Privacy ruling by EU puts ISPs in pickle

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BRUSSELS – Google and other Internet companies find themselves in a quandary over how to strike a balance between privacy and freedom of information as the world’s top search engine took a first step toward upholding an EU privacy ruling.

Google moved overnight Thursday to put up an online form that will allow European citizens to request that links to obsolete info be taken down — its first response to the ruling by Europe’s top court on “the right to be forgotten.”

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The May 13 ruling upheld a 1995 European law on data protection and ordered Google to remove links to a 1998 newspaper article about the repossession of a Spanish man’s home.

That puts Google and other Internet companies in the position of having to interpret the court’s broad criteria for information that is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” as well as developing criteria for distinguishing public figures from private individuals.

After putting up the online form in the early hours of Friday, Google received 12,000 requests across Europe, sometimes averaging 20 per minute, by late in the day, the company said.

“The court’s ruling requires Google to make difficult judgments about an individual’s right to be forgotten and the public’s right to know,” a Google spokesman said.

This week representatives from the EU’s 28 data protection authorities are due to discuss the implications of the ruling at a two-day meeting. Digital rights campaigners say the EU authorities need to agree on a common approach to guide the search engine companies.

“Companies should not be tasked with balancing fundamental rights or making decisions on the appropriateness, lawfulness, or relevance of information they did not publish,” said Raegan MacDonald, European policy manager at Access, a digital rights organization.

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