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"Should the Internet forget?\nDo people have the right to have outdated, inaccurate, perhaps embarrassing information about them removed from the web?\nAddressing that question, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled on Thursday that citizens do have a certain \"right to be forgotten\" online. The court ordered Google to remove links to archived newspaper pages containing old information about the repossessed home of a Spanish man who sued Google and the newspaper in 2010. But what does the \"right to be forgotten\" actually mean? What does this decision actually say, and what are its implications? We have the answers, below.\nSee also: EU Wants a 'Right to Be Forgotten,' But the Internet Never Forgets\nThe one-sentence summary\nGoogle will have to remove some search results upon request because the European Union's highest court believes that old information about a person can be not only irrelevant but misleading.\nWhat did the court say?\nThe ECJ ruled that a search engine like Google has a responsibility to delete links concerning personal information upon request as long as that information is not relevant or in the public interest.\nThe search engine must remove the links even if the original source of the information, in this case the newspaper, doesn't have the obligation to do the same.\nWhy this distinction between newspapers and search engines? Because search engines make it easy to find information and are responsible when that information is outdated or inaccurate, the court said. \n\"Without the search engine,\" reads the summary of the court's full decision, \"the information could not have been interconnected or could have been only with great difficulty.\"\nThe case was based on a complaint by Mario Costeja Gonz\u00E1lez, who argued that an auction note on his repossessed home damaged his reputation. The Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia published that information in 1998.\nSo what is this \"right to be forgotten\"?\nThe right to be forgotten is a legal concept in Europe that maintains that a person has a right to leave his or her past behind. The concept originated from the French \"droit \u00E0 l\u2019oubli\" (right of oblivion), which allows a convicted criminal to avoid having the details of a conviction and incarceration published after serving prison time.\nApplied to the Internet, this concept would give individuals the right to ask Internet companies to erase their personal data when it is outdated, inaccurate or simply not relevant anymore, if there is no public interest in preserving the data.\nBut experts warn this is not an unlimited right to get a free pass from an embarrassing or even criminal past.\n\"That does not mean that everybody has the right to be forgotten whenever they'd like to have their data forgotten,\" Douwe Korff, a law professor at the London Metropolitan University who specializes in data privacy, tells Mashable. \"The right to be forgotten, it's really a balance. It doesn't say you have the right to have your transgressions forgotten. It says if there is no public interests in those transgressions being exposed, then they shouldn't be exposed.\"\nThe right to be forgotten is not regulated in detail in European law, although the EU is working on a comprehensive new law that would regulate it explicitly. Today's decision, however, is based on a 1995 directive that says the EU's members have an obligation to make sure personal data is accurate and up to date. If there's \"inaccurate or incomplete\" data, countries have to provide citizens with a way to have that data \"erased or rectified.\"\nThe directive doesn't specifically refer to Internet data, but applies to all kinds of data. The ECJ ruled today that the obligation to erase or rectify inaccurate or outdated information amounts to a right to be forgotten.\nWhy are critics wary about this ruling?\nThat might all sound reasonable, as we all have parts of our past we'd like the Internet to forget, but there's a problem here: Who decides what information can be deleted and what information should be preserved? Where's the limit? \nThe ECJ ruled that a person who wants some of his or her personal data erased can demand so from a search engine, which in turn will have to decide if the request is reasonable, balancing the person's privacy rights with freedom of expression and the public interest. And that gets tricky.\n\"That's not a very easy judgment to make,\" says Jens-Henrik Jeppesen, the director of European Affairs for the Center for Democracy &amp; Technology, a digital rights organization. \"There is all the risk in the world that this will be used by all kinds of people to demand that various information that they find inconvenient should be taken down.\"\nThe risk, Jeppesen says, is that such requests might lead Internet companies to be overly conservative and accept most of the demands to avoid litigation. \nIn other words, the risk is pre-emptive self-censorship. And the result of that might be a situation in which the same search term gives completely different results in Europe and the United States.\n\"It almost sounds like China,\" Jeppesen says. \"You get one sets of results if you search from China and another if you search from outside.\"\nBut not everyone is alarmed. Viktor Mayer-Sch\u00F6nberger, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, wrote in an email that concerns about censorship are \"BS,\" since this is about information already out there and published many years prior.