When to respect someone's right to be forgotten

It is four years since a ruling by the European Court of Justice introduced what quickly became known as the “right to be forgotten”. The upshot of the judgment was to allow individuals to request search engines such as Google remove certain results from web searches.

When applications are made, it is ultimately for the search engines in question to make a decision about whether or not to comply. Given that requests often relate to historic news coverage, there have long been suggestions the legislation has effectively enabled people to rewrite history, expunging from search results media reports about past misdemeanours.

It’s hard not to feel a degree of sympathy for those who have done things in years gone by which were out of character or embarrassing. After all, who hasn’t done things they later regret, even if they weren’t newsworthy – or weren’t noticed?

Still, it is important to note the right to be forgotten applies specifically to search engines, not to individual publishers. That at least ensures news providers can resist attempts to remove from their online archives material which accurately reported contemporaneous events.

That’s not to say there won’t be rare occasions when we would consider removing content from public view. A recent example concerned a teenager who some years ago had been the subject of a missing person’s appeal. After a few days the youngster had been found safe and well, yet the article about them remained on our site.

Plainly the article served no onward purpose, its content was personal to the young person in question, and self-evidently had not appeared in the first place with their consent. Indeed, it included comments from the teen’s family which arguably invaded their privacy – especially after the event.

We came to the view these were the kind of highly unusual circumstances in which removal was appropriate. But protecting the integrity of our archive means it is a step we will continue to take only in exceptional cases.

Yours,

Will Gore

Executive editor