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EU Court Sets Limit On 'Right To Be Forgotten' In Company Registers (reuters.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the right-and-wrong dept.

The European Union's top court ruled in May 2014 that people could ask search engines, such as Google or Microsoft's Bing, to remove inadequate or irrelevant information from the web results produced from searches for people's names. Today, the court is limiting the so-called "right to be forgotten" principle, ruling that individuals cannot demand that personal data be erased from company records in an official register. Reuters reports: In Thursday's ruling the European Court of Justice said that company registers needed to be public to ensure legal certainty and to protect the interests of third parties. Company registers only contained a limited amount of personal information and, as executives in companies should disclose their identity and functions, it said. This did not constitute too severe an interference in their private lives and personal data. However, the court said there might be specific situations in which access to personal data in company registers could be limited, such as a long period after a company's dissolution. But this should be determined on a case-by-case basis.

28 comments

  1. Lack Of Sense by JimSadler · · Score: 2

    It is hard to believe that no one has mentioned that once something is on the net it is next to impossible to get rid of it. How many people copied various things and repost their information from time to time. You might have sent one email but it can be in thousands of hard drives around the world. Companies that go broke normally sell all the information that they hold.

    1. Re:Lack Of Sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think this is more about censoring (or whatever preferred euphemism Europeans are using to justify this) search results rather than individual hits. It would not be that sites cannot publish the things in question (yet), but rather that sites like Google, Bing, or Yahoo would have to remove all hits for a certain name if requested. In other words, the thing is still there, you just can't find it through conventional means.

    2. Re:Lack Of Sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sorry to burst your bubble, but this won't be true for very long anymore. The internet is rapidly being carved up in a few tightly managed walled gardens where this actually will work. The parts of the internet that won't be swallowed up by this will be so swamped by rules, regulations, take-down demands and lawsuits, that they are either going to have to make sure that they do not offend anyone or they will simply have to cease to exist because they cannot afford it anymore.

      Plenty examples around of this already happening.

    3. Re:Lack Of Sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      This is actually pretty untrue. If something goes viral it's almost impossible to get rid, but there have been thousands of people such as victims of revenge porn who have managed to get it eliminated from the 3 or 4 places it was present on the internet and such that videos or pics of them can no longer be found from Google search.

      Is it still on someone's hard drive somewhere? Maybe, but it's besides the point. If all they want to achieve is that it's hidden from casual searches by friends, family, employers, then that's mission complete from their point of view.

      There is indeed a lot of data that's widely shared, widely stored, but there is also a lot of data on the internet that's only discoverable based on fairly specific searches. The vast majority of people requesting data on themselves be removed are in this category, so for every Barbara Streisand who failed miserably at hiding pictures of her home, there are hundreds of average Janes and Joes that have succeeded. Oftentimes removal requests are as a result of very local disputes - a jilted boyfriend uploading revenge porn, being told by the police to remove it, and doing so, and make his small circle of friends that saw it and downloaded it delete it too. I have seen numerous court case reports about these kind of relatively small scale, very localised distributions of data and subsequent removals. Not all of them are the large incredibly viral cases that reach the global news pages.

      Regardless of opinion on the law, the rights or wrongs of it, the fact is that it's not as clear cut as saying once something is searchable on the internet that it's there forever - there are various gradients ranging from yes, it's there forever, through to greatly reduced searchability, through to complete elimination. Of course, once something is on the internet it makes sense to assume that in the worst case that it could indeed resurface or spread again, but that doesn't mean it always will - to say it always will is simply a fallacy - the reality is far more nuanced than that.

      I make this point simply because it's meaningless to argue against something if you've not even got the basic facts right - any argument that "This law should be removed, because it'll never work" is going to quickly fall flat as soon as the first person comes forward and says and evidences that "It worked for me". Arguments are better based therefore on why the law is bad, rather than sweeping statements that are trivially falsifiable.

