Brussels, 06/02/2015 (Agence Europe) - The consultative group commissioned by Google and set in place in May 2014 to study the impact of the ruling of the Court of Justice of the EU on the principle of the 'right to be forgotten' recommended on 5 February that the American Internet giant limit the de-referencing of controversial links only to sites hosted in the EU, and not include the site 'google.com' as called for by the 'Article 29' group of the national data protection authorities (see EUROPE 11233 and 11206).
Google set this consultative committee in place to guide it in the application of the principle of the 'right to be forgotten' prescribed by the Court of Justice, which ruled in May 2014 that Internet users could ask for certain personal details to be removed from the results of Internet search engines (see EUROPE 11078). This decision calls for the removal of this information in Europe, but leaves open the question of the application of the measure outside the EU.
The committee set in place is made up of academics, the editor-in-chief of a newspaper, lawyers, one politician, specialists in human rights and data protection, and Jimmy Wales, the founder of the Wikimedia Foundation (the organisation which operates the free online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia). Following a series of public meetings held in several European cities and the hearings of several dozen experts, the consultative committee has published a text which proposes a raft of ethical and legal criteria to help search engines to decide whether or not to accept a request for dereferencing. The committee lists four main criteria to be taken into account: - the role of the individual in public life; - the type of information subject to a request for withdrawal (degree of infringement of privacy, public interest); - the type of site hosting the information; - the age of the information published. (SP)