Olivia Solon

Olivia Solon

Deputy Editor,

The EU has ruled that people should have the right to be forgotten. This opens the floodgates to an era of mass censorship of legal content, argues Olivia Solon

Today (13 May), the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that people should have the right to be forgotten under the Data Protection Directive. That is to say that if you don't like a story about you on the internet, you have the right to ask Google -- yes, Google, not the publisher of the story -- to stop indexing it. This means that it will no longer appear in search results.

The case stems from one man -- Mario Costeja González -- who didn't like the fact that a 1998 report about his repossessed property continued to appear in Google search results despite the fact that he'd now got his finances in order. The news, he felt, should be dead and buried so that he could move on. By continuing to list said news, Google was invading his privacy. 180 similar cases in Spain alone have led to four years of legal wranglings before a decision was reached in Europe's highest court.

On the face of it, the right to be forgotten may seem fairly uncontroversial. But don't be fooled. This decision is a ridiculous one that threatens to censor entire swathes of the web. First of all, the landmark ruling states that search engines are responsible for policing search results even though the information is published by third parties. While I don't feel particularly sorry for Google, this is a major additional administrative burden that requires case-by-case attention and I'd hazard to say completely unenforceable. Imagine if everyone in Europe decided they didn't like a photo of them online or some report from more than 15 years ago. What about cached versions? Or web archives? Will the Wayback Machine have to delete the offending content? The repercussions of this ruling extend well beyond Google: to all other web intermediaries.

Secondly, this is legal content. It's not libellous, false or illegal. It's just not liked by the individual. This is censorship. There's no other way of putting it. Anyone with enough power, money and knowhow will be able to erase unsavoury episodes in their lives from the web. Had an affair that made it to the news 10 years ago but now consider the episode to be 'irrelevant'? Don't want your days at the Bullingdon Club to affect your chances in an election? Make a complaint!

Another major issue is that one person's right to be forgotten is another person's right to remember. Stories are rarely about a single person -- what happens if one person in an article wants it removed and a second person doesn't?

Bafflingly, the ruling goes completely against the opinion given by Advocate General Niilo Jaaskinen last June. He said that Google should not be held responsible for content from third parties and that the Directive does not establish a general 'right to be forgotten', but merely the rights to rectification or deletion of data that is "incomplete or inaccurate". He said that "subjective preference alone does not amount to a compelling legitimate grounds" for deleting personal data that are contrary to a person's interests. Doing so, he said, would amount to "censorship".

Why on Earth did the Court of Justice of the European Union not listen to him?


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