The highest court in the European Union has come down with a ruling that requires a search engine, Google, to remove links to defamatory information of a personal nature on individuals who search by a personal name in its database. This is a twist in previous decisions by the EU Court. This is the highest court so this decision is final. Google is surprised by this decision.
Some may not like such a decision with emphasis on freedom of expression or the right to publish information. However, there is the issue of privacy. For example, take the case of a professional in a health care field who upset a non profit organization about ten years ago. Some members of the non profit set up a web site on a free online platform along with a multiple site link campaign including “a health industry forum and blog seeding” flaming this individual with defamatory remarks and spun innuendos that spanned from personal health and life to professional creditability with the sole purpose to discredit and damage this individual personally and professionally .
Cases like this are numerous and the list is massive of sites that flame or make derogatory remarks about individuals which expose private matters.
For many victims of hate, malicious intent “freedom of speech/opinion” there hasn’t been any recourse unless they have unlimited funds for legal remedy and recourse. It has been nearly impossible to remove nor hold any of the individuals and/or the platform in which the site was created nor remove search results linking to these sites. This decision by the EU Court is good news to this professional without a doubt, and to many others who type their name in a search engine and have derogatory search results with links to derogatory information about them and are not able to do anything about it. This may indicate that someday in the USA there might be a way to have questionable material of a private nature removed from a search engine.
Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, has responded that this is a difficult balance between the “right to be forgotten and a right to know” which the company will try to work out.
You can watch the Wall Street Journal video about the decision or read the article in the New York Times and other articles mentioned at the end of this post.
Google Must Honor Requests to Delete Links, European Court Rules > NY Times
