Note that this case involved a criminal who wished to expunge his conviction from search results.
> ‘The right to be forgotten is meant to apply to information that is no longer relevant but disproportionately impacts a person,’ said Jim Killock, executive director, ‘The Court will have to balance the public’s right to access the historical record, the precise impacts on the person, and the public interest.’
‘The public’s right to access the historical record’ seems to me to be an incredibly Orwellian phrase. It seems to me that there is an absolute right to access factual historical information.
While I see your point, here are some counter-examples:
- Someone who was the victim of a high-profile crime, not wishing everyone they come into contact with to know about it
- Someone being stalked/targeted, living on a secret address
- Someone who was wrongfully convicted, later exonorated. Here a mandate to publish corrections would be good enough, but I don't think Google would be happy with that, either...
It seems to me that there is an absolute right to access factual historical information.
This isn't a comment about the case, or the right to be forgotten, but something quite important nonetheless - Google's search results are not "factual historical information". They're an index of webpages that anyone and everyone can create, saying whatever they like. Google claims their engine ranks pages that more reputable higher than others, but without any transparency around that we can't know whether or not we agree with it's decisions.
> Google's search results are not "factual historical information". They're an index of webpages that anyone and everyone can create, saying whatever they like.
I'd argue that the fact that a webpage says something is itself an historical fact, and shouldn't be forbidden to be said.
This means that any time someone is unhappy with the decision, Google (or an other company) has to shell out tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. Maybe Google can keep doing that for a few months but a normal startup would just grant every single request rather than having to fight it in European courts.
The decision should be made by some independent privacy committee which reviews all the facts, and right to be forgotten requests should go through that committee rather than directly to Google
Some of the factors that come into this include the very nature of criminal sentencing: A judge looks at the facts of the case, aggravating factors, previous convictions and sentencing guidelines, and determines an appropriate sentence.
Then along comes a search engine and doubly punishes someone in what may be a disproportional way; e.g. it's highly unlikely you will come across the convictions of John Smith when you google him, but when you look up someone with a non-common name, it may be the very first search result; disproportionally disadvantaging them for jobs, business and even dating partners.
The issue in this case was Google wanted to be the sole arbiter of what they would remove and what they would leave in, with no oversight from anyone. This would have crippled the GDPR even before it began.
That said, it's early days for the right to be forgotten.
> ‘The right to be forgotten is meant to apply to information that is no longer relevant but disproportionately impacts a person,’ said Jim Killock, executive director, ‘The Court will have to balance the public’s right to access the historical record, the precise impacts on the person, and the public interest.’
‘The public’s right to access the historical record’ seems to me to be an incredibly Orwellian phrase. It seems to me that there is an absolute right to access factual historical information.