Tag Privacy watchdogs

Check out this Politico article below and my previous related columns on the same subject:

Google contests global ‘right to be forgotten’ order
Don’t make us apply European laws around the world, Google pleads.
By David Meyer
30/7/15, 5:59 PM CET
Updated 31/7/15, 5:38 PM CET

Google is appealing an order from the French data protection authority to apply the “right to be forgotten” on a global basis, the company said Thursday.

The Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL) said in June that, when Google receives requests for the delisting of personal information from its search results, it should remove links to that information from all its sites around the world, including google.com.

The search giant currently only removes such results from its European domains, as the “right to be forgotten” stems from a ruling by Europe’s highest court.

Google has now formally asked CNIL to withdraw its order for global delisting.

“We’ve worked hard to implement the right to be forgotten ruling thoughtfully and comprehensively in Europe, and we’ll continue to do so,” said Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy chief, in a statement. “But as a matter of principle, we respectfully disagree with the idea that a national data protection authority can assert global authority to control the content that people can access around the world.”

The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in May 2014 that EU-wide privacy legislation applies to foreign search engines operating in the region. It said search engines must take down links to information that is “inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive” upon request, as long as there are no good reasons to keep them in its results.

Google went on to comply with the ruling, though a dispute remained between the firm and privacy regulators over the scope of the delinking.

Internet regulation is inherently complicated by the fact that the Internet does not naturally respect national borders. This leads to a tension between those who want to see national laws respected in the countries where they apply, and those who see international enforcement as the only way to make that happen.

While it is relatively easy to apply rules to country-specific versions of a website, such as those with addresses ending in Germany’s “.de” or France’s “.fr,” there is nothing to stop people visiting other versions of the site to find missing information.

The Article 29 Working Party, the umbrella group for EU data protection regulators, wrote in November that “limiting delisting to EU domains on the grounds that users tend to access search engines via their national domains cannot be considered a sufficient mean to satisfactorily guarantee the [privacy] rights of data subjects.”

This stance was the basis for CNIL’s order in June, which came with the threat of a fine of up to €150,000 for non-compliance.

However, a Google-convened panel of privacy experts said in February that the rights of EU citizens had to be balanced with those of people in other countries, who may have the right to see the offending information under their own national laws.

Americans accessing google.com, for example, live in a country whose legal system broadly prioritizes freedom of speech over the right to privacy.

Google built on this theme on Thursday, arguing that global delisting would risk a “chilling effect” on the web as many countries around the world have their own national speech restrictions.

The firm cited several national examples: Turkey criminalizes some criticisms of Kemal Ataturk; Thailand does the same for its royalty; and Russians are banned from disseminating “gay propaganda” online.

“If the CNIL’s proposed approach were to be embraced as the standard for Internet regulation, we would find ourselves in a race to the bottom,” Fleischer wrote in a blog post. “In the end, the Internet would only be as free as the world’s least free place.”

CNIL said it had received Google’s appeal and would “look at the arguments,” though it claimed those arguments were “in part political” whereas its own reasoning was “strictly legal.”

The regulator added that it would respond within two months.

Nicholas Hirst contributed to this story.

Please check out my two previous columns on this topic – and the latest on the situation from the Bloomberg article below:

Google Faces French Ultimatum Over Right to Be Forgotten

by Stephanie Bodoni
June 12, 2015 — 5:22 PM HKT
Updated on June 12, 2015 — 11:24 PM HKT

Google Inc. risks French fines after being handed a 15-day ultimatum to extend the so-called right to be forgotten to all its websites, including those outside the European Union.

France’s data protection regulator, CNIL, ordered the world’s most-used search engine to proceed with delistings of links across its network, irrespective of the domain name, according to a statement on Friday. CNIL said it received “hundreds of complaints following Google’s refusals.”

The order comes more than a year after a ruling by the EU’s highest court created a right to be forgotten, allowing people to seek the deletion of links on search engines if the information was outdated or irrelevant. The ruling created a furor, with Mountain View, California-based Google appointing a special panel to advise it on implementing the law. The panel opposed applying the ruling beyond EU domains.

If Google “doesn’t comply with the formal notice within the 15 days,” Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, the president of CNIL “will be in position to nominate a rapporteur to draft a report recommending to the CNIL Select Committee to impose a sanction to the company,” the watchdog said.

“We’ve been working hard to strike the right balance in implementing the European court’s ruling, cooperating closely with data protection authorities,” Al Verney, a spokesman for Google in Brussels, said in an e-mailed statement. “The ruling focused on services directed to European users, and that’s the approach we are taking in complying with it.”

Links Removal

EU data protection chiefs, currently headed by Falque-Pierrotin, last year already urged Google to also remove links, when needed, from .com sites.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has argued that the EU court’s ruling in May 2014 — in which it ordered search links tied to individuals cut when those people contend the material is irrelevant or outdated — didn’t need to be extended to the U.S. site.

“It is easy circumventing the right to be forgotten by using the domain Google.com,” said Johannes Caspar, the Hamburg data protection commissioner. “Google should be compliant with the decision and fill the protection gap quickly.”

Google has removed 342,161, or 41.3 percent, of links that it has “fully processed,” according to a report on its website.

