ECJ’s ‘Right to be forgotten’ rule stretches to Wikipedia
Google is to obstruct search terms to a link to a Wikipedia page in the latest attempt to adhere to the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) 'Right to be forgotten' law.
The move marks the first time the online encyclopaedia has been affected by the ruling, passed this May, which requires all search engines to delete "inadequate, irrelevant of no longer relevant" data from their results, when requested to do so by members of the public.
According to the Guardian, the identity of the individual who requested the link removal is unknown but that it will be put into effect within days.
The ruling has sparked outcry from many including BBC journalists such as Robert Peston who have had their work removed from Google, to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (pictured).
Last month Wales told Radio 4 that the ECJ laws have triggered a precarious situation in which the likes of search engines like Google are being given too much censorship power, which he described as a “dangerous path” to go down.
“…if we want to go down a path where we are going to be censoring history, there is no way we should leave a private company like Google in charge of making those decisions."
Wales added that he will be advising Google when he later helps the UK parliament come up with search engine law recommendations.
The laws, enforced earlier this year, resulted in Google along with other search engines Bing and Yahoo, set up web applications, via which people could submit their requests to have articles removed.
Since then Google has received more than 91,000 takedown requests, relating to over 300,000 pages.