Wikipedia
fought back against Europe’s “right to be forgotten” by listing the
online encyclopaedia’s articles removed from search results, snubbing a
court ruling that allows people to stop personal information appearing
under Internet searches.
The
Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organisation that runs the free
online encyclopaedia, said on Wednesday that it had received notices
from search engines affecting more than 50 links to Wikipedia pages.
In
its first public statement against the ruling from Europe’s top court
in May confirming that people can stop irrelevant or outdated personal
information from appearing under searches for their name, the foundation
said it would publish each notice for the removal of a link to a
Wikipedia page.
“Accurate
search results are vanishing in Europe with no public explanation, no
real proof, no judicial review, and no appeals process,” wrote Lila
Tretikov, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation on its blog.
“The result is an Internet riddled with memory holes — places where inconvenient information simply disappears.”
The
“right to be forgotten” has divided experts and pitted privacy
campaigners against defenders of free speech, who argue that the ruling
will lead to people whitewashing their past.
However,
search engines are required to take into account the public’s interest
in knowing certain information about famous or public figures when
evaluating removal requests, and the Court of Justice of the European
Union (ECJ) said a balance must be struck between the freedom of
information and privacy.
Also,
the person requesting that the link be removed is not necessarily the
one named in the article, but could be one whose name appears in the
comment section.
“The
disclosure of the link alone is not too helpful as you have no idea
what name on the page asked for link to come down,” said Lilian Edwards,
a professor of Internet law.
“LINK CENSORSHIP”
Wikimedia
had received five notices affecting over 50 links across the British,
Italian and Dutch versions of Wikipedia by Wednesday, it said.
Google,
which handles around 90 percent of searches in Europe, had received
over 90,000 requests under the right to be forgotten by July 18 and was
accepting over half of them.
The
search engine giant has been criticised for notifying publishers that a
link to their website has been removed, a method that can draw unwanted
attention to the page in question and feed speculation over who made
the request.
“Our
concern is that these notifications generate a lot of confusion, and in
some ways undercut the request itself by bringing people’s names back
into the open,” Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, who heads France’s privacy
watchdog and the WP29 group of EU national data protection authorities,
said in an interview with Reuters.
Google
says it is necessary to ensure transparency and already notifies the
owners of websites that are removed from search results because of
copyright infringements.
Wikimedia said it was posting the removal notices in the interests of free speech and transparency.
Posted by : Gizmeon
No comments:
Post a Comment