Yesterday's excellent University of Cambridge conference on Internet Regulation After Google Spain suggested that data protection law will continue to affect a growing range of our activities, but that interpreting its requirements in novel circumstances will continue to be challenging.
In discussions of the "Right to be Forgotten" it is often observed that Google manages each month to deal with tens of millions of delisting requests for breach of copyright, as opposed to tens of thousands for inaccurate personal data. Often the implication seems to be that those numbers should be more similar.
Next month I'll be going to an academic conference on Google Spain and the "Right to be Forgotten" (actually, "right to be delinked") so I thought I'd better organise my thoughts on why, as a provider and user of communications and information services, the decision worries me. And I am much more worried by the decision itself and the train of proposed law it seems to have created than by how Google has responded.
One aspect of the Google Spain judgment I’ve not seen discussed is the incentives it creates for search engines.
A number of people have asked me what the recent European Court judgment in the Google “right to be forgotten” case means; here’s why I have been answering that I don’t know!
ENISA’s study on the “Right to be Forgotten” contains useful reminders that once information is published on the Internet it may be impossible to completely remove it. Implementing a right to be forgotten would involve four stages: