Google Suffers Blow as EU Court Backs Right to Be Forgotten

Google Suffers http://technartoinfo.blogspot.com/Blow as EU Court Backs Right to Be Forgotten

Google Inc. (GOOG) may be ordered to remove personal information from its search engine after the European Union’s top court paved the way for citizens to have a “right to be forgotten.”

“Links and information in the list of results must be erased” where a person’s fundamental rights are harmed by the posting of personal information online and where there is no public interest in publishing it, the EU Court of Justice said in a statement on a ruling today.

A person may ask search-engine owners to remove personal information and can ask a court or a data-protection authority to step in if the company refuses, the Luxembourg-based tribunal ruled. The court said Google both processes and controls personal data and must abide by EU law.

The ruling is the latest data-protection blow to Google, which faces privacy investigationsaround the world as it adds services and steps up competition with Facebook Inc. for users and advertisers. The company was fined 1 million euros ($1.38 million) in Italy last month over privacy violations by its Street View cars, which photographed people across the country without their knowledge.

It’s “a very loud wake-up call” to all businesses that gather and store consumer data, said Mark Brown, director of information security at Ernst & Young LLP in London. Many companies may be “quaking in their boots at the thought of responding to a consumer ’right to be forgotten’ request” as they may not know what data they are holding, he said.

Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Google Inc. was fined 1 million euros ($1.38 million) in Italy last month over privacy... Read More

‘Disappointing’ Decision

Google said the decision was “disappointing” for search engines and online publishers, said Al Verney, a spokesman for the company in Brussels. The operator of the world’s largest search engine now needs to analyze the implications, he said.

The court’s ruling violates the right to freedom of expression because it “opens the door to anyone who wants to whitewash their personal history” even if the information is true and factual and the original source material remains unaltered, said the Index on Censorship, a London-based group that promotes freedom of expression worldwide.

A Spanish court sought advice from the EU’s top court for Google’s challenge to an order by the Spanish data-protection authority for it to remove information on a man whose house was auctioned off for failing to pay taxes, one of 200 instances where Spain has asked Google to pull content.

‘Turning Point’

Newspaper La Vanguardia published the information in the case in 1998 and years later it could still be found through a Google search.

The ruling sets out a so-called right to be forgotten that the European Commission proposed in 2012 as part of an overhaul of data-protection rules that may be finalized later this year. Today’s decision is binding on courts across the 28-nation bloc.

The case should mark “a turning point for Google’s behavior,” said Jose Luis Rodriguez Alvarez, the head of Spain’s Data Protection Agency, in an e-mailed statement. Google has “consistently challenged” the Spanish authority which has had to deal with an increasing number of complaints over the company’s refusal to remove personal information, the agency said.

Mina Andreeva, a spokeswoman for the commission, said regulators welcomed the court’s finding that EU data-protection law applies to Google and other search engines operating in Europe.

The case is: C-131/12, Google Spain, S.L., Google Inc. v. Agencia Espanola de Proteccion de Datos, Mario Costeja Gonzalez.

To contact the reporter on this story: Aoife White in Luxembourg at awhite62@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.netPeter Chapman, Robert Valpuesta

Google had argued that it did not control personal data and should not have to act as censor. Photograph: Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images
A European court has backed the "right to be forgotten" and said Google must delete "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" data from its results when a member of the public requests it.
The test case ruling by the European Union's court of justice against Google Spain was brought by a Spanish man, Mario Costeja González, after he failed to secure the deletion of an auction notice of his repossessed home dating from 1998 on the website of a mass circulation newspaper in Catalonia.
González argued that the matter, in which his house had been auctioned to recover his social security debts, had been resolved and should no longer be linked to him whenever his name was searched on Google.
The European court judges ruled that under existing EU data protectionlaws Google has to erase links to two pages on La Vanguardia's website from the results that are produced when González's name is put into the search engine.
The European judges made clear that in their view the EU data protection directive already established a "right to be forgotten". This appears to pre-empt lengthy negotiations within the EU over a new data protection directive which could establish a limited "right to be forgotten".
The judges said they had found that the inclusion of links in the Google results related to an individual who wanted them removed "on the grounds that he wishes the information appearing on those pages relating to him personally to be 'forgotten' after a certain time" was incompatible with the existing data protection law.
They said the data that had to be erased could "appear to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant or excessive … in the light of the time that had elapsed". They added that even accurate data that had been lawfully published initially could "in the course of time become incompatible with the directive".
In technical terms the ruling establishes that a search engine such as Google must be regarded as a "data controller" under the data protection laws in those EU countries where it establishes a branch to promote and sell advertising.
The case is the first of many in the pipeline against Google in which Spanish citizens want the search engine to delete personal information about them from their search results.
The EU justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, welcomed the court's decision, saying it was a clear victory for the protection of the personal data of Europeans. "The ruling confirms the need to bring today's data protection rules from the 'digital stone age' into today's modern computing world," she said in a post on Facebook.
Google said: "This is a disappointing ruling for search engines and online publishers in general. We are very surprised that it differs so dramatically from the advocate general's opinion and the warnings and consequences that he spelled out. We now need to take time to analyse the implications."
The British justice secretary, Chris Grayling, has been a leading opponent of Reding's proposals for an explicit EU "right to be forgotten".
The Ministry of Justice has estimated that the European commission's proposals could cost British businesses, which include many leading data and tech firms, £360m a year. The information commissioner has called the "right to be forgotten" proposals "a regime that no one will pay for".
The justice minister Simon Hughes said in March that "it is clearly better that we take time to get this right rather than rush into something that proves unworkable and costly". He said it was important that any new EU law would not impose costly rules that would jeopardise the growth of the digital economy.
Emma Carr, acting director of the privacy rights campaign Big Brother Watch, said: "The principle that you have a right to be forgotten is a laudable one, but it was never intended to be a way for people to rewrite history. Search engines do not host information and trying to get them to censor legal content from their results is the wrong approach. Information should be tackled at source, which in this case is a Spanish newspaper, otherwise we start getting into very dangerous territory.
"The regulators should be doing more to ensure that people have an informed choice over what data is collected about them by companies like Google, but if we start to make intermediaries responsible for the actions of the content of other people, you're establishing a model that leads to greater surveillance and a risk of censorship."
The ruling makes clear that a search engine such as Google has to take responsibility for the content that it links to and may be required to purge its results even if the material was published legally.
The EU judges pointed out that they were requiring Google to remove its links to two pages on La Vanguardia's website even though the Spanish data protection agency had rejected González's complaint against the newspaper and said it had published the information about him lawfully.
Data protection lawyers said the ruling could give the go-ahead to deletion requests of material including photographs of embarrassing teenage episodes and even insults on social media websites and could lead to a rethink in the way they handle links to content on the web.
Sarah Ludford, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman in the European parliament, said the ruling was gratifying. "Coming hot on the heels of the court's strikedown of the Data Retention Directive, it is clear beyond doubt that the EU's highest judicial authority stands squarely behind the European parliament and Liberal Democrats in strengthening EU privacy rights," she said.
The former Conservative shadow home secretary David Davis also described it as a sensible decision but said it was only the first step towards people having property rights over their own information.
"The presumption by internet companies and others that they can use people's personal information in any way they see fit is wrong, and can only happen because the legal framework in most states is still in the last century when it comes to property rights in personal information," he said.