Three of the biggest players online, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, will meet EU's data protection regulators to discuss about the "right to be forgotten" ruling issued recently by the European Court of Justice.
The ruling, that applies across Europe, explicitly allows any European citizen to ask for an "irrelevant" and "outdated" information to be removed from search results handled by these three companies.
The meeting will take place under the chairmanship of CNIL, the French data watchdog and will pit the regulators as an entity called the "Article 29 Working Party" against the US search giants.
The objective of the meeting according to the officiaal statement is to come up with "coordinated and coherent guidelines on the handling of individuals' complaints that may be submitted to the authorities in the case of negative responses from search engines to the request for removal from indexing."
Arguably, not everyone filing those requests does it with a clear conscience. As Google highlighted it, a third were related to fraud and scams, one in eighth to child pornography and a fifth to serious crimes.
Given the fact that libel laws are pretty strong in Europe, it is likely that the "contentious" content being listed by search engines complies with European rules anyway.
Via ZDnet
