On May 13, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that individuals had the "right to be forgotten" under specific circumstances. They could ask search engines to remove results that referred to them in response to queries, on the ground that "those results are inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed". This ruling only applies under ECJ jurisdiction. But it could lead to similar judgments in other places. The implications are huge since it affects freedom of speech, the right to privacy of individuals and future developments in digital search-archiving.
Many legal systems offer some version of the right to be forgotten, where crimes committed by a minor are expunged from his or her adult record. But this is much more complex. A digital request to be forgotten may lead to a conflict of interest where the individual's right to privacy must be weighed against the public right to information. Leading search engine Google has already received about 41,000 requests to be forgotten and other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo!, have also received such requests. The actual content is not deleted if a request is upheld. Search engines remove links to that content from search results. Google says that it will flag redactions under the right to be forgotten, thus alerting surfers to the fact that information has been removed.
Google has estimated 31 per cent of the requests so far received related to frauds, 20 per cent to arrests for violent crime, 12 per cent to child pornography arrests and two per cent involved celebrity scandals. Rejecting such requests would be relatively easy, given public right to information. But about 30 per cent of the requests did not fall in the above categories. Dealing with them would be a technically tricky process requiring expensive human intervention. Google has released an online form to enable such requests. It has also set up an advisory committee to set guidelines for processing them. Presumably there will have to be an appeals process. Other search engines may have to set up similar systems or they may club resources to avoid duplication.
The case that triggered the ruling is, in itself, illustrative of some of the confusion that could result in implementation. In 1998, Mario Costeja González, a lawyer based in A Coruña in Spain, was forced to auction a property he owned, to settle outstanding tax demands. A 36-word property auction notice was printed in a local newspaper and digitally archived. Online searches on Mr González's name led to links with the auction notice. In 2009, he started seeking ways to remove that link. His logic: he had paid the taxes and that notice gave a false impression of his current financial status. The ECJ agreed with Mr González in principle.
Ironical as it seems, links to that auction notice cannot now be removed since the case is key to a critical legal ruling. Also, there are now literally thousands of links to that notice, which makes the digital task of "forgetting" it difficult. In addition, Mr González is now a celebrity with possible political ambitions, which gives the public the right to information about his life. Variations of these themes will crop up in other cases. A private citizen may run for a public office. A public servant may retire and ask for the right to be forgotten when withdrawing from public life. Judging the merits of every request will be a delicate task.
