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 The event in Madrid will be the first of seven meetings in
European capitals, as the Internet giant struggles with thousands of
requests a month to remove from its search results everything from
serious criminal records, embarrassing photos, instances of online
bullying and negative press stories.
By mid-July, Google, which holds more than 80 percent of Europe's
search market, said it had received more than 90,000 requests and
accepted more than half since the European Union's top court ruled
they must remove results if the information was "inadequate,
irrelevant or no longer relevant".
Meanwhile data protection regulators from European countries, which
are next set to meet on Sept. 15, are working on guidelines for the
search engines, which also include Microsoft <MSFT.O> and Yahoo!
<YHOO.O>, to ensure that requests are handled consistently.
Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, who heads France's privacy watchdog and
the WP29 group of EU national data protection authorities, said on
Friday she was sceptical about the Google initiative, which she
described as part of a "PR war" on an issue that was important to
the company's business strategy.
 "Google is trying to set the terms of the debate," she said. "They
want to be seen as being open and virtuous, but they handpicked the
members of the council, will control who is in the audience, and
what comes out of the meetings."
If a search engine declines a person's request, he or she has the
right to appeal to the national data protection regulator. Some 90
such appeals have been filed in Britain, 70 in Spain, 20 in France
and 13 in Ireland.
Some examples of link removals have become public because Google
notified media outlets such as the BBC and Guardian when their
stories were removed from search results. That prompted critics to
charge that Europe's Internet was being scrubbed and the press
censored.
SPIRIT OF THE RULING
The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates online encyclopaedia
Wikipedia, set up a web page to post all the link removal notices it
has received, as a form of protest that attracts attention to the
very information someone wanted removed.
Regulators have said that such notifications undermine the spirit of
the court ruling on online privacy, and are considering whether they
should try and curb them.
The issue of notifications is one of the many that Google asked the
advisory panel to consider, said Sylvie Kauffmann, one of its
members and the editorial director of France's Le Monde newspaper.
"There are a seemingly infinite variety of cases coming in, so
Google is struggling to apply the court decision," said Kauffmann in
an interview.
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"Google has asked us to formulate ideas to help them, and there is
of course a public relations dimension to the exercise as well."
Kauffman added that Google would not pay panel members, beyond
covering their travel expenses, and that the company had assured
them they would have total independence.
Google asked French regulator Falque-Pierrotin via letter whether
she or other regulators would take part in the meetings, but she
declined, saying it would be inappropriate for a regulator with
enforcement powers. She said some national regulators could send
staff members to observe the proceedings.
A spokesperson for the Spanish regulator said it had no plans to
attend the Madrid meeting.
The advisory council includes eight representatives from outside
Google, including a former German justice minister and two
academics, as well as Google's general counsel David Drummond and
chairman Eric Schmidt.
Other members include Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder and vocal
critic of the "right to be forgotten", United Nations human rights
official Frank La Rue, and Jose-Luis Pinar, who headed Spain's data
protection regulator from 2002 to 2007.
After Madrid the council will meet in Rome on Wednesday, Paris on
Sept. 25, Warsaw on Sept. 30, Berlin on Oct. 14, and London on Oct.
16, before concluding in Brussels on Nov. 4.
Google said it would stream the sessions online.
(Additional reporting by Julia Fioretti, Robert Hetz, and Conor
Humphries; Editing by Will Waterman)
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