The 'Right To Be Forgotten' Is A Nightmare To Enforce----Google

Earlier this year, Europe granted its citizens the “right to be forgotten,” meaning they can ask search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to remove hits for their names that are irrelevant or outdated. A month into its going into effect, it’s proven to be a logistical nightmare, in part because of Google’s informing media organizations when it removes one of their stories from search, which leads the organization to re-earth the story and mention the incident that some European desperately wanted disappeared. In a post about the new right, Google’s chief lawyer David Drummond made clear that the search giant isn’t happy about the ruling but is doing its best to comply with a law with which it doesn’t agree. Up to that point, there had been only negative anecdotes about people who wanted forgetting — pedophiles, deceptive politicians and dastardly doctors — but Drummond actually mentioned some sympathetic ones — a man questioned for a crime he was ultimately cleared of and an abused daughter. But European data regulators aren’t happy either. They may ask Google to change the way it’s reluctantly complying with the law, reports Reuters.

Over two months, Google has gotten nearly 100,000 requests from people who want searchers not to stumble across certain information about them, and Google has hit the erase button for half of them. The two big problems from regulators’  point of view:

• Google only removes links from the local version of Google, so if you are a European and want to see what has been forgotten, you can just head over to a version of Google not based in Europe, such as the USA’s Google.com.
• “Another issue raised by the EU watchdogs was Google’s decision to notify the owners of the websites that have been removed from search results,” Reuters reports. Once notified, we journalists tend to write about the removal, subjecting the information that was supposed to be buried to greater publicity. One site is even archiving disappeared links.

The idea that Europe’s regulators would get to determine what information the rest of the world has access to through Google is a hard pill to swallow and would set a nasty precedent when applied to other local censorship by countries around the world. If they were to win that battle, every single person search around the world would get this message slapped on it. I doubt regulators will win that fight, meaning people in Europe doing people searches — who don’t respect the right to be forgotten — will just start routinely doing it on a non-European version of Google, undermining the privacy censorship. Only the lazy will miss the forgotten stuff.
However, it’s not hard to imagine regulators putting an ixnay on Google informing websites about disappeared links. To be transparent without jeopardizing the effectiveness of the law, Google could send websites regular reports about how many of their links were forgotten without telling them which ones they were, though it will make their PR campaign against Europe’s law far less effective.