Google Seeks To Limit 'Right To Be Forgotten' By Claiming It's Journalistic (cjr.org)

"In the first 'right to be forgotten' case to reach England's High Court, two men are fighting to keep their past crimes out of Google's search results, and the tech giant is fighting back by claiming it's 'journalistic.'" Chava Gourarie reports via Columbia Journalism Review: The case, which is actually two nearly identical cases, involves two businessmen who were both convicted of white-collar crimes in the '90s, and requested that Google delist several URLs referencing their convictions, including news articles. When Google denied their requests, they sued under a 2014 European Union ruling which established the right of individuals to have information delisted from search indexes under certain conditions. In its defense, Google has argued that it should be protected under an exception for journalism because it provides access to journalistic content. Even as a legal sleight of hand, the argument is quite a departure from Google's customary efforts to present itself as a disinterested arbiter of information, a position that has become more untenable with time.

Gareth Corfield, a reporter for The Register who covered the cases from the courtroom, said it's disingenuous of Google to put on the mantle of journalism only when it suits them. "They've gone through great lengths to say they don't make any editorial judgement in processing results," Corfield said, but "it now wants you to believe it is on a par with journalism." As the first case to test the "right to be forgotten" in England's High Court, its outcome will likely set some ground rules in the roiling debate between personal privacy and freedom of expression on the internet. Google's sudden identification with journalism may be a legal gambit, but it could have far-reaching effects across the landscape of data protection laws.

Comments

What about history?

[SuperKendall]

The thing I really don't like about "The right to be forgotten" is that it potentially serves to erase history that would be really valuable or informative many years hence. I kind of feel like "Right to be Forgotten" should be paired with some kind of time-sealed government run vault (hey, I'm rolling my own eyes here, just can't think of a better way to express this idea), into which all of the "forgotten" data would go and be kept more permanently until tit did not matter what was inside.

There is NO "right to be forgotten"

[mi]

To assert the "right to be forgotten" is to assert power over other people's memories. There is no such thing — and there should not be.

If you insist on creating one — for the "evil KKKorporations" — one day your ex will have the power to insist, your memories of the time together be wiped out. It is already possible.

Go to the source

[bidule]

I don't like this lazy way of getting forgotten.

Ask the state to get your conviction stricken from the public records.
Get newspapers to respect your privacy by hiding newspaper articles about it.
Get those "forgotten" records hidden from spiders if you still want explicit searches to work.
THEN, go to Google to clean up what's left.

If the state believe in the "right to be forgotten" enough to handle the first steps, there should only be low ranking stuff left behind.