Threat Management

House of Lords subcommittee highlights ‘right to be forgotten’ flaws

The House of Lords subcommittee has deemed the “right to be forgotten” ruling to be outdated and unreasonable.

In its “EU Data Protection law: a ‘right to be forgotten?'” report, the House of Lords EU Home Affairs, Health and Education subcommittee called the May ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) "misguided in principle and unworkable in practice" and spared it no criticism. The "right to be forgotten" law requires search engines to remove search results if requested.

But the report noted that smaller search engines might not have the means to deal with link removal requests. Google, for instance, received more than 70,000 requests after only a few months and organized an advisory council to help with its decisions.

Calling the law unenforceable, the subcommittee also advised against classifying search engines as “data controllers.”

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