August 12th, 2011
Google loses battle to retain info on Spanish citizens
Tech Watch
Google has failed in its attempt to stop the Spanish government forcing them to delete information regarding around 90 of its citizens from online indexes.
Spain’s Data Protection Agency filed a complaint last year and Google was quick to challenge the order, which has now been upheld by a Spanish judge.
The ruling is the latest development in the campaign to protect “the right to be forgotten” on the internet, or as it is known in Spain, “the right to oblivion”.
The Spanish agency reported late last year that the number of privacy complaints had increased by 75% since 2009, mostly targeting internet companies, including MySpace, Facebook and Google.
European laws are more concerned with people’s right to privacy than the US, where similar suits have not enjoyed much in the way of success. The European Union is expected to release regulations in the autumn.
EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said last month: “I cannot accept that individuals have no say over their data once it has been launched into cyberspace.”
Google has maintained that search engines should not be held responsible for the content that they provide links for, and say that individuals should target those that post the content.
In a blog earlier this year, Google’s privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer said that the growing issue of privacy was merely a justification for censorship.
“In a sense, privacy depends on keeping some things private, in other words, hidden, restricted, or deleted. And in a world where ever more content is coming online, and where ever more content is find-able and share-able, it’s also natural that the privacy counter-movement is gathering strength. Privacy is the new black in censorship fashions,” he wrote.
The issue came about in Spain following the digitalisation of a government gazette in which information about citizens is required to be published by law. The information was then indexed by Google, at which point the complaints began to roll in.
One of the complainants was a women who was worried her address could now be found by a former partner who had subjected her to domestic abuse. According to the New York Times, another was a student attempting to hide a previous criminal conviction.
Google said preventing some data being accessed through search engines “would have a profound chilling effect on free expression without protecting people’s privacy,” the report said.
A poll carried out in Europe showed that one in four citizens wanted the right to delete any information regarding themselves which was present on the internet.
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