Search engine Google has started to comply with a ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) that decreed that individuals in Europe have the “right to be forgotten” by having web pages and articles about them deleted from its search results.
The ruling stemmed from a case brought by a Spaniard after he failed to secure the deletion of a 1998 auction notice of his repossessed home that was reported in a Spanish newspaper. He took his case to the ECJ, which ruled that the information was no longer relevant and that search engines should therefore remove links to it.
Since the ruling, Google has received some 50,000 requests for web pages to be removed from European search results and even links to an article written by BBC economics editor Robert Peston have been removed, much to his disgust.
Mr Peston says that Google sent the BBC a notification this week saying that it regretted to inform the Corporation that it was no longer able to show pages from its website in response to certain searches on European versions of the search engine.
However, this doesn’t mean that the article disappears from the Internet, only that people typing in a particular combination of words into Google’s search engine will no longer see it.
The Guardian also reported that it had been perturbed to receive similar notices and argues that the decision to remove links to stories must belong to editors, not with Google.
However, the search engine is merely complying with the ruling and appears to be a reluctant participant in what the Guardian calls a form of censorship. To illustrate this, Google is informing sites when their content in blocked and is only removing the exact pages that have been requested for deletion, meaning that anyone being a little more imaginative in a search will still be able to find articles on the subject.