who drive the traffic, will be prevented from doing that, which means that the article I wrote will be lost to the thickening forests of data increasingly being indexed by Google daily. This will lead to my article ultimately becoming lost on those who should be reading it and thus, our hypothetical goal for IDS will be complete: Censorship of criticism.
As a small aside, Google have since received 'forget me' requests, including those from a disgraced politician and a paedophile, which serve to highlight the original concerns.
In Favour of the Ruling:
Those who support the ruling are primarily those pushing for greater ability to manage their individual data. This will include those for example who don't wish to see a prospective employer pulling up their data as an excuse to fire them. YouGov have commissioned a poll since, which shows British public support for the ruling (50% Yes; 23% No.) However, it should be noted that the vast majority of these people do not see any personal need to pursue such requests (73% said there wasn't any irrelevant etc. data online, only 9% said yes.)
As I am sure most of you will know, companies these days will refer to Google for information about prospective employees, primarily trawling through social media profiles. We were given a lecture last year on this subject and below are two images from the presentation showing statistics for rejection/hiring, based on results from social media searches (Goldstraw, 2013):
Why they were Rejected
Why they were Hired
These charts show that a great many people are not even invited for an interview because their social media profiles are filled with images of irresponsible behaviour, posts of an unsavoury character or just lies lies and more lies. This ruling will be able to inhibit such processes but -as was pointed out in the original BBC article, it will do little to stop a determined party from accessing such data anyway.
So What is My Opinion?
While I dislike those who try to censor the world around them and can't stand it when politicians/courts try to meddle with others' affairs, I find it hard to be truly outraged at this ruling, a little annoyed, but not much beyond that. The main reason for this is quite simply that, firstly, Google's mission statement is to make the world's information accessible and available to whomever wishes to see it, which of course can't be done with this ruling in place. Google's team of lawyers I'm sure will fight tooth and nail over this ruling and will ensure that it remains difficult for such requests to be passed. Why is this? Because -quite simply- Google make money through advertising services placed on websites, adjacent to content etc., which will be inhibited if their search indexes are shrunk by this ruling, due to so many de-listings of search results from disgruntled parties. This will mean -naturally- that as few requests as possible are acknowledged in order to retain large profitability.
Now providing that my prediction is correct, this could engender a two-tier system of requests. Imagine two different people who wish to see "irrelevant" and "outdated" content removed from the web: The first is an average man who posted something unsavoury on Facebook and wants it removed, while another is a powerful celebrity wishing to see a magazine article taken down because it defames their character (assume that the article is not untrue but rather shows the celeb in question in an unflattering light, but as a result of their own reckless behaviour nevertheless.) It is natural to assume that the celebrity -who may threaten with lawsuit- is more likely to have a request passed than the average person, of whom there will infinitely more and will deliver a larger loss for Google collectively. They are currently implementing a request button of some kind that will be ready in a matter of weeks. From here one can only imagine what the process will be like, however, the interesting thing is that Google can counter requests, but only if the person in question is a public figure, which suggests that anyone else is immune to scrutiny from Google.
Given all of these facts, I personally have to stand against this decision on Google, because I ultimately place the right to know higher than the right to be forgotten. People should have a right to know if it will concern them in some way e.g. an employer wishing to check a person's background, because this can be costly to businesses who may hire what turns out to be the wrong person. While I respect privacy, sometimes it is a price worth paying I believe for a universal standard that covers everyone regards to the data they choose to put online etc. We already have defamation and libel laws that adequately cover falsehoods posted by others after all, so why the extra ruling I ask?
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