Google has been flooded with tens of thousands of requests under the European Court of Justice Right to be Forgotten ruling. This equates to hundreds of thousands of URLs containing content that EU citizens want removed from the search results. ibVPN, like our other top VPN providers, cares about user privacy and also about free access to online content. The Right to be Forgotten is a very difficult issue because it can be seen as both a privacy violation issue if people cannot file their complaints, and as a censorship issue when requests to remove content are processed.
Privacy Protection or Content Censorship?
Privacy advocates are conflicted about what the EU High Court’s Right to be Forgotten ruling means. People living in Europe currently have a right to ask Bing, Google, Yahoo, and other search engines in their countries to remove links to certain content that you feel violates your privacy or brings you undue negative attention. These search engines must, under law, review the requests and consider seriously whether to remove the search results or not.
The question is whether having these search results removed is a privacy safeguard or if it is content censorship that favors people who have something to hide. Google already has over 328,000 URLs to go through. This means a potential for hundreds of thousands of results hidden, from about 91,000 requests. Many privacy advocates have voiced concerns over the ruling, and the Lords Affairs EU Sub-Committee considers the court’s decision to be wrong in principle as well as being impractical and irrational. About half of the requests submitted to Google have already been approved.
Jimmy Wales, the founder of known free content access advocate Wikipedia, said that it is very dangerous for a court to set such a precedent. He also said that if it must be done, it should not be up to search engines to decide what should be censored. Araq Tariq, a web developer who believes that the results should not be deleted, now has a campaign called Hidden from Google. Search results that have been removed from Google and their background stories can be uploaded to the website. Tariq calls it his way of documenting incidents of censorship on the Internet.
