Google on the frontline of internet privacy wars

Many want search results removed

Google dominates the search engine market to such an extent that it’s regularly the focus of individual and government attempts to have information removed from the internet.

In the European Union, courts have ordered the company to remove links to damaging personal information deemed inadequate, irrelevant or excessive. In the past three years, Google has received more than 735,000 removal requests from EU residents. Among them:

In Germany, a teacher convicted of a minor crime more than a decade ago asked Google to remove search results that linked to an article about his conviction. Google complied; In Italy, a woman requested that Google remove links to a decades-old article about her husband’s murder, which included her name. Google complied; In Britain, a doctor requested Google remove more than 50 links to newspaper articles about a procedure that he botched. Google refused, removing only three links to pages that contained personal information; and also in Britain, a man asked Google to remove a link to an old news summary of a court decision about his conviction since he had been officially rehabilitated. Google complied.

According to the company’s public transparency report, Google has delisted 1.1 million search results in the EU by weighing the rights of the individual against the public’s interest in the content.

The company provides little insight into how it manages that juggling act, saying only that it considers many factors, including whether the content relates to the individual’s “professional life, a past crime, political office or position in public life.” It also considers whether the material was created by the individual requesting its removal, or by governments or journalists.

In the EU, Google’s online removal form explains: “When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information. For example, we may decline to remove certain information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions or public conduct of government officials.”

Europeans who have their removal requests rejected can appeal to government privacy commissions and, ultimately, to the courts.

In France, the country’s highest administrative court, the Conseil d’Etat, will soon hear a case involving four applicants who had their removal requests rejected by both Google and France’s data protection agency.

The information at issue includes an explicit video that revealed an individual’s relationship with a public office holder; a news article related to the suicide of a Church of Scientology member; and articles related to a man’s conviction for sexually abusing children.

In Canada, Google will voluntarily remove “sensitive personal information” only under limited circumstances.

If web pages include personal medical records, information that can be used by fraudsters — e.g. signatures, credit card numbers, bank account or social insurance numbers — or unauthorized, sexually explicit images, Google will consider removals on a case-by-case basis.

In Canada, Google also acts upon court orders and government requests to remove information from blog posts, YouTube videos and search results.

In the first six months of 2016, Google received 56 official removal requests in Canada, and complied with the majority (69 per cent) of them.

According to Google’s transparency report for Canada, most of those removals involved defamation (45 per cent), privacy and security (29 per cent), fraud (13 per cent), copyright violations (five per cent) and violence (four per cent).

The report offered a handful of examples of Canadian removal requests. Among them:

In 2014, Google received a request from a man who had been acquitted of extortion for a plot that allegedly had ties to Hezbollah. He wanted a number of news articles delisted from search results of his name. Google refused for “reasons of public interest”; In 2011, the federal government asked Google to remove a YouTube video of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet. It refused; and in 2009, an unnamed Canadian politician asked Google to remove a blog criticizing his policies. Google refused.