BRUSSELS
(Reuters) - Google's handling of "right to be forgotten" requests
from European citizens will come under fire from the continent's
privacy watchdogs on Thursday, after the search engine restricted
the removal of Internet links to European sites only.
European data protection authorities are meeting representatives of
Google, Microsoft, which operates the Bing search engine, and Yahoo
to discuss the implementation of the landmark ruling from Europe's
top court upholding people's right to request that outdated links be
removed from Internet search results.
European Union privacy watchdogs have several concerns on the way
the ruling, which has pitted privacy advocates against free speech
defenders, is being implemented, particularly by Google, according
to a person familiar with the matter.
Regulators can take Google to court if it refuses to meet their
demands, as happened in Spain where the "right to be forgotten"
ruling originated.
Under particular scrutiny is Google's decision to only remove
results from its European search engines, such as google.co.uk,
meaning anyone can easily access the hidden information by switching
to the widely used google.com.
Experts have said this effectively defeats the purpose of the
ruling, which gives people the right to ask search engines to stop
links to information deemed "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer
relevant, or excessive" from appearing in searches for their name.
"Google has claimed that the decision is restricted to localized
versions of Google," said Ashley Hurst, a partner at Olswang, a law
firm. "There appears to be no basis for that claim at all."
Google declined to comment ahead of Thursday's meeting.
TRANSPARENCY VERSUS PRIVACY
Another issue likely to be raised by the EU watchdogs is Google's
decision to notify the owners of the websites that have been removed
from search results.
This sparked controversy three weeks ago when Europe's most popular
search engine removed links to an article by a well-known BBC
journalist about an ex-Wall Street banker and several links to
stories in Britain's Guardian newspaper.
The authors of the stories promptly wrote about the removal, thereby
drawing attention to the issue and feeding speculation about who
requested the removal. Google eventually reinstated a few links to
the Guardian articles.
EU privacy watchdogs are concerned about the effect the notification
process could have on people making the requests, according to a
person familiar with the matter.
Google already notifies the owners of websites that are removed from
search results due to copyright infringements.
Privacy advocates and legal experts said the backlash over the
newspaper articles showed the difficulty of implementing the privacy
ruling given the broad criteria laid down by the court for
information that is inadequate or irrelevant.
"We are likely to see complainants dressing up libel complaints as
data protection complaints as it is easier to prove that data is
inaccurate than it is to prove that it is libelous," Hurst said.
"This will lead to some difficult decisions for Google."
EUROPEAN PRIVACY TOUR
California-based Google faces a number of privacy headaches in
Europe, where rules protecting people's personal data are much
stricter than in the United States.
While the EU has been discussing a major overhaul of its
pre-Internet era data protection laws for over two years, the debate
heated up last year after revelations that the United States had
been conducting mass surveillance programs involving European
citizens and some heads of state.
U.S. web companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, came
under increased scrutiny over their handling of swathes of personal
data in Europe.
In a sign of the importance Google is attaching to the privacy
debate in Europe, it has recruited a panel of high profile
academics, policymakers and civil society experts to advise it on
how to implement the ruling as it ploughs through the over 70,000
requests it has received so far.
Separately, a group consisting of representatives from the EU's 28
data protection regulators are developing guidelines to help them
deal with complaints against Google in a coherent manner, given the
differences in national data protection legislation. Thursday's
meeting will feed into that process.
Complaints from people whose requests have been refused by Google
have begun to trickle in. The British privacy regulator had received
23 complaints by Tuesday afternoon, a spokesman said, while
complaints to the French and Italian authorities were still in
single figures.
