Wikipedia fought back against Europe’s “right to be forgotten” by
listing the online encyclopaedia’s articles removed from search results,
snubbing a court ruling that allows people to stop personal information
appearing under Internet searches.
The Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organisation that runs the free
online encyclopaedia, said on Wednesday that it had received notices
from search engines affecting more than 50 links to Wikipedia pages.
In its first public statement against the ruling from Europe’s top
court in May confirming that people can stop irrelevant or outdated
personal information from appearing under searches for their name, the
foundation said it would publish each notice for the removal of a link
to a Wikipedia page.
“Accurate search results are vanishing in Europe with no public
explanation, no real proof, no judicial review, and no appeals process,”
wrote Lila Tretikov, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation on
its blog.
“The result is an Internet riddled with memory holes — places where inconvenient information simply disappears.”
The “right to be forgotten” has divided experts and pitted privacy
campaigners against defenders of free speech, who argue that the ruling
will lead to people whitewashing their past.
However, search engines are required to take into account the
public’s interest in knowing certain information about famous or public
figures when evaluating removal requests, and the Court of Justice of
the European Union (ECJ) said a balance must be struck between the
freedom of information and privacy.
Also, the person requesting that the link be removed is not
necessarily the one named in the article, but could be one whose name
appears in the comment section.
“The disclosure of the link alone is not too helpful as you have no
idea what name on the page asked for link to come down,” said Lilian
Edwards, a professor of Internet law.
“LINK CENSORSHIP”
Wikimedia had received five notices affecting over 50 links across
the British, Italian and Dutch versions of Wikipedia by Wednesday, it
said.
Google, which handles around 90 percent of searches in Europe, had
received over 90,000 requests under the right to be forgotten by July 18
and was accepting over half of them.
The search engine giant has been criticised for notifying publishers
that a link to their website has been removed, a method that can draw
unwanted attention to the page in question and feed speculation over who
made the request.
“Our concern is that these notifications generate a lot of confusion,
and in some ways undercut the request itself by bringing people’s names
back into the open,” Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, who heads France’s
privacy watchdog and the WP29 group of EU national data protection
authorities, said in an interview with Reuters.
Google says it is necessary to ensure transparency and already
notifies the owners of websites that are removed from search results
because of copyright infringements.
Wikimedia said it was posting the removal notices in the interests of free speech and transparency.
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