Computer and Library Learning (Archived)

(Credit: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) News, Google must respect 'right to be forgotten': Court of Justice of the European Union ruling highlights free speech vs. privacy debate, May 13, 2014 – URL: http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/World/ID/2456321617/ )

 (Credit: Steve Doughty, The Daily Mail, Europe grants the 'right to be forgotten online': EU court will force Google to remove people's personal data from search results on request, May 13, 2014 – URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2626998/The-right-forgotten-EU-court-rules-Google-remove-personal-data-search-results-request.html#v-3564650546001 )

(Credit: YouTube – StreetTV, EU Court Slams Google, Says People Have 'Right to be Forgotten' Online, May 13, 2014)

In some cases, people with an Internet presence may be concerned about what information that people can find about them through a search engine, especially when the information is deemed to be outdated or irrelevant. Let us consider some recent developments in being searched for on the Internet by someone using a search engine such as Google.

Consider the May 13, 2014 court ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU) which backed the “right to be forgotten” on the Internet and ordered Google to delete “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” data from its search engine results when a person demands it. A Spaniard, Mario Costeja González, initiated this privacy test case in the European Union court after failing to get Google Spain to delete a reference to an auction notice from 1998 of a repossessed home in Catalonia in a major newspaper. The house had been auctioned off to cover social security debts and the matter had been resolved so a link to this man in the past to this case should no longer be available through a Google (or any other search engine) search. This case has led to a former politician, a physician, and someone convicted of a criminal offense, all in the United Kingdom, requesting that past information about each of them (i.e. behaviour, bad patient reviews, and information about the criminal conviction) should not be available in the Google search index. (Prior to these developments, Charles Arthur wrote an article entitled “How to delete your digital life” in The Guardian on April 4, 2013 in which he offered suggestions on how to delete (or at least, diminish) one’s presence on the Internet.) Martin Kettle wrote an article in The Guardian on May 14, 2014 entitled “The tech firms hate the Google verdict, but they can't be beyond the law” in which countries and people have a right to expect accountability from technology companies, including Google. Jian Ghomeshi, from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio Program “Q”, hosted a discussion on May 16, 2014 on the European Union (EU) court decision and the growing requests to be excluded from searches with The Guardian’s technology editor, Charles Arthur, and Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at the City University of New York. (Listen to the 10:10 audio clip here.)

Andrew Orlowski, writing on The Register on June 17, 2014, reported that Google is trying to amend the data protection reforms passed by the European Parliament in March 2014 by calling for the removal of the right of ordinary citizens to request the deletion of irrelevant data not deemed to be in the public interest, following the independent review of the European data protection reforms by the Article 29 Working Party, rather than appealing to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) of the European Union on a case-by-case basis. Google has appointed its own team of five “advisors” to consult, including Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales who recently compared the European situation balancing free speech and privacy with that in the People’s Republic of China (i.e. censorship) in discussion with the BBC’s Andrew Marr.

What about Canada? Andre Mayer, writing for CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) News on June 16, 2014, reported that the “right to be forgotten” legal concept is not likely to be adopted in Canada but cannot be completely ruled out either. There is a difference of opinion amongst Canadian lawyers whether such a law could work in Canada. On the one hand, freedom of expression is enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms while the right to be forgotten is not; on the other hand, some argue that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms attempts to reach a balance between the right to expression and privacy.

A Montreal-based lawyer, Allen Mendelsohn, offered commentary on the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling, comparing it to a hypothetical scenario in which a librarian would be penalized for helping someone to find a controversial book, even though the librarian did not publish the book. As far as Canadian law is concerned, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) ruled in 2011 that websites were absolved of legal responsibility for hyperlinking to defamatory content with Justice Rosalie Abella noting that a hyperlink, by itself, "should never be seen as 'publication' of the content to which it refers." 

Lawyer Kirsten Thompson of the law firm McCarthy Tetrault, who has expertise in internet law, argued that a case similar to that ruled on by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) could occur in Canada, following a complaint being issued to the office of the federal privacy commissioner, which in turn would turn to the courts as a means of leverage as the federal privacy commissioner has no power to compel search engines such as Google to remove anything from the Internet. The crux of the matter would be whether a search engine’s role could be re-interpreted. The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) offers Canadians protection from organizations who require personal consent to collect, use, and disclose personal information about individuals online. Google’s position is that it serves as a conduit to rather than a disseminator of information. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) disagreed but that interpretation may not be accepted in all jurisdictions around the world.

What about the June 13, 2014 ruling of the Supreme Court of British Columbia in the Equustek Solutions Inc. v. Jack case in which The Honourable Justice Madame Lauri Ann Fenlon ordered Google to remove websites from its global index, not just from results shown on Google.ca? University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, commenting on this case on June 17, 2014, noted that this court decision tied in directly with the globalization of the Internet and the World Wide Web  and the concerns of many with the application of local jurisdictional law to a global audience. Furthermore, Geist added that the court decision suggested that Google’s “global reach” required matching by the court’s influence, and laws should apply to organizations doing business in a particular jurisdiction but “attempts to extend blocking orders to a global audience has very troubling implications that could lead to a run on court orders that target the company’s global search results.” Geist was also concerned that other countries could practice censorship on an extreme scale in a discriminatory fashion towards a group of people or a country based on ethnicity or sexual orientation. Similarly, Tamir Israel, a lawyer with the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), expressed concern over the possibility of a country blocking websites from search engine results to weaken online political opposition. Google is appealing the ruling to the British Columbia Court of Appeals.

(Credit: Bloomberg TV – Google Removes Search Results in EU Compliance, June 26, 2014 – 0:37 – URL: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/google-removes-search-results-in-eu-compliance-3gqL3ptXS02ZhToy0LbImQ.html)

Undoubtedly, some people would argue that this adjustment of search engine results is tantamount to censorship. Consider the recent example of the deletion of blog posts by Google from its European search written by the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) economics editor, Robert Peston, who had tracked the departure of Merrill Lynch’s boss in 2007 following large losses on bad investments at that bank. Peston had received a “notice of removal from Google about this blog post. Such a practice could be misused to curtail freedom of expression and legitimate journalism in the public interest, Peston argued. James Ball, writing in The Guardian on July 2, 2014, reported that six articles from The Guardian newspaper no longer show up on Google.co.uk but can still be found on Google.com, including three 2010 articles about a former Premier League (soccer) referee having been found to have hidden the truth about why a penalty was granted in a particular soccer match that ultimately led to that referee’s resignation. Ball did go on to write that a case might be made for removing some articles from a newspaper’s archive, especially if someone has turned their life around, but argued that these decisions need to be considered by newspaper publishers and not search engines such as Google. Juergen Baetz, writing for the Associated Press on July 3, 2014, reported that Google has ninety percent (90%) of the European search engine market and has already received more than fifty thousand (50,000) removal requests. However, one can obtain unaltered (thus, uncensored) search requests by switching to Google.com. The road to “being forgotten” on the Internet is long at best and likely to be visited and revisited…

UPDATE: CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) News reported on July 4, 2014 that Google had restored index links to some media articles that it had previously erased following complaints of censorship.