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House of Lords declares EU ‘right to be forgotten’ to be ‘unworkable and wrong’

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By John Glenday | Reporter

July 30, 2014 | 2 min read

A House of Lords committee has ruled the EU-wide ‘right to be forgotten’ court ruling, which mandates search engines to remove links to ‘irrelevant’ information, to be ‘unworkable and wrong’.

The Lords home affairs, health and education EU sub-committee reported that the order was unenforceable amongst smaller search engines which lacked the resources to police the web.

What’s more the peers even questioned whether the Court of Justice of the European Union ruling even exists in law.

Baroness Prashar, chair of the cross-party committee, said she believed: “… it is wrong in principle to leave search engines themselves the task of deciding whether to delete information or not, based on vague, ambiguous and unhelpful criteria.We think there is a very strong argument that, in the new regulation, search engines should not be classed as data controllers, and therefore not liable as 'owners' of the information they are linking to.

"We also do not believe that individuals should have a right to have links to accurate and lawfully available information about them removed, simply because they do not like what is said."

Google alone has received over 70,000 take down requests since the ruling was made in May.

The UK is seeking to reverse the ruling, arguing that there should be no ‘infettered right’ to remove links to data.

Meanwhile, former F1 mogul Max Mosley has taken his battle with Google over images of him taking part in a sex party to the next stage with a fresh legal move.

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