ANA and Consumer Watchdog in 'Right to be Forgotten' Dispute; Google Declines to Offer Right Worldwide
In response to a letter to the FTC from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) Friday asking the agency to “reject” Consumer Watchdog’s complaint that says Google’s failure to offer U.S. users the right to be forgotten as it does for Europeans is an “unfair and deceptive” practice (see 1507150047), Consumer Watchdog said in a news release Friday the ANA “misunderstands the Right To Be Forgotten" and goes on to say that "consumer privacy protections are not censorship.”
“Allowing ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ policies to be enforced in the U.S. would cause serious and undue harm to the public’s right to determine for itself what is important and relevant information,” said ANA Group Executive Vice President-Government Relations Dan Jaffe in a news release. “Such a rule would force American companies to edit the past under the supervision of federal regulators,” and “runs contrary to consumers’ interests, and is certainly not constitutional in the U.S.,” Jaffe said. Consumer Watchdog is confusing the right to be forgotten with the right to not be embarrassed, the release said.
“We’re not asking that content be removed from the Internet,” said Consumer Watchdog Privacy Project Director John Simpson. “We are asking that Google -- not the government -- honor requests to take down search links from a person’s name to content that is no longer relevant,” Simpson said. “Google can easily offer this basic privacy protection to consumers on this side of the Atlantic,” he said. Consumer Watchdog said ANA “incorrectly asserts” the group is asking Google to “edit the past under the supervision of federal regulators.”
Meanwhile, while the right to be forgotten, or more accurately, a “right to delist” is the law in Europe, it's not the law globally, so Google doesn't have to remove search results from all versions of Google, wrote Google Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer in a blog post Thursday. The post was in response to a formal request Google received in June from France’s data protection regulator CNIL, which argued Google should delist links globally when requested by an individual, not just from google.fr and other European versions of Google search. “This is a troubling development that risks serious chilling effects on the web,” Fleischer said. “There are innumerable examples around the world where content that is declared illegal under the laws of one country, would be deemed legal in others,” he said, pointing to Thailand’s criminalization of speech critical of its king and Russia’s decision to outlaw speech that's deemed to be “gay propaganda.”
If Google agreed to CNIL’s proposed approach to the Internet, “the Internet would only be as free as the world’s least free place,” he said. “No one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access,” Fleischer said. And he said Google believes CNIL’s order to be “disproportionate and unnecessary,” since 97 percent of French Internet users access a European version of Google rather than access Google.com or another version. Google asked CNIL to withdraw its formal notice, he said. CNIL had no immediate comment, but Fleischer said Google hoped to continue to maintain a dialogue with CNIL and other data protection authorities.