Source: Privacy, Google draws up the guidelines - Il Sole 24 ORE

"Some results may have been removed as part of European data protection legislation". This disclaimer appears at the bottom of the page to anyone searching Google.co.uk (and Google's other European domains) for a first and last name that does not refer to a public figure. Even if the person in question has not requested removal, the disclaimer protects those who have. Effects of the European Court of Justice's judgment C 131/12, the "Costeja" judgment, named after the Spanish citizen who appealed to have content removed from a newspaper and had the link disappear in searches related to his first and last name.

Since the issuance of the judgment (May 2014), Google has received more than 200 thousand requests for delisting, i.e., removal of links related to personal information deemed irrelevant or inappropriate by the plaintiff. Requests to be assessed on a case-by-case basis, but according to what criteria? And with what procedure? The Mountain View company has turned to a council of experts, asking them to collect opinions in a series of public meetings in major European cities and then draw up guidelines to "balance the individual right to privacy with the public interest of access to information," as stated in the final result, a report online since February 6. The criteria set out in the report for delisting include: the subject's role in public life, the nature of the information, the source from which it came and the reason for removal, and the time that has elapsed since it was published. The work we were invited to do, as independent experts and on a voluntary basis," Luciano Floridi, professor of Philosophy of Information at Oxford University and one of the eight members of the Council, told Nòva, "was to help Google on how to apply the Court's ruling. These were the rules of the game. I too would have liked them to be different, but the discussion was not about personal "likes/dislikes"". The reference, not too veiled, is to the numerous written reservations accompanying the document, including that of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales ("I am totally opposed to a legal status in which a commercial company is forced to become the judge of our most fundamental rights such as freedom of expression and privacy, without allowing any appropriate appeal procedure for publishers whose works are suppressed"), and that of the German Federal Minister of Justice, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger ("in my opinion, the request for removal must extend to all Google domains, not only the European ones").

Two of the most controversial points of the report are: the removal of links by geographic area, which raises the question of national and supranational sovereignty in the era of networks; the role of publishers, "notified" via notification to the webmaster of the cancellation of the link, with all that this entails also in terms of indirect traffic to the site. On the first topic, according to Floridi "while it took the nation-states two centuries to create public libraries, responding to the private monopoly of publishing, with the Internet we did not have this time frame. Politicians did not realize what was happening: the legal power has abdicated in favor of companies and the efforts of Brussels to regain power in terms of control of the network are discouraging, because the network is made precisely to escape control." As for the introduction of notification for publishers, the report's guidelines agree on the need to notify even before delisting as well as having the ability to appeal in the face of improper revocations. "There's no law that says Google has to notify, but also no law that it can't. Our hope is that it does. The discernment of sources on which one of the report's points is based should also be understood in this sense. There is no concrete news on this, we are waiting for the evolution of the debate". But isn't it paradoxical that the Advisory Council for the Right to be Forgotten denies the existence of a right to be forgotten at the beginning of the report? "Legislatively, there is no right to be forgotten, the ruling does not remove the information but the link to the information, if it is not in the public interest. We are not talking about false or defamatory information, for that there is already the court. We are talking about information that no longer represents who we are and that cannot always be regurgitated, now that the search engine is increasingly the way we present ourselves to others. No one wants to deal with the real problem, which is that of the removal of information at source and the relevance of information, which is independent of the time factor. If we think of information not as property but as part of our identity, the ruling is a wrong step in the right direction." Disclaimer proof.

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