Google: "How an Oxford don is helping the tech giant understand the nature of modern identity—and stay out of court" (GOOG)

From Pacific Standard:

One day this past September, Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, sat down with a group of experts in Madrid to begin publicly discussing how Google should respond to a recent, perplexing ruling by the European Union’s Court of Justice. In May, the court had declared that, in accordance with the European “right to be forgotten,” individuals within the E.U. should be able to prohibit Google and other search firms from linking to personal information that is “inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive.”

In an age of revenge porn, social media gaffes, and all the infinite varieties of embarrassment that can attend one’s name in a Google search, the ruling was, in spirit, an attempt to keep ordinary Europeans from being unduly tyrannized by an Internet that, famously, never forgets. In practice, though, the ruling passed the buck: According to the court, it was now up to Google to figure out how to field, evaluate, and adjudicate all requests coming from European citizens wishing to scrub their online histories in accordance with the law.

The court’s judgment has provoked no shortage of criticism, with many seeing it as an assault on press freedom, the freedom of speech, and the Internet as we now know it. Jimmy Wales, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, condemned the ruling as a first step toward “censoring history.” Other critics focused on the court’s decision to delegate so much responsibility to a tech giant. Jules Polonetsky, the executive director of a Washington think tank called the Future of Privacy Forum, denounced the judgment to the New Yorker for “requiring Google to be a court of philosopher kings.”

Such critiques, however, have been of little help to Google in the immediate aftermath of the ruling. The company is required by law to comply with the judgment, so it quickly assembled a panel of experts to help chart a path forward, starting with the meeting in Madrid. Sharing the stage with Schmidt were the sorts of tech-industry insiders, legal scholars, human rights advocates, and media leaders that one might expect Google to call on, among them Wikipedia’s Wales; Le Monde’s editorial director, Sylvie Kauffman; and Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond. But there was one advisor who stood out: an Oxford professor, trained in metaphysics, epistemology, and logic, named Luciano Floridi. To build its court of philosopher kings, Google needed a philosopher.

FIT, 50, AND FOND of subtly tailored gray suits, Floridi is not the kind of person one would expect to find rubbing shoulders with the Silicon Valley elite, much less providing them with policy guidance. But in dealing with the Court of Justice’s ruling, what Google needed was a new way of thinking about the challenges before it—something that Floridi was uniquely qualified to offer.

But first, a bit of background. In 2010, a Spanish lawyer named Mario Costeja González appealed to Spain’s national Data Protection Agency to have an embarrassing auction notice for his repossessed home wiped from a newspaper website and de-indexed from Google’s search results. Because the financial matter had been cleared up years earlier, González argued, the fact that the information continued to accompany searches of his name amounted to a violation of privacy.

The Spanish authorities ruled that the search link should be deleted. In May 2014, the European Court of Justice upheld the Spanish complaint against Google. Since then, Google has received more than 140,000 de-linking requests. Handling these requests in a way that respects both the court and the company’s other commitments requires Google to confront an array of thorny questions. When, for instance, does the public’s right to information trump the personal right to privacy? Should media outlets be consulted in decisions over the de-indexing of news links? When is it in the public interest to deny right-to- be-forgotten requests?...MORE