    4. Re:Lack Of Sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It is hard to believe that no one has mentioned that once something is on the net it is next to impossible to get rid of it.

      Except for that technical guide that was posted 3 years ago that you want to look into now. Not only has the guide been removed, the entire server is shut down.

    5. Re:Lack Of Sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There's a big difference between "the information is out there, somewhere" and "it's the third result when your name is googled".

      As silly as the "Right to be Forgotten" sounds, Google et al have a significant effect on the reputation of people and businesses. If a society has decided that some things are best forgotten (e.g. details of youthful hijinks that now adversely effects someone's career), then where that line is drawn is a matter for the country involved, not Google. I'm firmly of the opinion that if you want to make money in Country X, then you should follow Country X's laws. If it's not worth the hassle, then just don't take money from that country and feel free to ignore their laws, but you can't have it both ways.

    6. Re:Lack Of Sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, it is not society deciding. It is a nation state imposing its will, through force, on others private property. The property being my link that points to data that you find undesirable.

  2. Not even worth the time to issue the decision by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    All tax-sheltered business is done in secret using New Zealand's notoriously worthless "beneficial owner" rules.

  3. What the heck are company registers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Explain.

    1. Re: What the heck are company registers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      A company register is a list of organizations/businesses in the location/area/country they operate within.

      In the U.K. all companies are required to appoint one, or more, director(s). The minimum number is dependent upon the company type a(there are four types of companies within the U.K.

      Limited information is available to the public regarding a company - directors, named company secretary, Place of business, legal financial judgements from U.K. Courts, etc.

      An example would be the BBC:
      https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/01420028

      16 Dec 2016: Registered office address changed from Television Centre 101 Wood Lane London W12 7FA to 1 Television Centre 101 Wood Lane London W12 7FA on 16 December 2016.

      28 Jun 2016: Annual return made up to 28 June 2016 with full list of shareholders
      Statement of capital on 2016-06-28
      GBP 250,000

  4. Finally a bit of sanity. by SvnLyrBrto · · Score: 2

    If something is false, libelous, or otherwise defamatory; it should be sued (if necessary) and removed at the source (after which it will fall out of the index the next time the originating site is spidered), not by attacking Google, or any othersearch providers.

    --
    Imagine all the people...
    1. Re:Finally a bit of sanity. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Ever tried suing someone in another country? Courts tend to defend their own citizens.

    2. Re:Finally a bit of sanity. by Carewolf · · Score: 1

      If something is false, libelous, or otherwise defamatory; it should be sued (if necessary) and removed at the source (after which it will fall out of the index the next time the originating site is spidered), not by attacking Google, or any othersearch providers.

      The original ruling is not "the right to be forgotten", it is just confused with that by journalists. The ruling basically amounted to that laws apply to the internet. It is a diverse set of laws in different countries, some of which prohibits indexing certain things after a certain time. So for instance you can't index people as criminals 25 years after they finished their sentence. Since it applies to indexing, not original articles, those laws apply to Google. Note none of the preexisting laws used in this context are EU-wide laws, they are all individial laws in individual countries.

    3. Re: Finally a bit of sanity. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That depends on the relative strength of the countries involved. France might have a chance against the UK but, say, New Zealand against the US...

    4. Re:Finally a bit of sanity. by JesseMcDonald · · Score: 1

      The original ruling is not "the right to be forgotten", it is just confused with that by journalists. The ruling basically amounted to that laws apply to the internet.

      The original ruling was an attempt to apply a horrible local law to entirely new circumstances and on an international scale. No one cared about the so-called "right to be forgotten" until they tried to apply it to major international web service providers. It was an equally bad idea before that, of course, but at least the impact was limited. The Internet has the effect of amplifying the global impact of misguided local laws outside their original jurisdiction. As a result, the world now has a stake in fighting these decentralized attempts at censorship, lest the promise of a single, global Internet be replaced with isolated enclaves divided along geopolitical boundaries.

