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google-good-or-badEllen P. Goodman (Rutgers University School of Law) and Julia Powles (University of Cambridge, Faculty of Law) have assembled 80 scholars (including myself) in support of an open letter to Google, which demands ”

Aggregate data about how Google is responding to the more than 250,000 requests to delist links, thought to contravene data protection laws, from name search results.

The letter mentions two main reasons why more transparency is needed:

(1) the public should be able to find out how digital platforms exercise their tremendous power over readily accessible information; and (2) implementation of the ruling will affect the future of the RTBF in Europe and elsewhere, and will more generally inform global efforts to accommodate privacy rights with other interests in data flows.

Read the letter in full, which ends with a long list of unanswered questions, over at the Guardian or at Medium.

(leonhard)

In the series “algorithm regulation”, we discuss the implications of the growing importance of technological algorithms as a means of regulation in the digital realm. 

google-good-or-badWith a market share of over 90 percent in Europe, the Google search engine and its search algorithm respectively decide what is relevant on an issue and what not. Any information that is not placed on the first few pages of Google’s search results will hardly ever be found. On the other hand, personal information that is listed prominently in these results may haunt you forever. The latter issue was recently tried by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), who ruled (C-131/12) that

the activity of a search engine consisting in finding information published or placed on the internet by third parties, indexing it automatically, storing it temporarily and, finally, making it available to internet users according to a particular order of preference must be classified as ‘processing of personal data’

and that, under certain not very clearly spelled out conditions relating to the data subject’s rights to privacy,

the operator of a search engine is obliged to remove from the list of results displayed following a search made on the basis of a person’s name links to web pages, published by third parties and containing information relating to that person.

By crafting such a “right to be forgotten”, the ECJ effectively regulates Google’s search algorithms. In other words, we can observe the ECJ regulating Google’s algorithmic regulation. In response to the ruling, Google has already set up an online form for deletion requests, stating that  Read the rest of this entry »

The Book

Governance across borders: transnational fields and transversal themes. Leonhard Dobusch, Philip Mader and Sigrid Quack (eds.), 2013, epubli publishers.
June 2023
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