Google plans to flag search results to comply with 'right to be forgotten' ruling

Irish Times reports that Google Inc is gearing up to flag search results that it has already censored as part of its measures to comply with a controversial European Court ruling. the search engine company is reportedly mulling over placing an alert at the bottom of each search result page where it has removed links to information it has removed per a person's "right to be forgotten."

The controversial decision, which was ruled by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on May 13th, now allows people who live in the euro zone to file a request to take down links that lead to material deemed to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant from search results. The request, however, will not completely take away the information available on the original web page.

Since the ruling, Google has been reportedly been deluged with tens of thousands of requests from users to take down information about the latter deemed too sensitive by them. As of last Monday, Google confirmed that it has received 41,000 takedown requests invoking their right to be forgotten. Google chief executive Larry Page has been quoted as saying that around a third of the requests were related to a fraud or scam. One-fifth of the requests were linked to a serious crime, while 12% are connected to arrests on child pornography charges, Page added.

Aside from setting up an online form to facilitate such requests, Google has also set up an advisory committee to aid the company in carrying out measures in line with the ECJ ruling, of which members are Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Irish Times said.

Wales has already said that the ECJ ruling was a form of censorship and will pose problems for news organizations. In an interview with TechCrunch this weekend, Wales added, "I think the decision will have no impact on people's right to privacy, because I don't regard truthful information in court records published by court order in a newspaper to be private information. If anything, the decision is likely to simply muddle the interesting philosophical questions and make it more difficult to make real progress on privacy issues."

Tags

European Court of Justice, Google Inc

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