      --
      "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
    5. Re:Finally a bit of sanity. by Carewolf · · Score: 1

      As I said "the right to forgotten" is a completely separate thing, and is the potential right to force something like facebook to delete data that you gave to them. It has nothing to do with google and other indexers. As I said journalists have just been confusing the two things for a long time.

  5. BeauH1B by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    Company registers only contained a limited amount of personal information and, as executives in companies should disclose their identity and functions, it said.

    What?

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:BeauH1B by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I can't be entirely sure but I think you use the word "liberals" in a way you don't mean to here.
      Remember that in America "liberals" means something completely different than in the rest of the world.

    2. Re:BeauH1B by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      Clearly the power of Trump enables you to draw conclusions from an unparsable sentence.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  6. Not how it works by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... to remove inadequate or irrelevant information.

    When one has commercial dealings with a third party, they have a memory of it too, governments even depend on this as part of their surveillance. The entitlement to be forgotten is not a blanket instruction to pretend someone doesn't exist. It's for data that one didn't agree to expose and so those free services (Facebook, Twitter, etc) cannot monetize someone's historical data without end.

  7. Fair principle bad practice by Martin+S. · · Score: 2

    Where the information is plain wrong it is reasonable to expect it to be removed. However in many cases the complainants demanding to be forgotten are simply crooks and criminals trying to cover up past transgressions.

    A list of BBC stories currently blacklisted by Google.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/int...

    1. Re:Fair principle bad practice by Carewolf · · Score: 1

      Where the information is plain wrong it is reasonable to expect it to be removed. However in many cases the complainants demanding to be forgotten are simply crooks and criminals trying to cover up past transgressions.

      A list of BBC stories currently blacklisted by Google.

      http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/int...

      Yeah, but the original ruling just ruled that Google is not except from the law of land just because they are on the internet. Since it is not a new law, it doesn't try to balance anything, and it specifically does not address wrong info. It just means that existing laws that prohibit indexing certain things after a certain amount of time (old crimes or bankcruptcies), also applies to Google. Since it is all about indexing and mostly about giving people who have done something bad a second chance, it is almost exclusively used by people who have done something bad long ago.

    2. Re:Fair principle bad practice by Cederic · · Score: 1

      No, it's trying to rewrite history.

      Those news articles existed, exist and represent an online record of events. Preventing people from finding or accessing them distorts and changes perception of those events.

      The original ruling was wrong, stupid and is something I'll be inviting my MP to overturn in the UK following the exit from the EU.

    3. Re:Fair principle bad practice by Carewolf · · Score: 1

      No, it's trying to rewrite history.

      Those news articles existed, exist and represent an online record of events. Preventing people from finding or accessing them distorts and changes perception of those events.

      The original ruling was wrong, stupid and is something I'll be inviting my MP to overturn in the UK following the exit from the EU.

      I would disagree with the ruling being wrong. Though I agree with you on the rest, but is the laws that are wrong. The European courts do not have the power to change or make new laws, so they have to apply existing laws and can only make judgement call when multiple laws conflict eachother.

  8. It was ever meant for this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The right to be forgotten, as I understand it (IANAL), was meant to remove hits from search results when searching for one's name. Not to remove the original content, not to remove search results using different search terms. This guy tried to use the right to be forgotten for something it wasn't meant for in the first place, and lost. This court doesn't limit the right to be forgotten, it simply confirmed that it doesn't apply here.

  9. Things had to change. by Chrisq · · Score: 1

    AS it stood there were two conflicting rules; the right to be forgotten and the need to retain financial records. A guy from our legal department says "if this goes in unchanged someone could ask you to delete all their data, claim that they were miss-sold something then if you had deleted the data win by default because you had not kept the required information, and if you hadn't sue you for not complying with the right to be forgotten.

    1. Re:Things had to change. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's called hyperbole, or another way to phrase it, he was talking out his ass. He didn't mean it is actually that way.