EU publishes guidelines for search engines for handling right to be forgotten

New European Commission guidelines that tell search providers how to handle takedown requests might have thrown a spanner for public figures hoping to remove embarrassing links about themselves using the so-called "Right-to-be-Forgotten" directive.

The EC has come out with new guidelines that are mostly in line with what Google had so far been doing.

Websites say they had to balance people's privacy demands against the public's right to know. A search firm could remove details of a person's life, for instance, but could refuse to hide criminal convictions or a person's official work record.

The EC has not been happy with Google's tendency to warn both users and site operators when it honoured a take-down request, as the  regulator says there is "no legal basis" for this. It is not clear that Google and other search engines were breaking data protection laws in the process, but regulators were not happy that these alerts drew more attention to people who were trying to keep their information a secret.

Further,  the wanted delistings to apply to all web domains Europeans could access, not just regional ones like .co.uk or .fr (See: EU for ''right to be forgotten'' ruling to be applicable worldwide).

The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which exercises oversight on the directive and other data protection issues, had published a set of 13 criteria on the basis of which search engines would need to make decisions.

While the document, which is available to read, upholds the right of individuals to have their privacy respected, it also leans heavily in favour of keeping links related to people who "play a role in public life".

"Politicians, senior public officials, business-people and members of the (regulated) professions can usually be considered to fulfil a role in public life," the guidelines state, as well as those involved in the arts, the "social sphere" or sport.

According to commentators, campaigners who feared right-to-be-forgotten could adversely impact free speech and the public's right to know relevant information about those who had a degree of influence over their lives and society would find much reassurance from the new guidelines.

Concerns about abuse of the EU directive got stoked earlier, when a Guardian article relating to a Scottish referee who had been found guilty of misconduct and an opinion piece on the BBC about the chairman of Merrill Lynch when it fell into crisis were removed from European Google search results.