The Solace of Oblivion

The European Court of Justice ruled that all individuals in European Union countries have the right to prohibit Google from linking to items that were “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed.” “The decision will go down in history as one of the most significant mistakes that Court has ever made,” said Jules Polonetsky, the executive director of the Future of Privacy Forum, a think tank in Washington. “It gives very little value to free expression. If a particular Web site is doing something illegal, that should be stopped, and Google shouldn’t link to it. But for the Court to outsource to Google complicated case-specific decisions about whether to publish or suppress something is wrong. Requiring Google to be a court of philosopher kings shows a real lack of understanding about how this will play out in reality.”