Google fights landmark UK ‘right to be forgotten’ lawsuits

MLex Market Insight

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4.9 • 9 Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2018

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

Does UK data-protection law mean Google should be forced to block historical search results when requested to so? That was the core question as the first cases to test the “right to be forgotten” principle were heard in the British courts recently as two unidentified businessmen laid out their case for the search company to be ordered to remove links to reports about their old convictions. The issue has become a hot topic since the right to be forgotten principle was cemented in a landmark EU court ruling in 2014; it has also been strengthened in new privacy rules entering force in May. With a ruling from the London court expected as early as the end of March, Vesela Gladicheva, Senior Technology Correspondent, talks over the case and its implications with Ana Rita Rego, Managing Editor in London.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi and welcome to another MLEX podcast. I'm Anna Rago, managing editor for Emlex's London Bureau.
0:17.1	Today we'll be talking about the EU's right to be forgotten principle, which applies to search engines such as Google, Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo.
0:23.6	The idea behind the principle seems simple.
0:25.6	Anybody in the EU can ask a search engine to remove the links to results about them.
0:29.6	But the reality is far more complex than that.
0:32.6	With me is Vesla Gladiccheva, senior technology correspondent in London,
0:35.6	who will be speaking about the latest court challenges in the UK on the right to be forgotten. Hi Vesla Gleditschewa, Senior Technology Correspondent in London, who will be speaking about the latest court challenges in the UK on the Right to be Forgotten.
0:40.3	Hi Vesla.
0:41.3	Hi, Anna.
0:42.3	So what is this right to be forgotten? Where does it stem from? Why is it so important?
0:46.3	So this principle was triggered in 2014 when the EU Court of Justice in Luxembourg handed down a very important judgment
0:59.0	that was sent from Spain. And basically, judges said that Google and other search engines
1:06.0	should comply with requests from individuals to have their names removed from such results.
1:14.3	So someone writes into Google, for instance. I don't want to be picking on Google, but someone
1:18.3	writes in and says, I want this link to be deleted, and then Google or Microsoft has X amount
1:23.9	of months or weeks to respond. Yes, and they have to sort of consider a number of factors, such as whether the information
1:32.5	is accurate, out of date, relevant, and basically it's a balancing exercise and they need to
1:40.8	away to competing rights, on the one hand, the right to private life and
1:46.2	on the other right to free expression.
1:48.3	So these two new cases in the UK court, which are helpfully mentioned as NT1 and NT2 versus
1:54.9	Google, I understand that there is some reporting restrictions so we can't actually talk about
1:59.2	the content, but we can talk about the legal
	...

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