Who could forget the decision of the European Union to force Google and other search engine providers to offer a "right to be forgotten" to web users in European countries that are member nations of the EU?
The law allows web users to request that links to sites that contain their names or information about them be removed from the search engine results. The ruling states that links to information that is inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant can be removed.
Microsoft is one company that has not forgotten. The company is taking time out from plotting the demise of up to 18,000 jobs to issue its own removal request form for EU citizens that want to scrub parts of their existence from Microsoft's Bing search engine.
The "Request to Block Bing Search Results in Europe" form, like its Google cousin, requires an extensive set of identifying documents in order to process the application. It asks for name, country of residence, email address and a choice of ID verification methods. These are not unreasonable requests, though; un-searching a person is a dodgy and imprecise business.
The law has sharply divided many advocates on both sides of the issue; free-speech proponents see it as a slippery slope to censorship, while others claim that it props up individual rights against corporate exploitation. Both sides may be right, but a solution that keeps both camps happy may not exist.
It is of loopholes that we now speak. Google will remove name-search results from the Google search engines that are registered in EU member country domains, but will not extend that scrubbing to the mothership, Google.com, or to domains in non-EU-member nations. This practice is an easy workaround for web snoops, and has raised the dander of European Union regulators.
As a result of this and because of the law's general complexity, implications and scope, the EU has requested a meeting with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to talk things over. Microsoft has agreed, Google and Yahoo are still mulling it over. Google, with its fancy 90 percent or so share of the European search market, was naturally the EU's first customer when establishing the law. Bing reportedly eeks out less than 3 percent of that market.
Google has already set up an Advisory Council to help the company establish the right procedures and policies going forward with compliance with the law. The council will hold meetings across Europe this fall, which will be accessible to public viewing.
