ICO may take action against Google over 'right to be forgotten'

The Deputy Information Commissioner, David Smith, has indicated that the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) may take legal action against Google over its handling of ‘right to be forgotten’ requests.   The Article 29 Working Party has also criticised Google for notifying media outlets when URLs from their sites are going to be filtered and for failing to filter URLs from all of its search engines including www.google.com.

On 13 May 2014, the European Court of Justice ruled that Google should filter from its search results, links that are irrelevant, no longer relevant or excessive.   The ICO has received around 150 complaints after Google has refused to remove links that are the subject of ‘right to be forgotten’ requests.   Mr Smith said: “At some point, we’ll have to reach a decision as to whether we pursue any [cases] where Google doesn’t agree with us, through formal action.  That’s enforcement action.”  At the current time, the ICO is trying to resolve cases through “discussion and negotiation”.

In a transparency report, Google has published information that shows that, at the time of writing, they have agreed to filter 41.3% of URLs that have been the subject of requests.   Google has received a total of 32,672 requests from the United Kingdom.