"The EU wants to unleash what will be the most extensive censorship and information whitewashing push since Orwell's Big Brother," wrote Lauren Weinstein on the Privacy Forum, a privacy discussion list.
The European Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday that a Spaniard named Mario Consteja Gonzalez had the right to request removal of a link to a legal notice about his home's repossession and auction in 1998 from a Google search because it was irrelevant or outdated.
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The ruling enshrines "the right to be forgotten." It applies within the European Union but not outside of it.
Because Google algorithms give greater weight to items that have many links to them, the original notice of the home's repossession on the newspaper's website now pops up on the first page of results in the United States. Some news sites even use a screen grab of the notice as the illustration for their stories.
The European high court's ruling didn't surprise Peter Swire, a law professor and privacy expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Ga.
"For this court, it's not a business practice case, it's a human rights case," he said.
Europe treats privacy, "as a fundamental human right," Swire said.
The judges ruled that Gonzalez' privacy rights were more important than "the interest of the general public in having access to that information."
That's in line with a European concept of "practical obscurity," said Swire.
The court didn't rule that the newspaper that originally published the information, La Vanguardia in Barcelona, had to remove it. Instead, it required that Google remove links to the auction notice from its search engine results.
The court drew a distinction between copies of newspapers sitting bound in a library in! Spain and a search engine that turns up the information about the house's auction and makes it available to anyone immediately.
"On a practical level, people used to have privacy through obscurity," but search engines have taken that way, said Swire. With this ruling "the court is returning things closer to the old status quo."
He notes that the entire concept of what's public and what's private is different in Europe.
"Many things that are public records in the United States are considered confidential in the European Union. For instance, in many European countries it's very hard to find out who owns a piece of land, whereas here it's a matter of public record," Swire said.
American privacy experts aren't sure how such a rule would be implemented. A company would have to have a way of confirming that the person making the request to have a link removed was indeed a citizen of the European Union and that the information was about them.
In the United States, the closest kin would be the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows copyright holders to demand material be removed from sites where it was posted without permission.
"We're very acutely aware of the potential for abuse," said Danny O'Brien, international director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a internet policy organization based in San Francisco.
He ticked off possible examples. People wanting to take down content that isn't about themselves. People wanting to take down content that a court determines is newsworthy. People wanting to improve their business' results on Google by having all evidence that another person is selling a given item taken down.
The removals won't necessarily be invisible. When items are removed for copyright, Google often notes that "items have been removed from this search," with a link to a site called the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, which lists the original request that the material be removed.
O'Brien imagines a similar site might be built for E! urope. Th! at way, people inside Europe would know when something had been taken down.
Many suggest that Wikipedia might especially be targeted by those wishing to have their past activities forgotten.
"It does put Wikipedia in the cross hairs, because that's pretty much what it does," said O'Brien.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales told the BBC he couldn't imagine the ruling will stand for long.
On Twitter, he said, "I'm sure you agree that it shouldn't be illegal to write about something based on how long ago it happened."
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