Once upon a time, when I googled my name (no comment), one of the first results was a blog post accusing me of a strange "turnaround" in my reporting on animals.
Although I had responded to the author herself and the – let’s say – misunderstanding had been resolved, the link remained hanging high in Google. Fortunately, today it has somewhat disappeared (I refuse to search for it) behind other results related to reporting, but I could ask the search engine to remove it as defamatory, a request that would probably be granted.
Since last May, when the European Court of Justice ruled that each of us, under certain conditions, has the right to demand that search engines remove specific results, more than half a million Europeans have flooded Google with requests. In the first month of the ruling alone, more than 70,000 users rushed to ask Google to delete specific links that concerned them, judging that the information contained in them “is inappropriate, has ceased to be valid or is excessive”. Now, the company has made available to users an online form, which anyone can fill out in order to submit a request for the removal of links.
According to information, hundreds of Greeks have also invoked the “right to be forgotten.” The latest example is actor Argyris Angelou, whose name was automatically filled in (auto-complete) by Google with the word “gay.” The actor asked the company to remove the specific results by filling out the relevant form, while at the same time filing a lawsuit against it (he lost the case, since it was deemed that the issue had already been resolved through the online process).
It is worth noting that since then, when searching for information on Mr. Angelou via Google , the footnote appears that “some results may have been removed based on the new European data protection law”. There is already pressure on the company not to display this information in the “articles” in which links have been removed based on the decision of the European Court of Justice. It is clarified, however, that search engines are only obliged to delete the relevant results, not their source. In other words, the defamatory texts are still online, they just do not appear with a simple search. This was Google’s first line of defense, namely that it is not itself responsible for the personal data that appears on its pages.
Although the development was welcomed with enthusiasm by a large part of the population, who saw it as a victory for the movement in favor of protecting personal data on the Internet, doubts have also been expressed as to whether this type of intervention is ultimately in our best interests. “Are we ‘retouching’ the past to such an extent that we will rewrite History?” is the question that arises.
Reactions
In any case, the debate is heating up, with defenders of the right to be forgotten on one side and those of the right to information and expression on the other. There are already reactions from journalists who can no longer find their articles in searches, with the most famous case being the BBC's financial editors, who saw their older article about the former chairman of the investment firm Merrill Lynch, Stan O'Neill, disappear.
Source: kathimerini.gr
