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Google's general counsel has signalled the company intends to fight, hard, against broad interpretations of the European Union's right to be forgotten.
Kent Walker, the company's general counsel and senior veep, put his name to a strongly-worded post on Wednesday, US time. Titled "Defending access to lawful information at Europe's highest court", the post argued that forthcoming cases in the European Court of Justice "represent a serious assault on the public's right to access lawful information."
Walker wrote that French courts' request for a European Court of Justice ruling on personal data collection effectively seeks a regime under which "all mentions of criminality or political affiliation should automatically be purged from search results, without any consideration of public interest."
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 18 2017, @03:26AM
We already allow people to change their name and address. Why isn't that sufficient?
This is an assault on the freedom of speech. You don't have the right to excise history that casts you in a poor light, particularly since the information in question is legal to display.
Ask the webmaster of the site where you posted that foolish information to delete it, if you can't do it yourself. It's not that hard. And if you did so on a site which can and does legally keep your mistake up for the public to read, then suck to be you. No reason to fix what ain't broke.
So what? It's not Google's job to clean up after your mistakes and crimes. And by forcing Google to be the Ministry of Truth [wikipedia.org] here, we are creating a long term anti-democratic threat for short sighted reasons.