Wikipedia founder weighs in on ‘right to be forgotten’

Wikipedia founder weighs in on ‘right to be forgotten’

Since may, Google has received more than 90,000 right to be forgotten requests.

No Internet search engine should be allowed to “censor history,” Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, told BBC radio last week.

Wales expressed his concerns to BBC about leaving the implementation of Europe’s new “right to be forgotten” ruling to private companies.

“If we want to go down a path where we are going to be censoring history, there is no way we should leave a private company like Google in charge of making those decisions,” said Wales, according to the Telegraph.

The European Court of Justice ruled in May that search engines like Google have a responsibility to remove links to irrelevant and outdated information that is not in the public interest if requested to do so, thus enshrining what has been dubbed a “right to be forgotten.” Google slammed the ruling, but has pledged to comply with it nevertheless.

Since may, Google has received more than 90,000 right to be forgotten requests, the Guardian reports.

“We’ve received removal requests on all sorts of content: serious criminal records, embarrassing photos, instances of online bullying and name-calling, decades-old allegations, negative press stories, and more,” Google said in a statement.

To help it sort through these requests and comply with the ruling, Google set up an advisory council of experts from academia, the media, data protection, civil society and the tech sector. The council includes Wikipedia founder, Wales.

“We have this one ruling of the ECJ which is very open-ended and very hard to interpret,” said Wales in his radio comments. “I would say the biggest problem we have is that the law seems to indicate Google needs to censor links to information that is clearly public – links to articles in legally published, truthful news stories.”

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