Company directors are deep-sixing Google links citing ‘right to be forgotten’

by  Roger Parloff  @rparloff  OCTOBER 21, 2014, 11:02 AM EST

Scores of British and Spanish company directors have removed Google links to information they are required by law to disclose.

In the past five months scores of current and former European company directors have removed Google  GOOG -1.48%  links to information that they are required by law to disclose publicly, invoking their “right to be forgotten.”

More than a third of the suppressed links relate to quite recent information—events occurring no earlier than 2012—according to my review of 64 documents to which links have been removed.

The right to be forgotten was recognized last May by the European Court of Justice, and is intended to give teeth to privacy rights recognized in a 1995 European Commission directive. Under the ruling—which involved suppression of links to a 16-year-old newspaper article about a private debt—European individuals may request European-based search engines, like Google.co.uk and Google.fr, to take down links to information about themselves that, while accurate at the time it was published, has since become “irrelevant.”

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Continua qui: http://fortune.com/2014/10/21/company-directors-deep-sixing-google-links/