Google Ordered to Remove Links About Removing Links

25 August 2015. The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has ordered Google to remove links to articles about the “right to be forgotten” from its search results. The order specifically refers to a person who committed a “minor” crime 10 years ago, and subsequently had the links removed under the EU's “right to be forgotten” law. The law says that EU citizens can ask search engines to remove links to outdated or inaccurate information about them. However, this act of removal was then deemed newsworthy by British news websites, which published articles about the removal. These news articles then appeared in the search results when searching for the person's name. The individual asked Google to remove these new articles from the search results, but the search giant refused, prompting the Information Commissioner's Office to step in. An ICO spokesperson said: “We understand that links being removed as a result of this court ruling is something that newspapers want to write about. And we understand that people need to be able to find these stories through search engines like Google. But that does not need them to be revealed when searching on the original complainant's name.”
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