Warc, 9 September 2014
EUROPE: Google, the internet giant, today begins a series of
meetings across Europe in which it will discuss the issues raised by the
so-called 'right to be forgotten' ruling issued by the European Court of
Justice earlier this year.
Since the court decided in May that people could in certain
circumstances ask Google to remove links to them from its search engine, the
company has had more than 90,000 such requests and has acceded to around half
of these.
The first meeting, in Madrid, will see a ten-strong advisory
panel, including Google executives Eric Schmidt and David Drummond and eight
people from outside the organisation, hear input from experts as it seeks how
best to balance an individual's right to be forgotten with the public's right
to information.
Drummond, Google's general counsel, has previously spoken of
the difficulty of interpreting the court's "very vague and subjective
tests" on what information is in the public interest and shouldn't be
removed.
The European Commission welcomed the meetings, with
spokesman Michele Cercone telling Bloomberg EU governments were discussing the
right to be forgotten as part of new data-protection rules.
Others were more sceptical, however, regarding the meetings
as having more to do with PR than anything else.
"They [Google] want to be seen as being open and
virtuous, but they handpicked the members of the council, will control who is
in the audience, and what comes out of the meetings," Isabelle
Falque-Pierrotin, head of the French Internet Rights Forum, told Reuters.
Simon Davies, a privacy advocate and an associate director
of the enterprise unit at the London School of Economics, was similarly
cynical. "The meetings are a cross between a lobbying exercise and a
brazen publicity stunt," he said, adding that "the process appears to
be fundamentally skewed against privacy and in favour of publication
rights".
After Madrid, meetings will take place over the following
seven weeks in Rome, Paris, Warsaw, Berlin, London and Brussels.
Data sourced from BBC, Reuters, Bloomberg; additional
content by Warc staff
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