A doctor, a politician and a pedophile are among hundreds of individuals who have contacted Google to remove links to certain information about themselves in the search results after the highest court in Europe made a sweeping ruling ordering Google to comply with these takedown requests and honor individuals right to privacy.
Following the final and un-appealable ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union Tuesday, hundreds of individuals have reportedly sent requests to Google to remove links to websites that publish information they believe to infringe upon their right to privacy. Among these are a doctor who wants to have removed negative reviews about his practice, a politician seeking re-election who asks for information about her behavior in office taken down, and a person who was found to be in possession of child abuse images who wants details about his conviction removed from the index, BBC reports.
Ulrich Kuhn, deputy commissioner for Hamburg, Germany's data protection authority - something that doesn't exist in the U.S. - said it has received eight requests in just one day after the landmark ruling was announced Tuesday. The commission normally receives an average of 100 requests every year.
Google already receives millions of takedown requests from content providers such as musicians and filmmakers for alleged copyright infringements. In the last two weeks of this month alone, Google had to remove 5.3 million links from its index, but the process is largely automated.
In the case of removing links to personal information, Google may have a much harder time implementing the ruling.
"The ruling has significant implications for how we handle takedown requests. This is logistically complicated not least because of the many languages involved and the need for careful review. As soon as we have thought through exactly how this will work, which may take several weeks, we will let our users know," says Google in a statement.
The ruling places on Google and other search engines, including Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing, what many analysts believe to be the almost impossible task of identifying which information is "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant." The decision also includes a public interest test, which the search engines can use to weigh the person's right to privacy against the public's right to know.
"The links to web pages containing that information must be removed from the list of results, unless there are particular reasons, such as the role played by the data subject in public life," as per a judgment summary [pdf] released by the high court.
In this case, a doctor facing negative reviews, a politician running for office again and a convict may have their takedown requests refused.
At Google's annual shareholder meeting Wednesday, Google executive Eric Schmidt said there were "many open questions" about the right to be forgotten as upheld by the European Union court.
"A simple way of understanding what happened here is that you have a collision between a right to be forgotten and a right to know. From Google's perspective, that's a balance. Google believes having looked at the decision, which is binding, that the balance that was struck was wrong," Schmidt told Google shareholders.