Google takes down links to British journalism under 'right to be forgotten' rule: The Guardian, the BBC, and others are reporting that it's being used to cover up embarrassing news stories.
Why is Google really removing links to news articles in Europe? What methods does it use to judge what should stay up and come down? Heaven knows – I’ve repeatedly asked Google to explain this since it began censoring results a week ago, but have hit a brick wall.
Google reverses decision to delete British newspaper links... underscoring the difficulty the search engine is having implementing Europe's "right to be forgotten" ruling.
The EU’s Right To Be Forgotten Is A Mess & How Google’s Making It Worse: don’t be the arbiter of what to censor.
Google’s not well qualified to do that, and it’s attempts to do so will only continue to generate controversy as we’ve seen this week. Reject requests under the reasoning that Google isn’t the competent authority to judge, then let the privacy regulators make the decisions.
Alternatively, perhaps the system needs to go on hold. The initial flood of requests has turned into a trickle. Rushing this isn’t necessary and likely only going to lead to more mistakes.
At the very least, stop talking the transparency talk and start walking the transparency walk. Provide a lot more information about how requests are being processed, along with some general stats about the types being handled, granted, whether they involved news publications and so on.
Right to be forgotten: A poor ruling, clumsily implemented: The fact remains that this ruling is deeply problematic, and needs to be challenged on many fronts. We need policymakers to recognise this flabby ruling needs to be tightened up fast with proper checks and balances – clear guidelines on what can and should be removed (not leaving it to Google and others to define their own standards of ‘relevance’), demands for transparency from search engines on who and how they make decisions, and an appeals process. If search engines really believe this is a poor ruling then they should make a clear stand against it by kicking all right to be forgotten requests to data protection authorities to make decisions. The flood of requests that would be driven to these already stretched national organisations might help to focus minds on how to prevent a ruling intended to protect personal privacy from becoming a blanket invitation to censorship.
