EU Poses 26 Questions on 'Right To Be Forgotten' By Dan Heilman July 25, 2014 11:49AM  The issue of the right to be forgotten has only been in the news for a couple of months. In May a European court ordered Google to delete links to information about a mortgage foreclosure after the party involved argued the information had become irrelevant. The EU wants Google, Yahoo! and Bing to set up a system for requests to take down links.
Related Topics Google EU Right To Be Forgotten World Wide Web Privacy Top Tech News Latest News Watson's First Consumer-Facing Gig FDA OKs New Opioid Pain Reliever Scientists Ponder Dogs and Jealousy We're All in the Clean-Plate Club Study: Tyrannosaurs Ran in Gangs	Google, Bing, Yahoo! and the European Union are playing a game of 20 Questions. Except that it's 26 questions, and it's no game. European Union privacy watchdogs had representatives from Google and other search engines on the hot seat Thursday over how, and if, they're implementing the EU's guidelines over Internet users' "right to be forgotten."The EU wants Google, Yahoo! and Bing to set up a system that will manage requests to take down links to outdated or irrelevant information about search-engine users. To nudge the process along, the EU's national data-protectionregulators met with representatives from the three search giants in Brussels on Thursday. The regulators asked six questions orally and gave the three companies until next Thursday to answer 26 further questions submitted in writing. Details Wanted The issue of the right to be forgotten has only been in the news for a couple of months. In May a European court ordered Google to delete links to information about a mortgage foreclosure after the party involved argued that the information had become irrelevant. Christina Warren, senior tech analyst for Mashable.com, told us the questions are a way for the EU to figure out how to make guidelines that can be enforced -- but that they should have been asked before a ruling went into effect, not after. "Google was able to choose its method of implementation," she said. "One could argue that any official guidelines won't be strong enough to protect EU citizens, because Google set the initial bar for what they would do themselves." The questions asked during Thursday's meeting touched on such topics as the information the search engines request from a data subject before considering a delisting request; and whether Web site publishers are notified of delisting, and under which legal basis that notification is done. The 26 questions calling for a written response were more specific. A report in The Wall Street Journal listed the questions as worded, and they included: -- Do you ask for a proof of identify or some other form of authentication and if yes, what kind? -- Do you have any automated process defining if a request is accepted or refused? -- Will you create a database of all removal requests or removal agreements? Realistic? Google said at the meeting that to date it had received 91,000 delisting requests regarding 328,000 links to Web addresses, and that over half the requests had been granted. It has rejected just over 30 percent of the requests, and asked for more information on 15 percent. Bing and Yahoo! have received significantly fewer requests. The information gathered at the meeting will be used to create guidelines for data protection authorities. The guidelines are expected before the end of the year. But Warren believes the EU's priorities in this matter are already misplaced. "One of the most difficult things about this law is that it doesn't appear that the regulators fundamentally understand the technology and what is entailed in indexing a site or a search query," she said. "I'm not sure if any of Google's answers will be able to convey the realities of how search engines work to the regulators, or if that will have any impact on how they say the implementations should work."