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UK Watchdog Defends EU Data Ruling

August 8 2014

UK data protection watchdog the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has spoken up in qualified support of the European Court's recent ruling, which it says is not a 'Right to be Forgotten' but a reasonable task for Google to address on a case by case basis.

A committee of the House of Lords said last week that the ECJ's ruling to search engines was 'unworkable' and 'wrong in principle'. The ICO says the criticism is 'misplaced' and has already been shown to be so by the initial stages of the ruling's implementation. ICO Deputy Commissioner David Smith cited the fact that the information would still be available online as the legislation only requires search engine links to be removed.

Smith also addressed the question of whether search engines should notify publishers each time a link to their content is removed, which he says is complex and must be looked at on a case by case basis. 'In some cases, informing the publisher has led to the complained about information being republished, while in other cases results that are taken down will link to content that is far from legitimate - for example to hate sites of various sorts. In cases like that we can see why informing the content publisher could exacerbate an already difficult situation and could in itself have a very detrimental effect on the complainant's privacy.'

This week Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, never afraid to express an opinion, said the ECJ ruling was 'deeply immoral' and warned that the process would leave the Internet riddled with 'memory holes' where 'inconvenient' information has been removed.

Google reported soon after the judgement that it was receiving about 10,000 requests for removal each day - and Information Commissioner Christopher Graham believes it's not unreasonable to ask the search giant to put its back into the work, but equally that the 'right to be forgotten' tag is wrong. He told BBC Radio 5 in an interview two weeks ago: 'Google is a massive commercial organisation making millions and millions out of processing people's personal information. They're going to have to do some tidying up. They won't do all the tidying up that some people might like, because if you embarrass yourself there's not much you can do about it. A good policy is not to embarrass yourself in the first place. All this talk about rewriting history and airbrushing embarrassing bits from your past - this is nonsense, that's not going to happen.'

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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