The more they do so, it means the media organization republishes the information and so much for the right to be forgotten. There is an issue there.
— Billy Hawkes, the Irish Data Protection commissioner, on Google informing the media about links it is removing — summing up a big problem with the right to be forgotten ruling in Europe. Google and other search engine providers such as Yahoo and Microsoft are meeting with European regulators today to discuss how to deal with the May ruling, which requires them to comply with certain requests for removal of links from search results. Most visibly, Google is dealing with a mountain of takedown requests, something it has talked plenty about publicly and which it has called a huge task.
Not that the company is getting much sympathy from people such as U.K. Information Commissioner Christopher Graham, who says Google is manipulating the media: Google is a massive commercial organisation making millions and millions out of processing people s personal information. They re going to have to do some tidying up, he told the BBC. And: All this talk about rewriting history and airbrushing embarrassing bits from your past – this is nonsense, that s not going to happen.
