Right to be forgotten: Should the policing of personal information be Google's responsibility?
Google has a big task ahead following the EU’s ruling on ‘the right to be forgotten’, but the real question the decision raises is: where should responsibility for consumer data lie? And is it up to Google and its peers to police the internet?
Richard Lamb
In terms of actually managing individual requests the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter actually have significant experience of dealing with copyright infringement – the Digital Millennium Copyright Act saw requests for the removal of 235m links from Google in 2013, of which 91 per cent were actioned. When dealing with these types of requests, Google in particular has tried hard to be transparent with its dealings – especially when a request is rejected. Although those individuals pursuing rejected claims could become victims of the so-called Streisand effect: Mario Costeja Gonzalez will have a job erasing all mentions of his home repossession after recent events.
For companies such as Google to manage large volumes of data requests, there needs to be clear guidance on the sort of information that can or cannot be considered eligible for removal. The government could make use of existing laws around defamation, namely whether the information is likely to cause significant reputational damage to the subject. In this particular application, it becomes difficult as the core criteria is truth, not how recent the information is and where it ranks in a search engine. Unless there is some attempt to classify what can or cannot be considered for removal, the potential time and energy that Google needs to put into managing this request is enormous.
In reality, one could argue that none of this should be Google’s issue. While the search engine can remove reference to an article, the piece still exists on the internet. Does this mean that media owners should also be responsible for handling the removal of such content? Media owners are able to determine whether content is visible to search engines. Although it is worth noting here that the sheer scale of publishing across Facebook and Twitter might actually give social networks a far greater challenge to manage personal information than search engines face.
The industry has to also consider the global nature of the web that could make removing content from the view of certain countries a potentially futile exercise. Users are already adept at getting around regional restrictions. We only have to look at the recent Twitter ban in Turkey that was easily circumvented by thousands including the deputy prime minister and president Abdullah Gul. At best, the implementation of what will be an incredibly long-tail process is going to be reliant on the goodwill of the search engines and social networks.
For advertisers, the bigger ramifications will come from the principle of applying EU data protection laws to Google per se, with the ruling that Google is a ‘data controller’ wherever it promotes and sells advertising. Whether this will have implications for the use of online behavioural data to improve the targeting of ads will be a matter of great concern to those involved in any form of online advertising. This could raise the same sort of fears as the EU Cookie Law, which ultimately proved toothless. This may be down to a lack of understanding of the many benefits that harnessing this sort of information has in terms of providing a better online experience across the sites where people spend most of their time. This inevitably raises the spectre of another attempt to curb these types of behaviour.
The resources companies such as Google have to deal with such requests hugely outweigh those available to governments to police compliance. Although a number of parties share a responsibility for managing consumers’ personal information, it would seem at least for the time being, the management of personal information on the web will fall on the shoulders of Google and its peers.
Richard Lamb is head of search at Performics, part of the ZenithOptimedia Group