Google Official Sees U.S. Slowly Addressing Right to Be Forgotten Through ‘Miniature Laws’
Google has received over 100,000 right to be forgotten requests since it put up a Web form following the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) May ruling, said Google Director-Public Policy Adam Kovacevich. “We have a backlog of requests,” he said at an Internet Association event Friday live-streamed from Harvard University. “This is not going to go away.” The EU’s data protection directive proposal (http://bit.ly/1oN3uPa) will, in the coming months, further define the rights of individuals over their own information, Kovacevich said. The discussion might then move to regulators in Latin America and Asia, who are asking, “Is this something we should consider?” Kovacevich said.
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In coming years, the U.S. will also tackle these issues through legislation and regulatory agencies, said industry representatives. Kovacevich said the U.S. is “probably going to have to weigh a lot of these things legislatively about how we feel a person’s history ought to follow them for certain types of information.” In a separate interview last week, Intel Global Privacy Officer David Hoffman said the FTC’s work on data brokers -- through its recent report (WID May 28 p1) and enforcement actions (http://1.usa.gov/IYJ4FY) -- would also clarify U.S. policy on one’s right to eliminate certain personal information.
The ECJ ruling (WID May 14 p5) determined search engines are responsible for third-party links that appear in search results. Since then, major search engine companies like Google and Microsoft have posted Web forms for European residents to request link removals (WID June 27 p7). “Some of the cases we've seen have been former politicians asking to have news of their criminal convictions removed,” Kovacevich said. “These things, in our view, are not in the public interest.” But he understands the impetus behind the desire. “It is important to acknowledge some of the feelings that motivate a desire for a right to be forgotten,” he said. Traditional “search costs for finding information” -- such as time and money -- “have been obliterated,” Kovacevich said. “People are concerned about the impact."
The U.S. has historically dealt with those concerns through narrowly drawn laws like the Fair Credit Reporting Act, said Kovacevich and Hoffman. Under FCRA, credit reporting agencies cannot use certain information against a person after a set number of years, they said. Bankruptcies stand for 10 years, lawsuits stand for seven years (http://1.usa.gov/1lLWWpy). “We've made a judgment in this country that this information has an expiration date,” Kovacevich said. FCRA, however, says reporting criminal convictions has no expiration date in the U.S., he said. “Whereas France says any crime should be expunged once you've done that time,” he said. “We're probably going to have to weigh a lot of these things legislatively about how we feel a person’s history ought to follow them for certain types of information.”
The FTC enforces FCRA and is applying the four decade-old law to the data broker market (WID June 2 p1). Hoffman believes those efforts -- particularly Commissioner Julie Brill’s Reclaim Your Name initiative -- are tackling the same complications raised in the ECJ’s ruling. “They're the same issues,” he told us. The FTC is taking a long-term perspective on the issue, he said. Brill has pushed for an industry- or government-run online portal where users can access data collected on them and choose what they want data brokers to use for varying purposes (WID Dec 20 p2). Through this process, Hoffman said, industry and government would have to determine what information individuals can suppress and for what purposes.
"I don’t think there will be a right to be forgotten” in the U.S., Kovacevich said, but “I think there will be sort of miniature laws and other steps taken to address particular types of information.”