‘Right Balance’

The U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office said in a statement that its experience with removal requests “suggests that, for the most part, Google are getting the balance right between the protection of the individual’s privacy and the interest of internet users.”

The right-to-be-forgotten rules add to separate demands for curbs on Google’s market power being considered by lawmakers this week. EU antitrust regulators in April escalated their four-year-old probe into Google, sending the company a statement of objections accusing the Internet giant of abusing its dominance of the search-engine market.

The same day, the EU also started a new investigation into Google’s Android mobile-phone software.

A eight-member panel experts tasked to review privacy issues relating to online search giant Google Inc. has rejected late last week attempts by EU privacy watchdogs to extend the “right to be forgotten” ruling beyond the 28-nation bloc – see Bloomberg report below.

The European Court of Justice issued a landmark ruling last May that anyone living in the European Union and Europeans living outside the region could ask search engines like Google to remove links if they believed the online contents breached their right to privacy and are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed.”

I have explained in my column last July that the ruling was Much Ado About Nothing as it amounted to everything but forgotten: what Google essentially did was to remove results from name search of those names approved to be deleted but only on its European websites. The same results remain on the Google US homepage and all its non-European sites. Furthermore, Google is only removing the results but not the links.

Thus no surprise there are now efforts to address these not-so-forgotten issues.

But as I have further pointed out then, the more devastating and often overlooked impact was how any “right to be forgotten” would be a much welcomed and God-sent convenience for “women with a past and men with no future”, essentially amounting to the “right to be defrauded”.

In short, anyone in support and calling to extend the “right to be forgotten” ruling – including the Hong Kong Privacy Commissioner Allen Chiang who erroneously heralded it as a way to grant everyone a “second chance in life” – is not only pulling the plug on the free flow of information but also effectively facilitating the closing down of everyone’s right to information, which would derail the notion of free markets in this global economy if every individuals and entities could so conveniently erase their dirty laundries (like criminal convictions, litigation history, old debts and past bankruptcy records for starters) at the expense of their counter-parties who could no longer trace anything – especially if this ruling was blindly extended and embraced globally.

And I stress once again, the internet, originally designed to exchange raw data between researchers and scientists, has evolved into a self-contained, self-sustained and self-evolving ecosystem of records, communications, commerce, entertainment, etc. Any attempt to remove the contents, successful or otherwise, is like playing God.

Historians will mark the EU ruling as a (irreversible) seismic error. Extending it to a global scale will have no equals in the history of mankind.

Google Panel Opposes EU Data Watchdogs on Forgotten Case

by Stephanie Bodoni

(Bloomberg) — A panel of experts enlisted by Google Inc. to review privacy issues following a European Union court ruling backed the search giant’s bid to limit the “right to be forgotten” to websites within the 28-nation bloc.

The eight-member group, which includes Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, rejected a push by EU privacy watchdogs to extend search link removals to Google’s global site.

“Delistings applied to the European versions of search will, as a general rule, protect the rights of the data subject adequately in the current state of affairs and technology,” the group said in the 41-page report. “Removal from nationally directed versions of Google’s search services within the EU is the appropriate means to implement the ruling at this stage.”

A ruling by the EU Court of Justice last year created a right to be forgotten, allowing people to seek the deletion of links on search engines if the information was outdated or irrelevant. The ruling created a furor, with Mountain View, California-based Google appointing the panel to advise it on implementing the law.

The geographic scope of an EU court ruling that forced the company last year to remove some search links on request was a “difficult question that arose throughout” the panel’s meetings, the group said.

Today’s report puts the group at odds with the 28-nation EU’s data-protection regulators who last year urged the company to allow people to seek the deletion of links to some personal data on the company’s main U.S. website.

Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a former German justice minister and one of the panel’s member, said that she opposed the majority view of the group on the geographical scope of the EU court ruling.

EU Domains

Removal requests “must not be limited to EU domains,” she said in the report. “The Internet is global, the protection of the user’s rights must also be global. Any circumvention of these rights must be prevented.”

The Google advisory group last year visited seven European cities, from Rome to Berlin, listening to academics and public officials.

“It’s been valuable to hear a wide range of viewpoints in recent months across Europe and we’ll carefully consider this report,” David Drummond, Google’s top lawyer, said in an e-mailed statement. “We’re also looking closely at the guidance given by Europe’s data protection authorities as we continue to work on our compliance with” the EU court ruling.

The company has received 212,109 requests to remove 767,804 links from its website to date, according to its website.

Initial Split

The deletion of links beyond the 28-nation EU was one of two issues that created an initial split between Google and data-protection regulators. Regulators have complained that information blocked on EU websites shouldn’t be easily accessible by visiting Google in other countries by changing a few characters on the browser address line.

The company’s policy of notifying the media about deleted links to stories on their websites also sparked the ire of regulators. The report recommended that search engines “should notify the publishers to the extent allowed by law.”

“In complex cases, it may be appropriate for the search engine to notify the webmaster prior to reaching an actual delisting decision,” the panel said. “If feasible, it would have the effect of providing the search engine additional context about the information at issue and improve accuracy of delisting determinations.”