Danish lawyer Dan Shefet has his name permanently removed from the Internet due to European law -- but is it right?
Do you have a right to be forgotten? A court in Europe may be your only hope, especially if you’re a lawyer named Dan Shefet, a Danish lawyer who has been officially forgotten from the Internet.
A court ruling in the continent of Europe last year forced search engines to remove a link deemed to be unfair to them, something that free speech advocates slammed but privacy advocates argued was a huge step forward for human rights, according to a New York Times report.
The basic reputation of the Internet is a zone where free speech has run amok, and therefore those who publish questionable information on the world wide web should be shielded from prosecution based on a basic human right to free speech. But a French court has gone further than that, claiming that if a link was defamatory, it should be removed from all search domains — a difficult thing to do in today’s environment.
It’s certainly a tough order for Google, which means that any link through any of their international sites must be removed from the main Google.com page, even though it is considered to be an American page and therefore exempt from European laws.
If European courts hold it up, it could have some big implications on the Internet. A Danish lawyer living in Paris for the last few decades started the movements due to concerns over a number of accusations due to claims of malpractice and fraud, which he appealed to Google back in 2013 to get those links taken down in order to shield his name.
But Google only removed links to the French site, causing Dan Shefet, the lawyer in question, the go to a Paris court to have his name to be forgotten, even though his name is being written about in news reports because of his very efforts to remove it.
He declared that Google put up a fight, but they lost, after the company was forced to remove links from all sites including Google.com. As a result, no one can find out about Dan Shefet, a Danish lawyer from Paris who has been accused of professional malpractice and fraud, as his name has been entirely been removed from the Internet.
