Google allowed to remember search results to news articles it was asked to forget. Good
- Reference: 1595926452
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/07/28/google_allowed_to_remember_search/
- Source link:
On Monday, the German Federal Court of Justice (Der Bundesgerichtshof, or BGH) [1]said the managing director of a regional charity, named in news articles when the organization had a financial shortfall of almost €1m in 2011, cannot bring a claim under German's data protection law to force Google to hide search results links to articles mentioning him.
The decision says that Article 17 of Europe's General Data Protection Regulation, which describes the so-called right to be forgotten, requires a comprehensive consideration not only of the rights of the plaintiff but also of the public and of content providers.
The German high court stayed another right-to-be-forgotten claim so two questions could be addressed by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).
This second case involves two individuals who ran a financial services business and were shown in photos accompanying a 2015 article about fraud prevention that made allegations about their business practices. The pair sued Google to prevent online searches that included their names from displaying links to the article and images.
Though a district court in Cologne dismissed their claim in 2017 and a regional court rejected their appeal in 2018, the BGH delayed a final decision to hear from the CJEU about whether the context of a linked article needs to be taken into account when weighing the display of preview images in Google search listings.
The rulings are said to be the first significant right-to-be-forgotten decisions in Germany since GDPR was activated in May 2018.
In May 2014, the CJEU found that European citizens have the right to ask Google to remove search result listings presented in Europe for name-related queries under certain conditions. Removing search results links does not affect the availability of information on source websites, it just makes it more difficult to find using Google.
In the past six years, Google has received about [2]952,000 delisting requests covering about 3.7 million URLs. The ad biz has complied with about 54 per cent of those requests, about 89 per cent of which come from private individuals.
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
In March, Google [3]appealed a €7m fine from Sweden after the Swedish Data Protection Authority found that the Chocolate Factory had failed to remove search listings it had been told to delist in 2017, despite an audit the following year that found non-compliance. ®
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[1] https://www.bundesgerichtshof.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/2020/2020095.html
[2] https://transparencyreport.google.com/eu-privacy/overview?hl=en
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/11/sweden_google_with_7m_data_fine/
[4] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Sad and bad and mad
That is a crap algorithm to be using, Louis Schreurs.
Re: Sad and bad and mad
> That is a crap algorithm to be using, Louis Schreurs.
Wow! amanfromMars1 achieves sentience.
Oh nice, a bigot (suppose I can't call you "racist")
re: suppose i can't call you racist
No. Because "American" isn't a race. Good grief.....
Re: re: suppose i can't call you racist
No. Because "American" isn't a race. Good grief.....
I dunno, "race to the bottom" seems an appropriate description of what's going on over there at the moment...
Confused
All these cases regarding the right to be forgotten seem to involve Google. Granted that Google is the Hoover of the vacuum cleaner world but there are other good search engines around; Bing has a decent following and all my ITC kit defaults to DuckDuckGo (despite the daft name). If the original articles remain available, other search engines will find it. Also, doesn't an insistence that Google "forgets" somebody mean that Google actually has to remember to filter their name from ongoing search results?
Re: Confused
You are confused - Google are the Hoover of the search engine world.
Though they suck up data mightily..
Re: Confused
The Right To Be Forgotten applies to all search engines. It's just that Google is the largest and so the most pressing for people to get removed from and the one that makes the news most often.
Re: Confused
Also, I don't think that Bing! has much marketshare in Europe. Last time I saw figures, it was at least a significant player in search in the US, but less so on this side of the pond.
Why I love the Right to be Forgotten
I used to work in cybersecurity and that field is not far from the anti bullying and child protection field. At policy conferences we’d rub shoulders with people from those areas (I imagine that nowadays you’d find revenge porn campaigners there too) and I once sat through a presentation from a woman whose ex boyfriend from when she was 15 or 16 had created web pages full of provocative photos of her with accompanying texts. He had also posted them to all sorts of image sites and message boards. All under her name.
After graduating from a top university she had great trouble finding a job because any prospective employer who would Google her would find pages and pages of photos of her with half her clothes on and saucy texts. She has had to legally change her name to get round this.
This happened in the US, where there is no RTBF, and I have just checked, if you Google for her old name all these photos still show up. Ten years after she had given that presentation and fifteen years after the photos had been taken.
I have been a staunch advocate of the RTBF ever since. It protects the normal people, not the dodgy politicians or crooks. Don’t forget, it doesn’t remove the articles from anywhere, protections for journalism still exist. The rule of thumb for the RTBF is that for any person or incident that is big enough to (theoretically) warrant its own Wikipedia entry, the RTBF is not going to help.
Re: Why I love the Right to be Forgotten
This is an interesting view.
We do forget real people.
And that RTBF should work for this.
Suing the wrong party
"The pair sued Google to prevent online searches that included their names from displaying links to the article and images."
It would be more effective and rational to sue the host of the relevant article in order to get it taken down. The GDPR "right to be forgotten" (Article 17) is legitimately exercised against the Data Controller, and it is highly questionable whether Google is the Data Controller in such cases as this, as it's the content that is being objected to, not the listing per se.
Article 17.2 states:" Where the controller has made the personal data public and is obliged pursuant to paragraph 1 to erase the personal data, the controller,[...] shall take reasonable steps, [...] to inform controllers which are processing the personal data that the data subject has requested the erasure by such controllers of any links to, or copy or replication of, those personal data. "
This effectively means that the party that might be expected approach Google to remove the listing is not the Data Subject but the host of the disputed content pursuant to the exercise of the Data Subject's right under Article 17. In any case, if the content were taken down, Google's listing would probably quite soon get purged by its bots failing to find it any more.
Re: Suing the wrong party
"It would be more effective and rational to sue the host of the relevant article in order to get it taken down."
Because that worked so well for the recording industry.
It's a sad time.
I almost skipped this article since it was contributed from the U$A.
My bad.