Juliette Garside wrote a piece for The Guardian today that Google will restrict search terms to a link to a Wikipedia article under the right to be forgotten law. Jimmy Wales founder of Wikipedia said, “You do not have a right to use the law to prevent Wikipedia editors from writing truthful information, nor do you have a right to use the law to prevent Google from publishing truthful information. Wikipedia can and should work hard to do a good job, just as Google can and should work hard to do a good job.”
From the article:
Google is set to restrict search terms to a link to a Wikipedia article, in the first request under Europe‘s controversial new “right to be forgotten” legislation to affect the 110m-page encyclopedia.
The identity of the individual requesting a change to Google’s search results has not been disclosed and may never be known, but it is understood the request will be put into effect within days. Google and other search engines can only remove the link – as with other “right to be forgotten” requests, the web page itself will remain on Wikipedia.
In May, the European Court of Justice ruled that citizens could ask search engines to remove particular links from results for a search made under their name, if the material was deemed to be out of date, no longer relevant or excessive.
Jimmy Wales, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001 and has overseen its transformation into the sixth most visited site on the internet, told the Observer: “It’s completely insane and it needs to be fixed.”
Wales is one of 10 members of an advisory council formed by Google to decide how to handle takedown requests. The council will travel Europe, with a first hearing scheduled in Madrid on 9 September, before writing guidance for Google and other search engines, such as Microsoft’s Bing, on implementing the new law.
It was a test case brought by a Spaniard called Mario Costeja González, who wanted a 1998 article about his home being repossessed removed from search results, that triggered the change in legislation.
Read the full article here