How Google’s Top Minds Decide What to Forget

On most Wednesdays, Google’s top minds in Europe get together and decide what to forget. The meetings are a new -- and potentially precedent-setting -- routine for a group of senior lawyers, engineers and product managers at the tech company, after Europe’s top court ruled that people could ask Google to remove links in search results for their name. The European Court of Justice ruling, a year old on May 13th, places Google in the uncomfortable position of having to vet take-down requests itself, and make a call. The decision making requires weighing a host of considerations, including weighty ones like how to balance people’s individual rights to privacy against the public’s right to know. The court gave little guidance on how requests should be decided, beyond saying that search results should be scrubbed if they include links to information that is inadequate, irrelevant, excessive or outdated. That largely left Google on its own to figure out where to draw the line. The case, which established what is informally known as the “right to be forgotten,” has prompted more than 250,000 requests covering more than 920,000 links.

Google has agreed to remove 35 percent of the links submitted and declined to remove 50 percent, with 15 percent still under review. Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, gave a rare glimpse of the mechanics of its decision making. He said the company was doing its best “to play a role that we never asked to play -- and don’t want to play.” The approach -- leaving it to Google to sort out -- sets one example for how Europe may choose to enforce any future broadening of the right to be forgotten.