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Google Wins Round in Fight Against Global Right To Be Forgotten (bloomberg.com)
Google shouldn't have to apply the so-called right to be forgotten globally, an adviser to the EU's top court said in a boost for the U.S. giant's fight with a French privacy regulator over where to draw the line between privacy and freedom of speech. From a report: While backing Google's stance, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar of the EU Court of Justice said that search engine operators must take every measure available to remove access to links to outdated or irrelevant information about a person on request. The Luxembourg-based court follows such advice in a majority of its final rulings, which normally come a few months after the opinions.
Google has been fighting efforts led by France's privacy watchdog to globalize the right to be forgotten, which was created by the EU court in a landmark ruling in 2014, without defining how, when and where search engine operators should remove links. This has triggered a wave of legal challenges. The Alphabet unit currently removes such links EU-wide and since 2016 it also restricts access to such information on non-EU Google sites when accessed from the EU country where the person concerned by the information is located -- referred to as geo-blocking. This approach was backed by Szpunar.
Google has been fighting efforts led by France's privacy watchdog to globalize the right to be forgotten, which was created by the EU court in a landmark ruling in 2014, without defining how, when and where search engine operators should remove links. This has triggered a wave of legal challenges. The Alphabet unit currently removes such links EU-wide and since 2016 it also restricts access to such information on non-EU Google sites when accessed from the EU country where the person concerned by the information is located -- referred to as geo-blocking. This approach was backed by Szpunar.
In most of the world, if a court says to, for example, "seal" someone's juvenile records, it doesn't expect newspapers to erase them from their archives, but merely to not cite (old form of "link to") them in current publications. Changing to that would be a huge change in settled law, and would cause angry litigation over censorship.
in the original Spanish case, Mario Costeja González specifically asked for the old, obsolete articles to be added to the site's ROBOTS.TXT file, which is the modern equivalent.
As I submitted to the Canadian privacy commission, this is what sites in Canada should do, is within the powers of the commissioner to order, and has no special cost to innocent third parties such as Google.
Canadian legal sites like CanLII (the Canadian Legal Information Institute) already do this. See https://leaflessca.wordpress.c...
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net