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European Commission Spokesman: Google Removing Link Was "not a Good Judgement"

Posted by samzenpus on from the we've-always-been-at-war-with-Eastasia dept.

An anonymous reader writes in with this article from the BBC about Google's recent removal of a news story from search results. "Google's decision to remove a BBC article from some of its search results was "not a good judgement", a European Commission spokesman has said. A link to an article by Robert Peston was taken down under the European court's "right to be forgotten" ruling. But Ryan Heath, spokesman for the European Commission's vice-president, said he could not see a "reasonable public interest" for the action. He said the ruling should not allow people to "Photoshop their lives". The BBC understands that Google is sifting through more than 250,000 web links people wanted removed."

7 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. Well, duh... by bradley13 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...but that's exactly what the ruling does. The original case was a businessman objecting to Google links to newpaper stories about his life. This is no different.

    Fact is, the court that issued this ruling screwed up big time. Perhaps, if Google can find a few more egregious deletions to make, the European Parliament will correct the error.

    --
    Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
    1. Re:Well, duh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "pretty obscure person" vs "very public CEO" is a matter of *your* perspective. If you're looking to go into business with the "pretty obscure person" then it's highly relevant for you. In both cases they are public articles by newspapers.

      What should happen is these requests should be put to the newspapers themselves, except then everyone would realize that it's censorship. And that's exactly what it is. So instead we have the silliness of asking a rich search company to do contortions to do filtering instead.

    2. Re:Well, duh... by gbjbaanb · · Score: 5, Interesting

      in this particular case, the guy the article was about didn't make the 'forgetme' request, it was some Joe Schmoe who was objecting to a comment he posted in the comment section under it.

      I don't know if the guy's comment is irrelevant now, I doubt it as it was just some feeble comment he wrote - not an article directly about that user. It could be he wrote something he is now embarrassed about, but more likely it is just some dick who wanted to try the system out.

    3. Re:Well, duh... by Zocalo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Fact is, the court that issued this ruling screwed up big time. Perhaps, if Google can find a few more egregious deletions to make, the European Parliament will correct the error.

      Fact is, the European Parliament passed a law that was so full of holes that it was inevitably going to be abused before it was passed and, despite this being pointed out frequently, they went ahead and passed the law anyway instead of maybe taking a bit of time to plug some of the holes and clarifing under what circumstances is could and, more importantly, could not be used. At least it's starting to look like some members of the EC are starting to realise that the EP messed up, but somehow I doubt that they are going to be able to convince their colleagues to do anything about it because that would entail them effectively admitting that they messed up.

      --
      UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
    4. Re:Well, duh... by FireFury03 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ...but that's exactly what the ruling does. The original case was a businessman objecting to Google links to newpaper stories about his life. This is no different.

      Fact is, the court that issued this ruling screwed up big time. Perhaps, if Google can find a few more egregious deletions to make, the European Parliament will correct the error.

      I think the big problem here is that Google are expected to be the judge, jury and executioner and are getting smacked down when someone thinks they made the wrong judgement call. This stuff should be going to an independent judge instead of expecting Google to uphold a new law that has a fairly vague scope.

      --
      http://blog.nexusuk.org
  2. A good idea, but... by bigalzzz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Whilst it's a good idea for most people to be able to hide some embarrassing stuff about them, sadly it can be used to hide information that should be public. For example I know of someone who owes me a considerable amount of money, and several others. He deliberately ran up the debt with no intention of paying. Whilst trying to find information about him the other day Google showed that it has hidden a results because of the right to be forgotten. I know that he's done this so he can get out there and con more people with less chance of being found.

  3. Re:So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Wrong, at least at the moment. You can turn off the google national redirect by simply appending "/ncr" to the url, i.e. http://www.google.com/ncr will take you to the USA site even if you are in Europe. However whether Google is forced to take that option away given some of these stupid EU and national court rulings is another matter.