E.U.’s Top Court Rules Against Facebook in Global Takedown Case; The New York Times, October 3, 2019

Adam Satariano, The New York Times; E.U.’s Top Court Rules Against Facebook in Global Takedown Case

"The case has been closely watched because of its potential ripple effects for regulating internet content. The enforcement of defamation, libel and privacy laws varies from country to country, with language and behavior that is allowed in one nation prohibited in another. The court’s decision highlights the difficulty of creating uniform standards to govern an inherently borderless web and then enforcing them.

Facebook and other critics have warned that letting a single nation force an internet platform to delete material elsewhere would hurt free expression...

Last week, the European Court of Justice limited the reach of the European privacy law known as the “right to be forgotten,” which allows European citizens to demand Google remove links to sensitive personal data from search results. The court said Google could not be ordered to remove links to websites globally, except in certain circumstances when weighed against the rights to free expression and the public’s right to information."

Google loses landmark 'right to be forgotten' case; The Guardian, April 13, 2018

Jamie Grierson and Ben Quinn, The Guardian; Google loses landmark 'right to be forgotten' case

"A businessman has won his legal action to remove search results about a criminal conviction in a landmark “right to be forgotten” case that could have wide-ranging repercussions.

The ruling was made by Mr Justice Warby in London on Friday. The judge rejected a similar claim brought by a second businessman who was jailed for a more serious offence...

In 2014 the European court of justice (ECJ) ruled that “irrelevant” and outdated data should be erased on request. Since then, Google has received requests to remove at least 2.4m links from search results. Search engine firms can reject applications if they believe the public interest in accessing the information outweighs a right to privacy...

“Before anyone meets a new person these days they Google them,” [Hugh] Tomlinson [QC, representing NT1] said. He added that many people engaged in misdeeds when they were young and if the misdeeds were constantly brought to the attention of others then they would permanently have a negative effect...

A Google spokesperson said: “We work hard to comply with the right to be forgotten, but we take great care not to remove search results that are in the public interest and will defend the public’s right to access lawful information. We are pleased that the court recognised our efforts in this area, and we will respect the judgments they have made in this case.”"

‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Online Could Spread; New York Times, 8/5/15

Farhad Manjoo, New York Times; ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Online Could Spread:

"More than a year ago, in a decision that stunned many American Internet companies, Europe’s highest court ruled that search engines were required to grant an unusual right — the “right to be forgotten.” Privacy advocates cheered the decision by the European Court of Justice, which seemed to offer citizens some recourse to what had become a growing menace of modern life: The Internet never forgets, and, in its robotic zeal to collect and organize every scrap of data about everyone, it was beginning to wreak havoc on personal privacy.

Under the ruling, Europeans who felt they were being misrepresented by search results that were no longer accurate or relevant — for instance, information about old financial matters, or misdeeds committed as a minor — could ask search engines like Google to delink the material. If the request was approved, the information would remain online at the original site, but would no longer come up under certain search engine queries.

Search engines and free speech advocates, calling the ruling vague and overbroad, warned of dire consequences for free expression and the historical record if the right to be forgotten was widely enacted. Now, they say, their fears are being realized...

“When we’re talking about a broadly scoped right to be forgotten that’s about altering the historical record or making information that was lawfully public no longer accessible to people, I don’t see a way to square that with a fundamental right to access to information,” said Emma Llansó, a free expression scholar at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a tech-focused think tank that is funded in part by corporations, including Google."

French Official Campaigns to Make ‘Right to be Forgotten’ Global; New York Times, 12/3/14

Mark Scott, New York Times; French Official Campaigns to Make ‘Right to be Forgotten’ Global:

"Europe is pressing for its ‘‘right to be forgotten’’ ruling to go global.

The privacy decision, which allows individuals to ask that links leading to information about themselves be removed from search engine results, has been gaining traction worldwide ever since European officials released guidelines last week that demanded Google and others apply the ruling across their entire search empires.

And on Wednesday, Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, who heads the French data protection authority and has campaigned heavily for expanding the ruling, defended European efforts to force search engines to apply the ruling to search results outside of Europe."