European privacy groups hope a standard will finally be established as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft representatives in Brussels work with European Union regulators to iron out "right to be forgotten" policies that will hold up in courtrooms.
Some privacy advocates have stated that it doesn't suffice for a search engine to remove controversial content from a singular region, while others have petitioned for clear-cut policies with regards to handling the "right to be forgotten" requests.
After a European Court of Justice ruling that search engines must remove inadequate or irrelevant materials associated with an individual, when requested, Google has navigated the murky waters of fielding tens of thousands of requests during its voyage into new waters.
Google's "right to be forgotten" requests were said to have exceeded 70,000, growing by about 1,000 new ones each day. More than 250,000 websites have been entangled in the requests.
The European Article 29 Working Party, a watchdog group which represents all data-protection agencies in Europe, such as the UK Information Commissioner's Office, met July 24 with the search agencies to develop policies and discuss their handling thus far of the right to be forgotten ruling. The guidelines are expected in the fall.
Ranking high on the list of concerns raised at the meeting in Brussels so far, Article 29 Working Party has asked that search engines follow a uniform policy for processing requests. Other concerns included the reach of "right to be forgotten" policies and the validity of notifying the publishers of content that has been removed.
Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, president of the French National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL), was concerned about the reach of removals, indicating that taking down regional material wouldn't stop the public from finding the content through another region's version of the same search engine. If results were only removed from Google.fr, the right to be forgotten wouldn't be as strong as it should be, asserted Falque-Pierrotin.
"Our aim is not only to come up with operational guidelines for regulators to use when judging these requests and appeals, but also to ensure that the approach is legally sound and can be defended in court," said Pierrotin.
Christopher Graham, UK information commissioner, wanted Google to be more proactive in removing damaging, irrelevant content from its search results. Google has spread "pollution" across the web and it's the search engine's job to clean up the mess, Graham said to the BBC.
"Google is a massive commercial organization making millions, millions and millions out of processing people's personal information. They're going to have to do some tidying up," stated Graham. "They won't do all the tidying up that some people might like, because if you embarrass yourself, there's not much you can do about it... all this talk about rewriting history and airbrushing embarrassing bits from your past, that's not going to happen."
