Google's Schmidt says right to be forgotten is a balancing act
Google Inc. Chairman Eric Schmidt started a European roadshow about the right to be forgotten, saying the world's biggest search engine must weigh privacy and citizens' right to know before cutting links to search results.
"We need to balance the right of information" against privacy, Schmidt said before a forum with an "amazing" panel of what he described as "genuine experts" invited to give evidence on how to apply a May ruling by the European Union's top court. The experts include the head of Spain's Huffington Post website, a Spanish supreme court magistrate and a human rights lawyer.
Google was ordered by EU judges to delete links on request to "inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant, or excessive" content that pops up on a search on a person's name. The company opposes the ruling and is touring Europe to debate problems raised by the judgment, starting with its first session with privacy experts in Madrid today.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and other advisers to Google will join Schmidt and the company's top lawyer, David Drummond, in questioning the experts at the public event to help them draft a report on how the right to be forgotten should be applied. They will consider the impact of the court case for Internet users and news publishers and make recommendations for how the company should deal with requests to delete criminal convictions.
Google has had "north of 100,000" request to remove search links since EU judges handed citizens the right to be forgotten, Drummond said today.
Legal Debate
Google's critics say the meetings in seven European cities are a self-serving attempt to steer a debate that belongs to regulators and courts. Spain's privacy regulator said last week it wouldn't attend because because it "does not take part in public open consultations promoted by companies or individuals subject to data-protection law whose activity it has to supervise."
Joaquin Munoz Rodriguez, a lawyer at Abanlex in Madrid who represented the man whose request to be forgotten led to the EU court ruling, said "there is no doubt this is mainly a legal debate" that should be based on current law "even though this is an issue that can be approached from different angles."
The judgment from the EU's top court can't be appealed. The bloc's privacy regulators are debating guidelines for how to handle any complaints over Google's handling of requests to delete links. EU governments and lawmakers must still agree new data-protection rules that also defines the right to be forgotten.
To contact the reporter on this story: Aoife White in Madrid at awhite62bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaaronsbloomberg.net Peter Chapman, Mark Beech