Last month, the European Court of Justice ruled that individuals have the “right to be forgotten,” which holds that search-engine operators should delete outdated, inaccurate, or irrelevant information from the results they return. However, search-engine operators are finding this hard to accomplish, particularly because they have received huge volumes of deletion requests from users. . For example, Google says it is fielding an average of 10,000 requests per day. The right to be forgotten has proven to be controversial. Proponents say it is necessary to protect individual privacy. Opponents say that it is a form of censorship, will be too time-consuming and expensive to comply with, and will balkanize search result by creating one set for Europe and one for the rest of the world. Issues surrounding the European Court of Justice’s decision led to two days of meetings by EU data-protection authorities. The group of 28 data authority leaders is scheduled to produce an agreement specifying compliance requirements in September of this year. (TIME)(Reuters)