\nFurthermore, he adds, \"practical implications will be limited because it still requires individuals to make claims and vigorously pursue them not shying away from spending time and money. Only few will do so.\"\nBut the ruling opens up many other questions.\n\nDoes this mean news orgs will have to delete journalism from archives because someone wants to be \"forgotten\"? http://t.co/rWcbO6CBRJ\n\u2014 Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) May 13, 2014\n\n\nI wonder if those upset by the \"right to be forgotten\" decision in Europe also believe data brokers have 1st Amdmt rt to be unregulated.\n\u2014 Frank Pasquale (@FrankPasquale) May 13, 2014\n\nWhere will the ruling apply?\nAcross all 28 member states of the European Union. \nWhy doesn't the United States have a \"right to be forgotten,\" too?\nEurope and the United States may share many Western values, but they have different legal regimes and cultural perceptions. In Europe, privacy is a right that is explicitly enshrined in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, whereas in the U.S., privacy rights are more open to legal interpretation.\nMoreover in the United States, the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press, is almost untouchable. It would theoretically be more difficult to reconcile extensive free speech rights with an obligation to delete data after the fact.\n\nEU's 'right to be forgotten' is a blow against free speech.\nhttp://t.co/XRSG44SSPK\n\u2014 Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) May 13, 2014\n\nThat being said, there are some U.S. laws that have tried to give citizens more power to request the removal of online content.\nCalifornia has mandated that minors have a chance to delete their own social media posts. Numerous states are considering laws against \"revenge porn,\" in which people release private images of former partners. Both cases acknowledge that some situations necessitate the deletion of content from the Internet whether put there voluntarily or otherwise.\n\"We have a handful of laws that already do this,\" said Meg Leta Ambrose, an assistant professor at Georgetown University's department of communication, culture and technology. \"I think that if you factor in a long amount of time that it's possible that the First Amendment could make room for a right to be forgotten.\"\nIs this ruling a big deal?\nYes, it is. First of all, the ECJ, as Jeppesen puts it, is basically the \"Supreme Court\" of the European Union, so its decisions are \"the law of the land\" in Europe.\nCourts across the EU will have to use this ruling to interpret European law. The ruling goes beyond just a single case, according to Korff.\n\"The Europeans, including the court, are squaring up for a massive international legal statement saying we will not allow the privacy and data protection rights of European citizens to be undermined by the Internet,\" Korff says.\nThat said, experts also cautioned against interpreting the effects of the ruling too quickly. \"It will take some time for everybody to really digest the implication,\" Korff says.\nMayer-Sch\u00F6nberger notes that this decision was about a very particular case, and \"the court made clear in other cases the balance may need to be struck differently.\"\nWhat does this mean for Google?\nIt's going to cost them money, possibly a lot of it. \n\"It's a really expensive decision,\" said Meg Leta Ambrose, an assistant professor at Georgetown University's department of communication, culture and technology. \nThe decision might require Google to hire a slew of people to handle requests to delete personal data. \n\"I imagine you'll see a whole lot more 'help wanted' ads on Google in the next couple weeks,\" she said.\nThe case also puts Google and other search engines in a sudden position of power. Google will now be tasked with becoming the front-line arbiter of what should and should not be deleted.\n\"Now, Google is in charge of deciding what the right to be forgotten means for all of these member states,\" Ambrose said.\nIndividual EU countries can determine their own regulations for Google to follow. This case in Spain may not have played out the same way in Italy.\n\"For every request that comes in, [Google] will determine the public interest in that content, and it will have to navigate 28 member states,\" Ambrose said.\nIn addition, newspapers have certain protections because they are considered part of the public interest, but Google does not have the protections that most publishers have, Ambrose said.\nObviously, Google is unhappy. In a statement, the company said that \"this is a disappointing ruling for search engines and online publishers in general.\" But it declined to comment any further.\nRead the ECJ's summary of the decision below.\nECJ Ruling on \"Right to be Forgotten\"\n\nHave something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.\n      window._msla=window.loadScriptAsync||function(src,id){if(document.getElementById(id))return;var js=document.createElement('script');js.id=id;js.src=src;document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0].parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);};\n_msla(\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\",\"twitter_jssdk\");"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2014/05/13/right-to-be-forgotten-europe-google/>