VOA标准英语2014--欧洲法院称谷歌应尊重"被遗忘权"

Is There A 'Right to Be Forgotten'? 欧洲法院称谷歌应尊重"被遗忘权"

The so-called "right to be forgotten" is being debated after the European Court of Justice ruled that the Internet search engine Google must sometimes, on request, remove links to articles containing personal information.

欧洲最高法院支持“被遗忘的权利”(即个人应有权删除互联网上的个人资料，在西班牙等欧洲国家实行，但在美国不被在意。)，并称谷歌必须删除“不充足的，无关紧要的，不再相关的”数据，以保证它们不出现在搜索结果中。谷歌表示：“这是一个令搜索引擎公司失望的裁决，广义上讲，它的影响甚至会波及在线出版商。此前公开的公众意愿与结果如此的大相径庭，这点让我们很惊讶。我们现在需要时间分析影响。”

It's a debate about which is more important: the right to privacy or the freedom of information.

According to Glenn Gabe, president of G-Squared Interactive 1, which provides digital marketing 2 services to executives and celebrities 3, many people have something in their past they would like to removed from the Internet.

"[Let's say] they went to prison, right? And maybe ten years ago everything happened, and everything's still showing up in Google on page one, even though they've paid their dues," he said.

At the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, executive director Marc Rotenberg agrees with the court's ruling that privacy is a basic right.

"When you talk about free expression, you have to consider the ability of individuals to control the dissemination 4 of information about themselves," he said. "That is, in many respects, the core of free expression — how we choose to express ourselves or not to say things or do things. That's, you know, what makes us human."

But a number of U.S. privacy advocates disagree with the European court's Google ruling.

For Jules Polonetsky, executive director of Washington's Future of Privacy Forum 5, the decision sets a legal precedent 6 that is likely to limit the freedom of information in general — both in terms of individual privacy and, in some case, the right to a free press.

"If someone can tell search engines, news aggregators or maybe bloggers, 'Sorry, that information tells us about some individual, that individual doesn't want to be found, [so] you need to take it down,' the effects really could be dramatic," she said. "It breaks the Internet."

While the right to a free press is specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, the right to privacy is merely implied.

"It's a real blow to transparency if legal, public information can be obscured simply because somebody decides that it's information that they would rather not be available," said Polonetsky.

But Rotenberg says the European judges did a good job of balancing privacy with press freedom in this particular case, in which they ordered Google to delete links containing personal information about a Spanish lawyer's 1998 tax problems at the lawyer's request, because the information, the court said, was no longer relevant.

"And what the European Court of Justice has done with this decision is to say, in effect, you know, search is an important service, but it has to be done in a way that protects privacy," he said.

The ruling will be costly 7 for Google and other search engines in Europe, but is not expected to immediately affect their U.S. operations.