By: Karin Deutsch Karlekar, Director of Free Expression At Risk Programs, PEN America What if a Japanese man had standing in court to require Googl…
By: Karin Deutsch Karlekar , Director of Free Expression At Risk Programs, PEN America
What if a Japanese man had standing in court to require Google to delist the digital record of his child prostitution conviction; or if a British man could request that search engines operating in Europe expunge 50 entries detailing a medical procedure he bungled; or if a Swiss financier could use European Union law to make Google consider removing any mention of his felony convictions from its results?
Increasingly, these claims are being considered in courts and legislatures worldwide under a newly developed legal notion that people have an inherent “right to be forgotten” (RTBF). This trend concerns free expression advocates who see the potential for broad censorship of news, historical information, or literary and academic works. Now this concept is set to be tested in the United States by a draft law introduced last month in the New York State Assembly.
So far, the United States has been reluctant to codify ‘’the right to be forgotten” at the federal level through judicial rulings or legislative action, but the concept has gained significant footholds elsewhere. Within the E. U., Google has received a total of 702,699 requests to delist 1,941,026 URLs since May 2014, and has granted 43.2 percent of these requests, according to its transparency reports. In India and China, citizens are using this Western legal precedent to buttress their cases to force search engines to delist articles from apparent results. The South Korean government established a legislative framework for requesting access restrictions on public content, and Canada was considering its own framework.
A turning point in establishing the concept of RTBF came in 2014 when the European Parliament instituted a regulation allowing its citizens to appeal for search engines operating in Europe to eliminate access to articles that were “inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant, or excessive.” The law has its roots in a 2009 suit by a Spaniard, Mario Costeja González, who demanded the delisting of two 1998 articles that linked him to foreclosure notices, lest Google search results infringe on his privacy rights. A few months after the passage of the law, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that Costeja’s claim was supported under the E. U.’s existing 1995 Data Protection Directive, and required Google to remove the articles.
